It All Returns:

Robert Creeley Live on Record

Liner notes by Chris Mustazza, Co-Director PennSound

In the spring of 2017, shortly after Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I remember an undergraduate in Charles Bernstein’s poetry seminar asking him what Bernstein thought of the musician being honored in this way. Did this award indeed settle the question of whether popular music lyrics could be considered Poetry? Bernstein answered that the more pressing issue was around systems of recognition and their lacunae. He concluded his comment by saying, “When Robert Creeley can win the Grammy for Best Record, then we can talk about whether Dylan should receive the highest prize in Literature.”

That comment stuck with me all these years, and guided my approach to creating this assemblage, or setlist, of Creeley’s works. As I’ve written about extensively, including in The Poetic Record (Edinburgh University Press, 2026), poetry has been a central part of audio history since the invention of sound recording, yet literary audio occupies a liminal space in discussions of popular recordings. This is because poetry recordings live somewhere in the gaps between speech and writing, orality and literacy, and Louis Zukofsky’s famous calculus interval, “lower limit speech, upper limit music.” No one better traverses this sonic frontier an Robert Creeley, who deserves the counterfactual recognition Bernstein imagined. To that end, I would like to present to you It All Returns: Robert Creeley Live on Record, curated from a set of Creeley’s performances in the PennSound Archive.

I’ve endeavored to arrange the recordings here in an order evocative of attending a large-scale rock concert, replete with all its recognizable tropes, in the hopes of situating Creeley within his due spot of popular recognition. The setlist opens with Creeley taking the stage. In the preface to “The Rhythm,” he takes his instrument (the microphone) and begins with a moment of vulnerability with his listeners: “I feel very secured by those who are here. I feel at home.” Just as the “here” of the modernist poem often references the shared space of poetry, between reader and audience, so too do I intend this comment to establish a new shared here, the intimacy between performer and listener, Creeley and you, that exists within the bounds of this collection. As he notes in “Old Song”: “If I know still you’re here, then I’m here too, and love you, and love you.” Here’s to being here.

This track is followed by one of his big hits (though not THE biggest), “The Language”. He gets the crowd hyped with this well-known banger that draws from his Beats-adjacent, proto-Language influences to explore the materiality of language: “Locate I / love you some- / where in// teeth and / eyes, bite.” In Creeley’s performances, we hear the echo of the Williamsesque linebreaks as faint pauses that give the poet his signature flow, in which prosody is used to enact this physiological understanding of language (and by extension, poetry). 

A cluster of the recordings references Creeley’s interest in the sounds of language (e.g. “Echoes,” “Mother’s Voice”) and renders them in sound, the truest medium to the poems’ topics. Other selections draw from poems that span biography and language philosophy (“I is the Grandson,” “Massachusetts”). I also wanted to sprinkle in a few cover songs, where Creeley pays homage to some of his influences. To this end, you will hear him reading William Carlos Williams’s “The Dance” and Emily Dickinson’s “Ambition cannot find him,” positioning Creeley as the heritor of this strain of (proto-)modernism.

The concert proper ends with Creeley performing “Help!,” a track that seems to reference Beatles’ song in title. The flow of the track is driven by a rhythmic downbeat and renders as something between an old lyrical ballad and a rap. He concludes the reading with a playful, “Goodnight. Goodnight, all!” that at once recalls Eliot’s conclusion to the “Game of Chess” section of The Waste Land (“goodnight, sweet ladies”) and cues the audience into a riotous applause. 

Of course, no good concert can end without an encore with the performer’s best-known song. As such, after the applause dies down and some time passes, I offer you “I Know a Man”—for me, one of the most important poems of the twentieth century. The collection closes with Creeley discussing his most famous maxim, that content is never more than an extension of form (and vice versa), with Leonard Schwartz, in a Cross-Cultural Poetics episode recorded toward the end of the poet’s life. 

Creeley’s performances ranging from 70 years ago still delight, challenge, and stimulate in their contemporaneity. The students in my class love to discuss questions around whether “I Know a Man” is a funny poem or an ominous warning (“the darkness sur-rounds us”), how the Poundian use of “sd” seems to anticipate text messaging in its immediacy, and how the staccato readings, in lockstep with the poems’ visual forms, propose an alternative kind of projective verse. All of this to say: here is my vote for Robert Creeley to be awarded the Grammy for Best Record. I hope you will like this new “here” that the readings open and that you will further seek out the wider collection at PennSound.

 

Chris Mustazza

Plymouth Meeting, PA