That Which Collected Itself

                                          
' Lost in some confusion of integrity, I had to tell the truth, however unreal, and persisted toward its realization, even though unthinkable. So writing, in this sense, began to lose its specific edges, its singleness of occurrence, and I worked to be open to the casual, the commonplace, that which collected itself.'
    Reams of enthralling stuff in the Collected Essays of Robert Creeley, which Ron Silliman gave a link to last Tuesday (16th Nov). Creeley's prose is as subtly measured and elliptical in syntax as his poems, which I've always found startling and unprecedented despite mainstream disfavour.
   As well as generous writerly insights into both antecedents ( Whitman, Lawrence, Pound) and contemporaries (Zukofsky, Bunting, Olson, Dorn) , he perhaps writes most vividly about his own poetic processes, especially in the piece quoted from above ("Is That a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up?") The counter-academic sense of deep-felt integrity it imbues is inspirational.