The variously unsatisfactory or seemingly insufficient aspects of Creeley's work are inseparable from the actual greatness of the work. The inarticulateness, hesitancy, the occasional triviality, vagueness, or sentimentality. What else? A minimalism that sometmes seemed (to me) a dead end. Sentences that are as abstract as anything out of Ashbery:

"Things continue, but my sense is that I have, at best, simply taken place with that fact. I see no progress in time or any other such situation. So it is that what I feel, in the world, is the one thing I know myself to be, in that instant. I will never know myself otherwise."

A sense of oneself in the specific here and now, but expressed abstractly, negatively. It is a kind of mysticism. This attempt to explain the work is more difficult than the work itself. A work very appealing and genial yet paradoxically enigmatic. "Position is where you put it." Koan-like tautologies. Let's not translate all this into a critical metalanguage.