4 The death of Robert Creeley this spring was more than a literary loss. Creeley, who loomed large over the landscape of American poetry, was also a subtle but significant voice in jazz-or more accurately, a poet who shadowed jazz practices in uncommonly thoughtful ways. Jazz was not the subject of many of his poems, although a few, like "The Bird, the Bird, the Bird (for Charles)," made the allegiance clear. Rather, Creeley saw in the music a mode of expression that could be adapted for poetic purposes. Jazz lurked behind his assertion that "form is never more than an extension of content"-a phrase that rattled the academic orthodoxy and gave free verse its rallying cry. Creeley came to jazz as a young man. During his Harvard years he haunted Boston's nightclub circuit, bearing witness to Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Honing his voice, he internalized elements of bebop that were more structural than superficial: tension, rhythm, judicious silence. "Writing is the same as music," he said years later, sounding typically matter-of-fact. "It's in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don't play is as important as what you do play." Any reader of Creeley would recognize this imperative, which applies to much of his oeuvre. Consider how he begins "Some Place," a mid-'60s poem: I resolved it, I Found in my life a center and secured it. There's a whiff of danger here, something left unsaid. "It is the house," the poem continues, "trees beyond, a term / of view encasing it." But soon that center destabilizes, despite the narrator's insistence, shaken by "something loose in the wind." There are worlds beyond these words. Creeley holds back the note, bends it, and releases it: "There is nothing I am / nothing not." The line comes as an admission, but of what? Going back to the first line, what has really been "resolved?" "Some Place" would strike almost no one as a jazz poem, which is part of what makes Creeley's appropriation unique. Unlike the Beats, who so often felt the need to perform their jazz affinity, Creeley looked beyond the novelty of improvisation toward a means of conveying personal lyricism. He once said, famously, that jazz taught him that "you can write directly from that which you feel." The irony is that the emotional impact of his poems is often anything but direct. A number of years ago I heard Creeley tell a story about lying awake in a New York apartment in the '50s and listening to Miles Davis, who was wont to practice on the roof of a nearby building. As I recall, Creeley connected this to his poem "The Whip," which chronicles "a night turning in bed" beside a sleeping lover, while "on / the roof, there was another woman I / also loved, had / addressed myself to in / a fit she / returned." Setting aside a revisionist reading of the poem, I'll simply suggest that Davis' taut romanticism and lyrical economy provide a useful corollary to Creeley's poetics. Like the Miles of mid-'50s vintage, Creeley could be both lyrical and cynical, both emotive and oblique. These same qualities typified Creeley's interactions with jazz musicians. Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, whom he met in Paris in the '80s, set Creeley's verse to music on Futurities (hatART), an envelope-pushing album with vocals by Lacy's wife Irene Aebi. Lacy would revisit Creeley's poems often over the following years: his final studio album, 2003's The Beat Suite (Sunnyside), featured an angular, jaunty "Jack's Blues," again with Aebi. Lacy wasn't the only person to assign Creeley's words to a female voice: bassist Steve Swallow employed Sheila Jordan on the excellent 1979 ECM album Home. Jordan, who otherwise bears little stylistic resemblance to Aebi, took a similarly liberal approach to line reading and cadence-an audacious move, given Creeley's reverence for the line as a poem's "defining rhythm unit." It's because of this concern for composition that Creeley is ultimately best heard reading for himself. The 2001 album Robert Creeley (Jagjaguwar) captures his voice unaccompanied, a study in shifting weight and grain. He's no less focused on the 2001 Cuneiform release Have We Told You All You'd Thought to Know?-a brilliantly abstract concert recording with Swallow, drummer Chris Massey, saxophonist David Cast and guitarist David Torn. Here, and on a subsequent release called The Way Out Is Via the Door (482), Creeley demonstrates some outwardly jazz-honed sensibilities. But still, the poems dictate their own time. A few days after Creeley's passing, Kurt Elling paid homage in the Allen Room, the glass-walled face of Jazz at Lincoln Center. "He was a master of shorter pieces that were lethal," said the singer, "and often impenetrable, unless you really hit that rock hard." Then the band tumbled into "Man in the Air," the title cut from Elling's most recent Blue Note album-pausing mid-song to offer Creeley's "The Sign Board." Elling hit the rock a little too hard in that poem's ephemeral midsection, but his dramatic touch suited the ending: "nothing there / where there was a man." true 203 2007-06-07T14:05:44-04:00 15831 93 200508 true 0 90 2005-07-01T00:00:00-04:00

The death of Robert Creeley this spring was more than a literary loss. Creeley, who loomed large over the landscape of American poetry, was also a subtle but significant voice in jazz-or more accurately, a poet who shadowed jazz practices in uncommonly thoughtful ways. Jazz was not the subject of many of his poems, although a few, like "The Bird, the Bird, the Bird (for Charles)," made the allegiance clear. Rather, Creeley saw in the music a mode of expression that could be adapted for poetic purposes. Jazz lurked behind his assertion that "form is never more than an extension of content"-a phrase that rattled the academic orthodoxy and gave free verse its rallying cry. Creeley came to jazz as a young man. During his Harvard years he haunted Boston's nightclub circuit, bearing witness to Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Honing his voice, he internalized elements of bebop that were more structural than superficial: tension, rhythm, judicious silence. "Writing is the same as music," he said years later, sounding typically matter-of-fact. "It's in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don't play is as important as what you do play." Any reader of Creeley would recognize this imperative, which applies to much of his oeuvre. Consider how he begins "Some Place," a mid-'60s poem: I resolved it, I Found in my life a center and secured it. There's a whiff of danger here, something left unsaid. "It is the house," the poem continues,...

2009-03-02T00:24:46-05:00