The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley. Ed. Rod Smith, Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. 512 pp. $65.00 Hardback.

It will be difficult for a biographer to do a better job of revealing Creeley and his life than the editors – and of course Creeley himself – have done in this selection. Whether in letters to other writers, his wives or his children, Creeley wrote openly about his often changing views, responses, feelings, hopes and plans. He is often so ingenuously open and self-focused that he discloses even more than he may be aware of – i.e. reading a Creeley letter can be a lot like reading Browning monologue.

The context and tenor of the early letters during which Creeley farmed in New Hampshire, lived in Aix-en-Provence,  Mallorca and Black Mountain, NC, will be familiar to those who have read volumes of George Butterick’s ambitious but uncompleted Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence. It’s a period in which Creeley is aggressively seeking his place in postwar American poetry, searching for mentors and exploring possible connections with his younger contemporaries. Before he has any significant publications he is confidently introducing himself to Williams and Pound, asking for their help, and exchanging views on poetics. He soon discovers more fruitful connections with Cid Corman, Denise Levertov and Olson. These letters mostly concerned with questions of how to write, literary politics and publishing possibilities but are also punctuated with reflections on his poverty, his unhappiness with the places in which he is living, and his embarrassment at not being able to support his young family in a ‘manly’ fashion. What is especially interesting is how he wrestles with himself in these letters, posing various possibilities against one another in both his writing and domestic lives. There’s an obsessive sense of irresolution similar to the one which gives the first decade of his poetry such power.

Throughout he tends to be excited about new poems he has written. But often within a few months he re-reads them and thinks they are weak, facile, slight, too “easy” because they are so similar to ones he has written before. He finds them again a year later – if he hasn’t destroyed them – and is impressed with them. Later when they are published and well received by some of his writer friends his estimation of them rises again. The excitements, self-doubts, conflicted feelings, moments of despair – often caused by the same things that have excited him – tumble one after

Senior American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has been investigating how the history of English-language modernist poetry came to be mapped, and its poets identified, ranked or excluded, since at least 1985, when she published Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers. Her most recent publication in this historiographic project is Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2012).

DuPlessis suggests that she could have focused in this book on other or additional male modernist poets without her findings being “significantly changed” (195). Her choices appear to have been not so much assertions of poetic importance as namings of writers who benefited most visibly from the patriarchal assumptions of both our literary and general culture. They’re also namings without blaming. DuPlessis recognizes the enormous advantages that patriarchal position-taking has offered/offers to male poets – the unquestioned right to ‘speak’ for all gender roles and material situations, to pronounce ‘authoritatively’ on all topics, and to be praised for doing so. She notes also how male poets have been not only reluctant to share such advantages with women poets whom they recognized as able – such as Pound with Mina Loy – but have also quarrelled and maneuvered among themselves for the (most) patriarchal mantle. She both regrets the resultant exclusions and envies the male ability – because of the greater social power the general culture still accords to men – to make “imperial” pronouncements. She begins her book’s final paragraph “I wanted (imperially?) to declare the end of the patriarchal era of poetry by the sheer force of these sometimes negative examples and by the temperate if also suspicious empathy that characterizes most of my analysis” (196). That is, as a willing

Part of the work of writing my recent biography of Canadian poet bpNichol (aka bpNichol) took me to the special collections department of Simon Fraser University’s W.A.C. Bennett Library, where several deposits of Nichol’s literary and other papers had accumulated since the early 1970s. Most had come from Nichol himself, at least one posthumously from his wife Eleanor, and one or two from others, such as artist Arnold Shives, who had exchanged letters with Nichol in the mid-1960s. At Simon Fraser I discovered that parts the Nichol collection were not only large but relatively complete; the collection contained all but one of the diary-like notebooks he had kept, most of the letters he’d received, most of the outgoing letters that he had begun keeping copies of in the 1970s, and most of the many drafts of his published and unpublished writing. There were 50-60 or more large file boxes of often surprising materials. There was also his comic book collection, a large file of his visual poems, many done in colour, a part if not all of his toy collection, and a collection of audio recordings.

But there seemed to be also significant gaps, perhaps only noticeable to someone who hoped to write a Nichol biography. There was very little from the early years of his life, other than the recollections he had recorded in his