FERRYING POETS AROUND OHIO: Creeley and Me in a Not Particularly Large Car

Now that I am on a roll of remembering poets, I decided to tackle my memories on Robert Creeley, but as I had had a partner for that journey, I called Columbus poet Jerry Roscoe, who had ridden along on the drive. 

("I Know a Man" by Robert Creeley)

"Jerry, I don't remember much," I said. "What do you remember?"

"Diane, you wrote about this for Cleveland Poetry Scenes," Jerry said. "I've just been rereading it." Lo and behold, Jerry is right, and I have pirated some of this memoir from that terrific anthology, with thanks to Larry Smith and Mary Weems, its editors.

When Robert Creeley was visiting writer at Cleveland State for several weeks one autumn, he told me that he wanted most to visit the Asphodel Bookshop in Burton, and as much as the bookshop itself, he wanted to talk to Jim Lowell, who still sold letterpress books and broadsides out of a garage that also housed his wife's hair salon. 

(If you don't know about Jim Lowell, you can find Mark Kuhar's wonderful "A tribute
to james r. lowell, 1932 - 2004" Deep Cleveland.)

Creeley talked the whole ride out to Burton. Mostly he careened in speech on and on about people, all by first names, none of whom we knew. When we got to the bookstore, he went on in this vein, with Lowell nodding occasionally.  Jerry remembers that at one point, Lowell made fun of Diane Wakoski's work, and Creeley defended it. But otherwise, we were pretty lost as to whom was being discussed. At one point, Creeley mentioned, “Allen,” and Jerry, thinking we finally had an “in” said, “You mean Allen Ginsberg?”

“No,” Creeley answered. “Allen who helps me with plumbing.”

And so for the ride home, we didn't even try to ask questions. Jerry figured out that "Bill" was William Carlos Williams, but by then we just let him talk because he was "always talking." It was the last and the only time I was ever in a car with him.

***

He showed up in my C.S.U. office the next day, still talking-- and smoking. People smoked then on the 18th floor of C.S.U.! (And everywhere else.) He was frustrated about a manuscript about himself that a professor had asked him to proofread, filled with errors. “It even misspells Allen Ginsberg!” he said, showing me the error. We were both aghast.

Then he began about how much he disliked teaching creative writing, which he had been hired to do, in addition to sitting in on the C.S.U. monthly first Friday poetry workshop and giving an afternoon reading. He said he was trained as a literature teacher, for chrissakes, but he tended to get these gigs for teaching creative writing. Then a C.S.U. professor walked into the room, glared at me, glared at Creeley, and said, “Where have you been? The class began twenty minutes ago.” And he left with the poet in tow, casting one more look at me, who had unwittingly provided Creeley a 20- minute reprieve from the job.

Jerry and John Stickney bonded with Creeley about jazz and they had all planned to take him around the Cleveland jazz scene after the C.S.U. Poetry Forum, which was, after all, never a class. However, the excursion never materialized and Jerry thought it hadn't even registered with Creeley. Then a week, Creeley asked Marily Murray if Jerry were around. "So he seemed oblivious to us in the moment," Jerry comments today, "but he did remember." It was though Creeley was firing on eight cylinders, and we thought there were only six.

His afternoon reading was spectacular. As usual, he sat, a cigarette in his hand which combed through his hair and held the hank back with the hand to his cheek, his eye socket weeping, his voice steady as a metronome but musical too, not rhythm only. I remember that at one point, I was weeping, unconscious of what words had triggered my tears exactly, just filled with the emotion in the poems he intoned and the tension in the poems that filled the room.

***

I was not ferrying Creeley in 1994 when Joel Lipman and I read with him at the James Wright Festival in Martin's Ferry, Ohio. My most memorable moment of Creeley occurred the evening before the festival. The participating poets and the two festival organizers met for a casual dinner at a Chinese restaurant across the river in Wheeling. Creeley ended up next to my husband, and buttonholed him in conversation as he was wont to do, but this time, but once they were introduced, he realized he had in Paul a listener who understood him on postmodern literary theory. When Paul nodded, he knew exactly what Creeley was talking about, and it wasn't plumbing. Not only that, but Creeley learned that Paul's hometown was Fitchburg, MA, just down the road from his own hometown of Acton, about which he had many strong important memories.

But as we finished up the meal and headed off, he asked Paul about his work with a particularly liteary group. "Oh," Paul said, "No, no, that's another Paul Beauvais." "Oh good," Creeley said, "I like you better."

Creeley really seemed to enjoy the James Wright Festival, though he himself was a little more distanced personally from Wright than other poets had been. I think he especially enjoyed the incredible closeness and cameraderie and sense of home that pernmeated that festival. Bruce Jackson, once wrote:

One of Robert Creeley's favorite words was "company." He was always talking about being part of a company—a company of family, of poets, of artists, of this group here on this night around this table, eating and drinking and talking, always talking. When the company constricts so does your world, so do you. The first thing he said when we talked about Allen Ginsberg's death in 1997 was, "The company keeps getting smaller." Company, for Bob, was whom you thought in terms of, whom you talked with. --–Bruce Jackson, “On the Subject of Company” in Buffalo Report

***

From 2000 till his death in 2005, Creeley was active in a yearly event in his hometown library of Acton. Someone at the library told me that he was spurred on to involvement by his memory of the Wright event. At any rate, the Robert Creeley Foundation set up a yearly poet award. I was living in Massachusetts at the time of the first award after his death, which was made to Carolyn Forche in 2006. I had always wanted to hear her read, as her book The Country Between Us had catapulted me into my work in Central America. She read from The Angel of History with her signature passion, which reminded me of Creeley's quiet passion. It was such a wonderful evening, and it felt like Creeley's gift to me, to all of us. 

