Robert Creeley: Language Speaks Itself

Abstract

One of the characteristics of Robert Creeley's poetry is that it is immediate, spontaneous, naturalistic, and open in forms. Robert Creeley, along with Charles Olson, is one of the leading theorists of “open form” whose mode of writing is without closure except the vividness of each instant moment. In order to express the point-by-point vividness of instant moment, Creeley suggests, the poet must loose himself and follow the peculiar shape and movement of language. If the poet ceases to impose his own meaning and verbal structure on language, the language will generate its own meaning and direction. What we can observe in Creeley's poems is that language speaks itself without the poet, and that the poet, who is however necessarily involved in the process of writing, is nothing but a body through which language moves in a poem. So to speak, the poet's heart beats and breath rhythm are used as a kind of mediating system whose very act of mediation between perception and communication provides both form and content of poetry. Consequently, the poem is not the poet's. He is rather possessed by the aspects of the language he is using. Language is its own occasion, its own subject, rather than a means of expressing or communicating human subjects. “Words speaks everything” (“The Language”).