A Thom Gunn Moment, with a little bit of Creeley

I remember we were given an assignment to observe an animal and write a poem about it. (We had read Rilke's "Panther.") Not the kind of excercise that I was (or am) any good at. I remember writing about birds flying from branch to branch in "short / uninteresting curves" ! ?! I wasn't trying to sabotage the exercise, this was just my honest observation. What I had observed yielded no epiphany. Yes, the poem itself was a little drab (ok, more than little), as was obvious to Gunn and everyone else, but I tried to argue that my observation had a sort of "Creeley" quality to it. Amazingly enough, Gunn bought this argument. It didn't make the poem any good, but he had to admit that if Creeley had signed these lines he would have accepted them more readily. I admired this flexibiity, this willingness to take a point from a 17-year old kid.

So what is dullness in poetry, really? My act of attention was perfunctory, and the adjective "uninteresting" was the self-conscious result. The word doesn't appear too much in poetry, and for very good reasons. Follow the assignment, but don't write as though you are following an assignment. An impossible double-bind. Yet, Creeley-like, I was attentive to my own inadequacy, the poverty of that sort of anti-epiphanic moment. To write endlessly, like Creeley, about something that he wasn't very good at for a very long stretch of his life: human relationships, impossibly painful domestic situations. There's a sort of aporia there too, a productive tension if you will. If he were psychologically wise about his experience, he wouldn't have had the experience in the first place, he would have been "spared the agony of human relation/ships."

Berryman famously found Creeley dull, probably because of the lack of a certain sort of theatricalization, at which Berryman was very good at.