That Fucking Merwin

Robert Archambeau reminds us that even Saint Creeley had anger issues:

I know a lot of people who loved Robert Creeley, who saw the old sage of Black Mountain and Buffalo as a generous mentor and friend, and he certainly was that. He may turn out to have meant more to more younger poets than any other figure of his generation. But if you read his letters, you see that he had as large a capacity for hatred as he had for paternal or avuncular love. He despises Theodore Roethke and Louis Simpson, hurls abuse at Helen Vendler, spews bile in the direction of Louise Glück and Charles Wright, dismisses Kenneth Koch as a lightweight, and talks about cutting Frank O’Hara (the editors of the letters work hard, in a footnote, to explain this away as metaphorical, and may be right). “Fuck him,” he says of Kenneth Patchen, and he tells us how “that fucking Merwin” is a “a symbol of rot.” He clearly sees battle lines drawn between a kind of poetry he admires and the kinds he does not, and he takes exception when the people who should be on his side appear to cross the line and embrace the enemy. “I will never forget this,” he writes to Kenneth Rexroth, when the older poet treasonously supported Roethke; and when William Carlos Williams spoke approvingly of W. H. Auden, Creeley demanded to know whether someone had held a gun to Williams’ back. Academics have a special place in Creeley’s inferno—even after so many of them had come to accept his views about who the important poets were. In 1985, he tells us that academics wouldn’t deign to write about Williams or Olson—and does so with such vehemence that I wouldn’t want to have been the one to tell him of the half dozen prominent academic articles on Olson that year alone, or the three dozen on Williams, or of the professor who’d just edited the sixth volume of Creeley’s correspondence with Olson. Resentment outlives its occasion, and those who harbor it don’t want to be reminded of the fact.