It has been billed as”A Blaser Creeley [of] Reading”. Discreet handbills posted in supportive bookstores; a brief notice in the “Upcoming events” section of the local entertainment weekly: “A poetry reading by two major senior poets…”

The local “literati” are out for the occasion: there are perhaps more writers than readers crowded in the hall. Stacks of the poets’ recent books are on display: Robin Blaser’s Holy Forest; Robert Creeley’s Life & Death; and a hand-set commemorative broadside (“2 Poems”) specially printed for the occasion.

I get a strange pleasure to realize that all of us are here for love of language! Here to spend an evening with two people who have devoted their whole long lives (Blaser 78; Creeley 77) to — have earned a living by! — the craft of words.

We are members of that lost tribe who wander daily in the textual wilderness: those few (it seems) who take a true delight in finding this word in preference to that one; who admire the attentive fitting of one phrase to its neighbor (a master mason setting one stone upon another in the careful building of a wall). Our ears have been tuned to the subtle music of a shapely sentence; we feel that each such is a signal sent out, directed to us, as wild animals use pheromones to collect their kind.

So we have been gathered, and in the dark hall listen, patient, while each poet shuffles through his sheaves of poems: two archers pulling the truest arrows from their quivers, taking aim, and letting fly.

And I can’t recall the last time I listened as attentively to someone speaking. Each word attended to, and every nuance noted. Their breath and pacing, and the rhythm of the syllables within the line.

The rhythm of the syllables within the line.

• • •

Here is Robert Creeley’s “After School”, from that commemorative broadside mentioned just above:

After School

We’d set off into the woods
and would climb trees there
and throw things, shouting
at one another, great shrieking
cries I remember — or would, if
I dreamt — in dreams. In dreams,
the poet wrote, begin responsibilities.
I thought that was like going to
some wondrous place and all was
waiting there just for you to come
and do what had to be done.