There was a time when Robert Creeley believed the world would yield its truths to him. To believe this did not make the poet’s task any easier, and his career has not been filled with the fruits of knowing. Rather, Creeley has followed what he once titled "The Plan" of lyric apprehension, a journey in which neither the "quieter possibilities of slumber" nor the "truth, the mind this time at last trapped" are provided to him. In the midst of "this damned muddle," Creeley has quarreled and questioned, and in poems unfailingly direct and generous he has indefatigably pressed forward. To strive in the face of the unknown is the expected pose of the poet. Creeley’s advance is earnestly American. Sensing early that "the darkness surrounds us," he questions only briefly, "what can we do against it" before he takes the advice of a friend to "buy a goddamn big car" and drive onward. And if he pauses later in life to reassess his predicament, to account in Life & Death (1998) some of the human company who have fallen missing in this work, then in this latest collection, If I were writing this, Creeley is again pressing forward, bringing along with him many others.
          Still, Creeley’s lifelong muddle persists, a dilemma which now places him in the provisional state of his title, If I were writing this. When Wordsworth, late in life, faced the loss of the "visionary gleam," he lamented something he had once seen. Robert Creeley, believer and inheritor of that same Romantic vision, has never encountered "the glory and the dream." His lament leads him not just to the deep limits of thoughts "too deep for tears," but to a pragmatic boundary where writing loses purpose:

"Too deep for words"–
My weary hand was poised
Above the paper’s blank–
Too white for thoughts, recalcitrant for tears.

The weariness of Creeley is authentic. Likewise, his pose of conjecture–"if I were writing this"–is not coy. In the midst of proposing the provisional If of this new book, and with the joy and disappointment of a life of work behind him, he continues forward, writing this. His obstinate task has not yet overpowered him.
          In this new book Creeley has come to a new understanding of how to proceed. "The Plan" has yielded to "The Way," a poem which begins and directs this collection. First along this way is the necessary recognition of the futility in much of the poet’s previous method. The absolute wisdom which he sought "had at best a transient credit," and even knowledge was misunderstood as an end because, in fact, the action of "knowing was its own reward." This knowing can "hold together…[a] moment’s recognition" and hold off the "hostile incoherence" of the world. Yet while it cannot hold forever, the important work of knowing is not undercut by the fact that it must be provisional. The revealing light of wonder may not be as persistent or as static as belief but it best leads the poet into uncertainty. Creeley advises:

Best wonder at mind and let that flickering ambience
of wondering be the determining way you follow,
which leads itself from day to day into tomorrow,
finds all it ever finds is there by chance.

           In line with his careful and revelatory thought, the form of Creeley’s poems has been meticulous as well as providential. Creeley’s signature headlong enjambments and ambiguous syntax combined with a regularity of stanza have evidenced his ideology in his prosody. We witness the willed and skillful alignment of elements up to a line’s edge, and then we follow the chance by which the pieces seem to fall. If I were writing this claims more to chance, yet in poems full of end-rhyme and endstop we find thoughtful plotting in the line. Chance has moved away from the line and taken a different form. We see it when we notice that each of the book’s three sections includes a long poem comprised of short, numbered segments, such as the series of three-couplet figures that make up "Clemente’s Images." By collecting these often cryptic images we are tempted to compile the wisdom of the sequence. And the whole does present a kind of ecosystem of paradox and in-between-ness where "turn as one will, the sky will always be / far up above the place he thinks to dream as earth." If we do this, however, we’ll supplant the chance moment of knowing a single image–however difficult it is to place "each complicating part"–in our effort to grasp for its controlling truth. In another poem Creeley argues chance as the expansiveness of "Possibilities":

Inside, it could have been included.
There was room for the world.
One could think of it, even be simple, ample.
But not "multitudes," not that way in–
It’s out, out, one’s going. Loosed.

The familiar compactness of Creeley’s poems has never made them solipsistic or insular. Now, even as the blackness continues to surround, even as he is certain that "the ‘outside’ is empty but vast, I think. / It’s everywhere around me and still there," Creeley will not collapse inward. No, "there are no mirrors here to look into, / No answering reassurances one’s sufficient."
          As with every assertion in this book, Creeley’s claims against reassurance must be set against his many reassuring gestures. The entire collection repeatedly reaches out to others in friendship and in love. Of forty-four total poems, twenty-three are indicated "for" a particular person and at least fourteen poems begin with or include homage to a particular poet (among them Whitman, Donne, Wordsworth, Dickinson, Baudelaire). Whether the assurance of this type of gesture falls more upon the poet or the recipient, these postures of offering suggest two truths about Creeley. We must know that there is a persistent sadness through this work that has not been offset by age or any revelation at this later date. Instead, there are:

Blunted efforts as the distance
Becomes insistent,
A divided time between now and then,
Between oneself and old friend–

We must know that against his sadness and his darkness Creeley has struggled all the way through. In "For Love" Creeley began his questioning of what the poet can do, which he knew required love. Alone, one is not sufficient, and his love leads him nowhere:

Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous
self-regard.

Only with others, only in "the company of love," can he best proceed. This love is many things: persistence, acceptance, the "place to be" and how to be there. But Creeley, always puts it best, always succinctly, when he charges throughout this vibrant book: "Go for it–as in love."