I wrote a letter to The New York Review of Books about the Simic / Creeley review. Very moderate in tone. It basically says "I'd love to show Simic my 400 pages of Creeley." I doubt they will publish it because they get "thousands of letters."

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Certain of us need the Creeleyesque. Sometimes for me it's an actual physical craving I get on occasion for that particular tone, that "insistence," to use a word he himself might use. It's a language that without him would not exist, an idiolect. For me, unoriginal poet, it's a useful register to be able to call upon. Creeleytude, Creeleytas.

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Certain others are Creeley skeptics, the way I am a Duncan skeptic. The skeptics say that it is dull (Berryman), that there's nothing there. There's probably nothing to be done--in the sense that a justification not immanent to the work itself will not convince. It is an immanent sort of thing. The Creeley skeptics are not less cultivated, less intelligent, or less anything else. They are just less in need of what Creeley offers. It's there in just a few words, recognizable

"Most explicit--
the sense of trap"