Robert Creeley: For J. D. (Hearts)

.

Hove Lawn panorama: sea view, dawn: photo by Tom Raworth, 17 January 2011

Pass on by, love,

wait by that garden gate. 

Swing on, up

on heaven's gate.

The confounding, confronted 

pictures of world

brought to signs

of its persistent self

are here in all colors, sizes --

and hearts as big as all outdoors,

a weather of spaces,

intervals between silences.

 In My Eye, I Saw Creeley's: Jim Dine, 1996, for Robert Creeley's 70th Birthday Celebration

Robert Creeley: So There: Poems 1976-1983, cover by Jim Dine

Robert Creeley: For J. D., in Jim Dine/Five Themes, from Collected Essays, 1989

Creeley and I agreed to write to each other, to keep talking. I hadn't ever had such a dangerous friend before. By dangerous I mean the anger was bubbling up and kept at bay by austere and beautiful sculptures of American words, honed to almost nothing. The blade was very, very sharp.

-- Jim Dine on the beginnings (c. 1965) of his long friendship and working relationship with Robert Creeley, from the reminiscence I knew about Creeley

 

Moon and seagull: photo by Tom Raworth, 7 January 2010

Hearts

 

Just as one's self will serve as constant in a world of otherwise shifting reference, a heart is sign that one can care, that there is a consistent presence of feeling. In a curious way this heart is neither inside nor outside oneself but, rather, exists in a hieratic determination of its own possibility, and so lives in a place that can be as powerfully singular and remote as the moon or as physically evident and contained as one's own hands, feet, and head.

This heart is an imagination, of course. One knows the actual heart looks not at all like those most familiar from the iconographic slogans of Valentine's Day -- which seems itself an invention from faint root except that there must be one day on which, unequivocally, hearts triumph. Have a heart  . . .

It would be an error, however, to presume that these specific hearts are either symbolic or ultimately abstract. They are far more like weather, a shifting presence that has faces but is not itself a fixed content. More apt then to call them, among other things, a ground or context which serves as means for feeling out the possibilities of what is going on.

The insistent echoes of this image must have been delight to an artist so remarkably open to language and its powers. One can trust the associations here of everything from 'A heart as big as all outdoors' to 'hardhearted' or 'broken-hearted' or, simply, 'The heart of the matter.' 

Robert Creeley: from Hearts, in Jim Dine/Five Themes, 1983