First reports had it that the new New York Review of Books includes a “hatchet job” by Charles Simic on Robert Creeley’s two-​volume Col­lected Poems. “Let no one think that the other side merely ignores us out of carelessness,” said Mark Weiss in a post to the Buf­falo Poet­ics List, “This is true venom.”

But with the arti­cle now avail­able online (albeit for a fee), it’s hard to see what’s so upset­ting. Simic is any­thing but spite­ful, and his basic judgment—that Cree­ley did his best work early on—seems pretty accurate.

Simic, taking refuge in “broad agreement,” calls For Love Creeley’s best book. He finds Words “uneven,” says Pieces “doesn’t amount to much,” and thinks things go quickly down­hill from there.* Still, he makes sev­eral efforts to qual­ify his judg­ments on the later books. For instance, “On rare occa­sions, when he comes out of him­self and remem­bers William Carlos Williams’s injunc­tion ‘no ideas but in things,’ to actu­ally look closely at the world around him, he is a far better poet.” And: “In the last years of his life Cree­ley recov­ers some of his old touch.”

The dis­joint between Simic’s arti­cle and the vitu­per­a­tions that it has already prompted might seem mys­te­ri­ous to an out­sider. But it points to the leg­endary qual­ity that Creeley’s life took on during his years teach­ing at Buf­falo. “You can’t help but love a world in which a Robert Cree­ley happens,” Tom Pickard wrote. In the latter half of his career, Cree­ley was a noto­ri­ous encour­ager of the youth. “He’s one of the most gen­er­ous people I’ve ever met,” said Ben Fried­lan­der. “He had a gift for tend­ing to friend­ship that not many people have.” (From all accounts, Creeley’s charisma was evi­dent even early on, and his rep­u­ta­tion flour­ished despite, if not because of, the sto­ries of stolen wives and bar­room brawls.)

Cree­ley made him­self open to so many people that (inten­tion­ally or not) he ended up with a com­mu­nity of devo­tees that would put most saints to shame. His nearly indis­crim­i­nate enthu­si­asm endeared him to a whole gen­er­a­tion of young poets, who have buoyed his rep­u­ta­tion with an energy that often seems frankly reli­gious. On hear­ing of the Simic review, one cor­re­spon­dent to the Buf­falo Poet­ics list wrote:

This man, Bob, was, I think, very much the sort of human embod­i­ment of the divine - a savage on all fours moving across our dirty floor, so pol­luted by the likes of many (includ­ing on this list), attempt­ing to recoup him­self and in that, I think, find and offer grace. He was the man who often said: No prob­lem what-so-ever. He was an ambi­tious man, a good man, a person many of us KNEW.

The trick of writ­ing a crit­i­cal arti­cle in the face of such devo­tion is how best to divert atten­tion from the person to the work. Simic seems to have exactly this dis­tinc­tion in mind when he reports,

I knew Cree­ley for over forty years and enjoyed his talk, which was always full of inter­est­ing sto­ries and ideas, and now read­ing his inter­views feel the same way, but there is little evi­dence of that qual­ity of mind in his work after 1975, with poem after poem con­sist­ing either of super­fi­cial remarks or descrip­tions so gen­eral that they are instantly forgettable.

It’s obvi­ous, too, that Simic rec­og­nizes the perils of neg­a­tively review­ing a poet who meant so much to so many people. He pref­aces his dis­missal of the second volume of Creeley’s Col­lected (which spans 1975-2005) by saying, “This may sound harsh, but read­ing the hun­dreds of poems that Cree­ley wrote after Pieces, I could not come to any other conclusion.”

The best part of Simic’s review has noth­ing to do with Cree­ley at all. Simic writes,

Unless one is an inmate serv­ing a life sen­tence in a state pen­i­ten­tiary, a book of a thou­sand poems is nearly impos­si­ble to read, since the con­cen­tra­tion and enthu­si­asm such an under­tak­ing requires can only infre­quently be sum­moned. More to the point, there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading….

Eighty pages seems thin by a third, but the sen­ti­ment is spot on. For­tu­nately for Cree­ley fans who share Simic’s resis­tance to 1200 pages of poetry, a new selec­tion of poems, edited by Fried­lan­der down to some­thing closer to 300 pages, is on its way.

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*Note: For com­par­i­son, see what Denise Lev­er­tov said about Pieces in her pos­i­tive review for Caterpillar:

Some­body glanc­ing through it who did not know Creeley’s ear­lier books might get an impres­sion of slop­pi­ness and ask, What’s this guy think he’s doing, pub­lish­ing unfin­ished drafts? Some­one who knew and dug his work, its ele­gance and con­ci­sion and (most of the time) its clarity—dug it just for those attributes—might sim­i­larly think Pieces weak, self­ind­ul­gent, a falling off. But it’s not. Its very sprawl and openness…is in fact a move­ment of energy in his work, to my ear: not a break­ing down but a break­ing open.

Even those who agree with Lev­er­tov about Pieces have to admit that she’s giving up a lot in those first two sen­tences.