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Here Is/Where There/Is: Some Observations of Spatial Deixis in Robert Creeley's Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2011

DAVID KENNEDY
DAVID KENNEDY
Affiliation:
University of Hull. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Multiple uses of the spatial deictic “here” are a notable feature of Robert Creeley's poetry. For example, the Collected Poems 1945–1975 contains five poems called “Here” and two called “Here Again,” and after only a hundred pages one has encountered at least eight uses of “here.” Similarly, Charles Altieri has noted a movement in Creeley's poetry from saying “there” to being able to say “here” as a statement of “an ideal of pure presence, of a relationship between subject and world where each is transparent to and completely adequate for the other.” In this essay, I will examine examples of Creeley's “heres” in the early poetry, up to and including Words (1967) and Pieces (1969). I will argue that while some of Creeley's uses of “here” do involve problems of location and ideal presence, other uses speak to problems of agency, form and the body. I will go on to argue that, ultimately, Creeley's “heres” map a search for location that discovers each new articulation is a disorientating reorientation. This reading of Creeley's use of “here” will be informed by a number of other sources including Jonathan Culler's pioneering work on deixis in Structuralist Poetics; J. P. Denny's comparative work on spatial adverbs in English, Eskimo and Kikuyu; Heidegger's discussion of “here” and “yonder”; and the paintings of Barnett Newman which are notable for their deictic titles. Reading these with and back into Creeley's poetry enables a greater understanding of how spatial deixis works in lyric poetry and how it relates to Creeley's reflexive lyric.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 73 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 In David Anfam, Abstract Expressionism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 145.

2 Ibid., 146.

3 Yve-Alain Boise, “Here to There and Back – Barnett Newman Retrospective,” Artforum, March 2002, 100–8, 100–1.

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13 Ibid., 168.

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16 I am grateful to the work of Jill D. Hopkins for drawing my attention to Denny. See Hopkins, Jill D., “Spatial Deixis in Chiwere,” Kansas Working Papers in Linguistics, 15, 2 (1990), 60–72Google Scholar.

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