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*Creeley. Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976. . 1978. 85 pp.

Trees want
to be still?
Winds
won't let them?

This is probably not going to convince a Charles Simic that Creeley is worthwhile. It is Creeley at his least fearful of the seemingly trivial observation. "Sitting at table--/ good talk / with good people." On the other hand, I think Simic's poetry is pretty trivial, where Creeley is essential:

If the world's one's
own experience of it,

then why walk around
in it, or think of it.

More would be more
than one could know

alone, more than myself's
small senses, of it.

That's just it, isn't it? The sense of being in one's experience and nowhere else, but the simultaneous sense that there ought to be more. Creeley already lives in Rilke's untranslated world. And he knows how to to notate it. That last comma is priceless. Think, too, of how much weight is on that neuter pronoun it, repeated four times in this short poem.

These reflection on self in the moment occur in a travel diary. It is travel, being in a different place, that instigates reflection on the essential non-travel: not being able to get out of one's own skin: "So it's // all by myself / again, one / way or another."