On "I Know a Man"
Cid Corman
I think one would have to be deaf dumb and blind to miss the
wallop of Creeley's poem and not to feel the subtle handling of it, the way words
and feelings are "scored" freshly.
[. . .]
It is a trait of Creeley s best work, as here, that it makes us hold judgment in
abeyance, makes it seem superfluous, irrelevant. The event is so immediate and true. The
speed, in this poem certainly, that the abbreviated notation implies, seems wholly
consistent with what is going on. Part of the dissolution.
[. . .]
Creeley, even within the growing complexity and difficulty of the situation, where we
are, sings. How simple! And how movingly concentratedly profound! How that broken
"surrounds" envelops us, the self-criticism and the obsessiveness of "...
because I am / always talking ... ", the loneliness and projection of "which was
not his / name," the excitement in the penultimate stanza and the sharp painful
braking of the last, the urgency of it, the feeling of near disaster, throwing us back
upon the futile wish of "a goddamn big car." Every syllable pulls its weight and
no punch pulled. There isn't "time," least of all to embroider.
From a review of For Love in KULCHUR (1962)
Charles Altieri
The particular
events Creeley treats and the nature of his line, however, are essentially
symptoms whose underlying causes can be discovered in those poems where Creeley
encounters the actual dynamics of the void, dynamics stemming in large part from
the problem of finding or creating an adequate language. His most famous poem on
this theme, "I Know a Man," perfectly illustrates the interconnections
between the traditional sense of the void and failure of communication:
[quotes poem]
The
speaker's generalized angst here
actually intensifies the horror of the void. His vague speech gives us nothing
concrete to hold on to and instead further broadens the gap between human
subjectivity and the world with which it must come to terms. Drunkenness becomes
the poem's metaphor for inauthentic speech that deepens the darkness evoking the
speech in the first place. Drunken speech stems not from perception, but from
the need to fill voids, to put off silence. Unlike speech which is devoted to
some referential order, speech that strives to communicate a feeling or
perception, drunken speech takes off from its own momentum. Each succeeding
statement is born from some associative speech pattern, not from any referential
logic. The protagonist becomes the passive and helpless victim of his own powers
of speech, and his failure is most clearly portrayed when he utters an
octosyllabic line (1. 9). To Creeley the long line courts the void by not
defending itself, by trying simply to cover the void, and by suggesting possible
coherences and orders it cannot really manage. The only reply is the one
"John" gives—keep your eye on experience; live in it and avoid the
purely verbal universe.
from
"The Unsure Egoist: Robert Creeley and the Theme of Nothingness." Contemporary
Literature 13.2 (Spring 1972).
Robert Kern
"I'm given to write poems" (QG, 61), Creeley says in one of the most
comprehensive of his statements on poetics, and any investigation of his work as critic or
theorist properly begins with the recognition that his primary sense of the poetic act is
that he is its object, the humble witness rather than the organizing manipulator of the
poem's occasion. This distinction in itself—that between humble witness and
organizing manipulator—might serve as a fruitful point of departure, since open form
poetics is often predicated upon the conviction that it is the order and value out
there, in the external world, that is important, as opposed to what immediately issues
from the poet's private creative imagination, the poem itself regarded as the locus of
value. Of course this conviction depends upon a prior one—the assumption that there
is in fact an immanent order and value in external reality, or at least that there are
forces outside the poet that ultimately control and indeed permit the act of
composition—forces which the poet must recognize in order to write at all.
The emphasis here falls on the notion of the poet as medium more than as maker, an
emphasis that is clear in Denise Levertov's statement, "I believe poets are
instruments on which the power of poetry plays." Although she goes on immediately to
qualify this remark by saying that poets are "also makers, craftsmen,"
whose responsibility it is to communicate what they see, the act of making seems
temporally distinct in her definition from the act of recognition, or seeing, which is
primary, prior to any making, and without which making would be impossible or trivial.
Thinking of the poet as both medium and maker, in any event, does not prevent Levertov
from defining her own mode of "organic" poetry as a method "of recognizing
what we perceive" that is based, in turn, on "an intuition of an order, a form
beyond forms, in which forms partake" (PW, 7), where the important point is clearly
that there is an order in experience which not only transcends but provides a ground for
the conventional forms of poetic tradition, and which it is the poet's fundamental task to
disclose.
