"My / Eye Locked in / Self Sight": The Self-Portrait Poems of Robert Creeley's Words

Abstract

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System f Frank O’Hara “is almost certainly the subject of more portraits than any other poet of the twentieth century,” as Brian Glavey relays in a beautiful essay on the “statuesque” New York School poet, then Robert Creeley is second in line (782). Featured in numerous portraits by visual artists like Francesco Clemente and R. B. Kitaj, and in photographs by Elsa Dorfman, Jonathan Williams, and others, Robert Creeley should, as John Yau notes, “rightfully be called a ‘poet among painters’” (Perloff, qtd. in Yau 47). As perceptive readers like Yau and Charles Altieri as well as Creeley’s own wide-ranging art criticism suggest, the plastic arts have been central to his poetic imaginary.1 Inspired by an early residence in Europe where he had, as he writes in “On the Road,” “come to know some painters, like they say”―including a rapturous introduction to abstract expressionism―and by a brief tenure at Black Mountain College, where he taught alongside leading experimental figures in dance, music, and film, Creeley grew enamored of the “energy” and “viability” in these other media: an attention to process and material that he became intent to replicate in poetry (Collected Essays 369).2 Perhaps in an effort to better achieve this in his verse,