And the gift goes on. You can find all the Robert Creeley Award winners here , with the most recent poet listed being Mark Doty in 2018. In addition, the Helen Creeley Student Poetry Prize is given to two high school students to honor Robert Creeley's older sister Helen, a prize-winning poet while she was a high school and someone he recognized as mentoring him when he was young, yet another gift he has passed on.

FERRYING POETS AROUND OHIO: Moving an Audience for Seamus Heaney

Compared to the Milosz reading, my memory of the details during Seamus Heaney's visit to Cleveland State in March 1979 remain spotty. 

That is, Bob McDonough thinks it was March of 1979, and I am dependent on Bob for much of this memoir because while he ferried, I ran around checking on the spaces he was ferrying Heaney to. But whatever the date, we definitely remember the reading.

But as with Milosz, before the reading, there was dinner. And there wasn't time to get him to the Flats. He  was on one of those crushing tours of many readings in many cities in not many days in order, he told us, to earn money for his dream car. A BMW I thought. Bob remembers a Porsche. Details. 

So The Parthenon it would be. That cavernous place in the 1500 block of Euclid whose huge brown slabs of rotating gyro meat greeted you when you came in the door, whose moussaka was both flakey and heavy, and its prices really quite light. We reserved a big table, and Bob brought Heaney there from his hotel very soon after he arrived in town. He was wearing jeans, a blue work shirt, and a sports coat and would be wearing it to the reading because, he noted with chagrin, his suitcase hadn't arrived. Many photos from those days always show him in a suit and tie. The later ones, post-Nobel, have him in the casual dress of that night. Most of us had had a fair amount of retsina and roditis even by the time the saganaki arrived, and we were so used to having it, no one thought to warn Heaney, who suddenly saw flames shoot up and shouts, and he leaped in his seat. He laughed afterwards and pronounced the cheese quite good.

During the meal, some nervous presenters asked him how did he pronounce his name. (Today, you can hear it pronounced online by an American, a Brit, and an Irish woman here, but back then, better to wait and get it from the Irishman's mouth.) He said that his family had pronounced it "Hane-ee," but the nuns had insisted on "Hee-nee," and the latter seemed to have stuck. He had one more nun story before the evening was over, too.

I headed over a few minutes early to the room where the reading was to be held.

Alberta Turner, who had made the arrangements previously, was gone that semester. Heaney's PR person had taken care of the press releases but mostly got the word out through the local Irish-American media of radio and newsletters and churches. Anything to get beyond the newspapers, which seemed to eschew any mention of poetry. (Cy Dostal always said it due to their complicity in d a levy's death. Before my time, so I don't know, but you could not get a notice in about a poetry reading if Shakespeare had been giving it.) The previous spring, only 17 people had shown up to hear Adrienne Rich in an auditorium that seated 200 people. We had huddled in the front, and she had been gracious, saying how fortunate Cleveland was to have the Big Mama Troupe. And it was a weekday. Still.

The Heaney reading was on a Friday night, so there was that. No classes then, not English classes, so you couldn't herd students in. But several of us had taught some of Heaney's poems in our comp classes, and let me tell you, you give working class kids Heaney's poem, "Digging," to read, and they will want to show up to see this guy. I recognized a fair number of my students already in the room, which was-- uh oh, wait a minute-- the room was overflowing already. People lined up all around the perimeter and stuffing themselves in through the door. Early still. 

And then, the hysteria of the moment totally blocks my memory. Who was called and how, I can't recall, but I am pretty sure that Leonard Trawick, the person any of us would want in crisis to be there, was indeed there and found a big room, and then several campus security guards materialized, an announcement was made, and the whole audience got up and paraded-- and I mean, it was indeed a parade-- to a much bigger hall we could all fit into, all 200 or so.

Heaney was introduced by Cleveland State history professor Tom Campbell, whose two hour introductory lecture on Irish history that I once heard has stayed with me for life.  And then Heaney read, fully and generously. He read the title poem from his 1966 book, Death of a Naturalist. Bob has reminded me of the story Heaney told about it: Many years after its publication, he was invited to an Irish Catholic school where the children were to honor him by reciting the poem in chorus. He thought ahead to the last lines where the frogs of the poem "sat/ Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting." Were the nuns really going to let the children say the word "farting"? He couldn't imagine it, and yet, there it came, and all the children chanted, "Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads darting." He was still enjoying that teeny bit of bowdlerization. And much to my great pleasure, from that same book, he read "Digging," the poem of his I most often shared with classes, an anthem for a working class kid who hopes to write.

He also read from Field Work, which had just come out, and from it, he read "The Skunk," surely the only successful poem in English literature that lovingly compares a wife to a skunk. One of my favorite love poems. Or lust poems. Anyhow, a fav.

I don't remember the reception, but Bob does, and remembers that one of the dear horrid cantankerous poetasters who were always showing up at readings and workshops to demand attention and who the CSU Poetry Center usually welcomed graciously, pressed a poem on Heaney, who took it with a smile. 

Bob remembers the next morning that Heaney looked pretty tired, but smiled brightly when Bob picked him up to take him to the airport. As he dropped Heaney off to catch his flight, Heaney turned and said, "Well, I am off to simulate new life!" 

He went off and breathed life into the poetry of the English language, and I used to bump into him in Logan Airport 2000-2002, when he was teaching at Harvard and flying home to Dublin, and I was living between Boston and Findlay, Ohio and our flights left from the same tiny airport terminal. By then, he had won the Nobel Prize, and he didn't need to be reminded of the time he read in a work shirt because his luggage didn't show up. However, that's how I like to remember him,  jumping up as waiters shouted, "Opa!" and laughing over darting frogs.