Creeley's articulation of similar intuitions puts even greater stress on the humility
demanded by the act of composition regarded as a process of recognition:
I have used all the intelligence that I can muster to follow the possibilities that the
poem "under hand," as Olson would say, is declaring, but I cannot anticipate the
necessary conclusions of the activity, nor can I judge in any sense, in moments of
writing, the significance of that writing more than to recognize that it is being permitted
to continue. I'm trying to say that, in writing, at least as I have experienced it,
one is in the activity. . . . (QG, 61)
Seemingly more radical than Levertov, Creeley is implying that he does not know where
he is going until he gets there, a notion of the creative process that brings to mind his
frequent use of the example of driving a car as an analogy for writing, where it is the
external road that determines the driver's decisions from moment to moment and that he
must strictly attend to if he is to maintain himself in not only a unified relationship
with his experience but literally a safe one. Consider the friend's reply to the speaker
in Creeley's well-known poem "I Know a Man":
[quotes poem]
In remarking on the poetic process in an interview with Charles Tomlinson—remarks
that lead to yet another use of the driving metaphor—Creeley observes that his
conception of writing is "an awfully precarious situation to be in, because you can
obliterate everything in one instant. You've got to be utterly awake to recognize what is
happening, and to be responsible for all the things you must do before you can even
recognize what their full significance is" (CP, 26). In the poem, the friend is
attempting to bring the speaker back into immediate relationship with the experience at
hand by breaking into the speaker's self-distracting—and potentially self-destructive
rhetoric of metaphysical despair and escapist fantasy.
Creeley's position, then, is one which allows no temporal gap between writing and
experience—or what Levertov calls making and seeing—no separation between poesis
and mimesis, so to speak. What a poem is about is literally its own
making or unfolding. The poet, in such a conception, is inside the act of
composition, which is entirely self-limiting, a record of the circumstances of its own
occasion.
from "Composition as Recognition: Robert Creely and Postmodern Poetics." boundary
2 6:3 and 7:1 (Spring/Fall 1978).
Robert Hass
What else is experience in the second half of the twentieth century about, but the
sense of a world run by people with insane assurance who manipulate large and unmanageable
forces over which they have almost no control? "The unsure egoist," Creeley
wrote, "is not good for himself " But if he makes us conscious of the process by
which ego comes into being, tries to make some purchase on the experience of its
emergence, defines exactly what that purchase is and is not, he may be the writer above
all worth listening to. It is also not a coincidence that Creeley wrote the poem of the
decade about a world gone out of control and the crazy assumption of control that the ego
makes:
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
From a review of Creeley’s Collected Poems in Threepenny Review
(1984)
Charles Altirei
Many of the poems in For Love try to survey the underlying conditions that
create the explicit voids and the torments embodied in the style. As the style indicates,
language itself is one of the primary villains, for it promises a wholeness it cannot
fulfill. Language in ideal form promises to make the self objectified and communicable to
another, yet its reality entraps us in webs of meanings which we do not intend. The words
stand emptied of us and we face them turning once more on a self we can neither fix nor
possess. "I Know a Man" contains Creeley's most fundamental dramatic statement
on the problem of language and its relation to the void:
[. . . .]
The speaker's generalized angst here actually intensifies the horror of the void. His
vague speech gives nothing concrete to hold on to; instead it further broadens the gap
between human subjectivity and the world with which it must come to terms. Drunkenness
becomes the poem's metaphor for inauthentic speech that deepens the darkness evoking the
speech in the first place. Drunken speech stems not from perception, but from the need to
fill voids, to put off silence. Unlike speech that is devoted to some referential order,
speech that strives to communicate a feeling or perception, drunken speech takes off from
its own momentum. Each succeeding statement is born from some associative speech pattern,
not from any referential logic. The protagonist becomes the passive and helpless victim of
his own powers of speech, and his failure is most clearly portrayed when he utters an
octosyllabic line (1 .9). To Creeley the long line courts the void by not defending
itself, by trying simply to cover the emptiness, and by suggesting possible coherence and
orders it cannot really manage. The only reply is the one John gives--keep your eye on
experience; live in it and avoid the purely verbal universe.
From Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s.
Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979. Copyright © 1979 by Associated University
Presses, Inc.
Lynn Keller
[M]ost of the line breaks in "I Know a Man," coming midphrase, create
hesitations one would not find in relaxed conversation:
[. . . .]
Because of the asyntactic line breaks, the first syllable of each line receives extra
emphasis. The crowding of stresses and the unnatural pauses communicate both the speaker's
anxious restraint and his need for release, well before he mentions the threatening
darkness or the car in which he might escape it. The unexpected break in "the
darkness sur- / rounds us" -- sounding as if the speaker were almost suffocating or
breathless with fear and forced to inhale midword -- conveys his heightened panic. When
the speaker hits upon a possible solution, the poem's rhythms reflect his momentary
confidence and sense of liberation; "buy a goddamn big car" is the poem's only
phrase of any length that flows unimpeded. In "John" 's cautionary rejoinder,
Creeley returns to midphrase junctures that interrupt ordinary speech rhythms; the abrupt,
heavy stresses of this lineation register the urgency of "John" 's warning --
"for / christ's sake, look / out where yr going."
By the late 1950s, when he was composing the poems in A Form of Women, Creeley
had established his own distinctive blend of colloquial and flatly abstract diction and
had learned to manipulate the rhythmic possibilities of the vernacular. At the same time
he had settled into a characteristic mode, one -- as Duncan has pointed out -- defined by
Williams: "the common-speech song with a persisting convention of two, three, or
four-line stanzas, highly articulated to provide close interplay and variation." That
deft articulation involves manipulating not only the speech patterns and line junctures I
have already examined, but also the broad range of sound patterns that Creeley, following
Pound as well as Williams, includes within the category of "rhyme."
From Re-making in new: Contemporary American poetry and the modernist tradition.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Copyright © 1987 by Cambridge University
Press.
Michael Davidson
The speaker is caught between two conflicting positions: whether to solve his
existential despair by escaping from the world (by buying a "goddamn big car")
or by paying a greater attention to what is immediately in front of him. Despite the
poem's title, he cannot truly know anyone -- either himself or another -- because
he is constantly talking and thus avoiding recognition of the other. He does not really
know the other's name, nor is he able to differentiate himself from his interlocutor. His
despair is generalized ("the darkness sur- / rounds us"), and to drive and thus
escape such despair is an inadequate solution to a problem of much greater proportions.
The poem's last tercet introduces a voice of reason that urges the speaker to pay
attention to what is happening: "for / christ's sake, look / out where yr
going." But the terse and enjambed lines, the highly subordinated quality of the
syntax, and the confusion of speaker and interlocutor conspire against the ostensible
solutions these lines proffer. Adding to the general instability of the lines is the fact
that the word "drive" could equally be a continuation of the previous lines (Why
not buy a car and drive somewhere?), or it could be the beginning of an imperative spoken
by "he" ("drive . . . look out where you're going"). Such ambiguities
enact at a structural level the very conditions that prevent the "I" from
"knowing" anyone. The poem, then, demonstrates one kind of attention -- poetry's
power to embody contradictory states of feelings and emotion --while denying another.
Creeley states in compressed form some of the dilemmas that can be found in the work of
many Beat writers. The world is perceived as alien and hostile, an undifferentiated
"darkness" created and maintained by forces beyond the individual's control. The
hipster's endless talk becomes a tentative way of countering that darkness and of
acknowledging, if inadequately, the need for dialogue. Another solution, one found in many
another American literary work, from Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick to On
the Road, is to take the open road, "drive" away from Aunt Polly or the Man
in the Grey Flannel Suit toward some indefinite freedom. Most accounts of the Beat myth
stop here, at the edge of the highway, where the vast spaces of the West offer the
illusion of escape. But Creeley's conclusion offers a salutary warning to pay attention in
the midst of distraction and abstraction. This moment of self-consciousness, however
tenuous, represents a side of the Beat myth seldom acknowledged: the recognition of
solitude and vulnerability despite the competing claims of participation and communalism.
from The San-Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989. Copyright © 1989 by Cambridge University Press.
Leverett T. Smith, Jr.
The second poem, "I Know a Man," is without doubt Creeley's
best-known. A phrase of it has served as the title of Jeremy Lamer's novel Drive,
He Said and of the movie made from it. More recently the poem has served as
the epigraph of the final chapter of Stephen King's fantasy about American
automobile culture, Christine. In this chapter, the book's narrator,
Dennis Guilder, attempts to destroy the possessed 1958 Plymouth Fury Christine
by battering her to death with a large pink tanker truck. In spite of a badly
injured leg, Dennis tells us, "I was going to drive" (486). But
driving only seems a solution to Dennis's problems, just as it seems one
in the poem. Here it is:
I Know a Man
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,—John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
(Collected Poems 132)
It is significant that Robert Bly includes this poem in his anthology Forty
Poems Touching on Recent American History, thereby asserting a significance
beyond the personal for it. In his introduction, Bly defines the political poem
in such a way that we may understand "I Know a Man" as political. He
says that "the poet's main job is to penetrate that husk around the
American psyche, and since that psyche is inside him too, the writing of
political poetry is like the writing of personal poetry, a sudden drive by the
poet inward" (10). Later he concludes that "a true political poem is a
quarrel with ourselves" (13) and continues as follows on the subject of the
American psyche:
The life of the nation can be imagined also not as something deep inside
our psyche, but as a psyche larger than the psyche of anyone living, a larger
sphere, floating above everyone. In order for the poet to write a true
political poem, he has to be able to have such a grasp of his own concerns
that he can leave them for a while, and as he returns he brings back
plant-seeds that have stuck to his clothes, some inhabitants of this curious
sphere, which he then tries to keep alive with his own psychic body. (12-13)
Bly may have described here what any truly memorable poem achieves, and he
certainly means us to apply it to "1 Know a Man."
"I Know a Man" is concerned with an essential human problem: how to
cast light on the darkness which surrounds us, how to "run order through
chaos," as Henry Adams put it. Most who have commented on the poem—and
there are many—have arrived at this conclusion. Ross Feld says that "Creeley's
best known poem is a good example of how postwar French existentialist doubt
became transposed into American Beat fear; how the closed cafe turned into the
semienclosed, more vulnerable automobile" (99). Wyatt Prunty, in an essay
remarkably unsympathetic to the poem, says that the task of all contemporary
American poetry "continued to be that of ferreting order out of apparent
disorder" (80). Peter Stitt speaks of it as "poking fun" at
"old existential sibboleths" (644). Charles Altieri feels that Creeley
"encounters the actual dynamics of the void" in the poem (163).
Finally Stephen Stepanchev speaks of an "awareness of the dangers of the
world" (152). All these seem efforts to conceptualize the condition
expressed in the phrase, "the darkness sur/ rounds us."
The poem contains three different alternatives to this problematic state. The
first is proposed by the narrator: "buy a goddamn big car." The poem
hints here at the silliness of the way most of Creeley's contemporaries in the
United States deal with the problems they encounter—by buying something.
(Notice how the stanzaic form of the poem keep separate the two verbs of the
narrator's sentence: "buy" and "drive.") At this point the
speaker's solution is that of most citizens of commercial post-World War II
America, and the poem implies a satirical comment on the propensity of Americans
to make their lives meaningful by reference to commerce and technology. But if
the poem rejects this solution we need also to balance that rejection by
examining Creeley's own excitement at acquiring a car in the 1950s, communicated
in a letter to Charles Olson. He has just purchased a 1928 Hupmobile for $15
(not exactly the "goddamn big car" the reader of the poem imagines)
and hopes it will be the solution to some of his difficulties: "To make
visits in without spending money on truck, etc." He concludes his remarks
on the car with a generalization which suggests that he himself may be closer to
the narrator's friend John ("which was not his/ name") than to his
narrator. He writes Olson "1 don't want to go fast anymore. I just want to
get there" (Correspondence Vol. 3 122).
The name "John," along with the phrases "goddamn" and
"for/ christ's sake," has been seen by critics as suggesting the
possibility of an alternate scheme of value—that proposed by traditional
Christianity—particularly when we consider that the beginning of the Gospel
According to St. John is concerned with presenting God as a source of light,
bringing order to a world of darkness. Creeley himself has been particularly
enraged by some readings of the poem, remarking in one interview that "it's
the most incredible distortion of any intention I felt" (Contexts 207.
Creeley gives a summary of his intentions in "I Know a Man" in this
interview 207-209). Charles Tomlinson, in another interview with Creeley,
comments that critics of this sort (and he refers to a discussion of the poem in
a recent issue of the London Times Literary Supplement) who "must
somehow try to dig down for something which they think ought to be there and
they get frustrated when they find it isn't" (Contexts 15). The
words are in the poem, and they resonate, but the poem also rejects traditional
Christianity, as it has rejected contemporary American materialism, as a
solution of the narrator's problem. When the name "John" is mentioned,
we immediately learn that John was not the narrator's friend's name, and this
instructs us to beware the solution of traditional Christianity. The question
the poem confronts, however, remains a fundamentally religious one.
The poem's words propose a third solution to this problem of how to light the
darkness which surrounds us. This is conveyed in the way the problem is stated:
The darkness sur-
rounds us.
The breaking up of "sur-rounds" creates a new word,
"rounds," one with more positive connotations. According to the poem
(and without the narrator understanding it), the darkness also
"rounds" us, helps make us whole, or at least the recognition of that
darkness is what enables us to achieve what wholeness we can. The human
imagination will transform darkness into light. Wallace Stevens has a similar
use of the word "surrounds" in his poem "Anecdote of the
Jar". Here is its first stanza.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
(Collected Poems 76)
The congruence of the word "surround" with the word
"round" in Stevens's poem achieves the same paradox which Creeley gets
by splitting the word over the end of his line. And we have a vision of the
possibility of order within chaos. Creeley has written of himself that 'I am
however young [old] writing at random—straining at particles of light in the
midst of a great darkness—" (A Day Book, n.p.) He has this in
common with the narrator of his poem.
They also have in common a delight in driving and an impulse to see it as a
means of ordering the world. On a couple of occasions in his correspondence with
Charles Olson he expresses this delight. Simple activity is the ideal: both
Creeley and his narrator seem companions of Jack Kerouac ("John, I / sd,
which was not his / name") here:
Feel very much these hot days, like moving—travelling. Two yng men
stopped in yesterday, with a car, and talking to them, cd not keep off the
subject/where they were going (Hartford & the Tanglewood, they replied . .
.),and thought myself—of, say, one of those Lincoln Continentals, rides like
an extension of, say, the idea. Anyhow, say, cruising, abt 60/70 miles per:
those long, stretches, highways—into the south, down & under. With 1
bottle cool, cool: wine & yr own self—wd be cool. Remember one morning
on Morningside Drive, waiting for Bud—he drove up in one of those, sitting
between Dizzy Gillespie & the Hawk . . . 'Sunday After the War.' If you
want to drive, drive with one who knows: flight. The gig. Used to catch myself
pulling/UP/ on the wheel to see, if it cd not be: LIFT ED
Away, the gig.
Riding on the idea/as Lawrence wd: is the way, in some ways. To be able to
move. Riding. Well, not as extension of 'power' but just: 'movement.' Is the
thing. (Correspondence Vol. 2 101)
The poem's genesis might well be right in this passage. Creeley imagines
himself and Olson in the car, and sees it as a transcendence of ordinary life.
In his distinction between movement and power, he distinguishes himself from the
commercial American.
A second passage from a later letter, underlines many of the same elements
and adds more:
Leave me now turn you on to RainerM/: will be picking up soon again,
thinking as I am, of one big black car, sliding along the highway, west,
southwest, along those real crazy highways: abt eve, leave us figure it, &
the lights begin to pick up things, flash them back at us, & movement, IS
move/move/move: 1 gal/wine, on the seat beside, & all the things to see. (Correspondence
Vol. 4, 27-28)
Here the darkness is beginning to surround us, and it does appear an active
agent in the making of meaning. What these passages omit is the element of
warning with which the poem concludes.
from "Robert Creeley: 'A So-Called Larger View.'" SAGTRIEB
7.2
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