Eric Wagner on Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley, May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005 

A Wicker Basket 

By Robert Creeley 

 

Comes the time when it’s later 
and onto your table the headwaiter    

 puts the bill, and very soon after 

 rings out the sound of lively laughter— 

 

 Picking up change, hands like a walrus,    

 and a face like a barndoor’s, 

 and a head without any apparent size,    

 nothing but two eyes— 

 

 So that’s you, man, 

 or me. I make it as I can,    

 I pick up, I go 

 faster than they know— 

 

 Out the door, the street like a night,    

 any night, and no one in sight,    

 but then, well, there she is, 

 old friend Liz— 

 

 And she opens the door of her cadillac,    

 I step in back, 

 and we’re gone. 

 She turns me on— 

 

 There are very huge stars, man, in the sky, 

 and from somewhere very far off someone hands me a slice of apple pie, 

 with a gob of white, white ice cream on top of it,    

 and I eat it— 

 

 Slowly. And while certainly 

 they are laughing at me, and all around me is racket    

 of these cats not making it, I make it 

 

 in my wicker basket. 

By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger

I got The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1975 – 2005 for Christmas, 2025. I had read his Collected Poem: 1945 – 1975 years ago, and I thought I would read my Christmas gift to help me prepare for his centennial. The first poem begins by quoting K. C. and the Sunshine Band:  

“That’s the way 

(that’s the way 

I like it 

(I like it” 

Up until the first half of ninth grade I tended to wear button down shirts. Midway through ninth grade my mom took me to a t-shirt store where I got a Pink Floyd t-shirt and a K. C. and the Sunshine Band t-shirt. I had that Pink Floyd shirt on when I took the picture for my college ID two and a half years later. 

I first heard of Robert Creeley in the early 1980’s because of the Steve Swallow album of setting of Creeley’s poetry Home. 

Still majoring in math at Arizona State in 1984. I signed up a contemporary American poetry class, excited that the textbook included Creeley. By the end of the semester I had done my paper for that class on Creeley, and I had changed my major to English. 

In 1985 I graduated from college and I went to a celebration of Ezra Pound’s centennial at the University of Maine, Orono, where I met Creeley and Allen Ginsburg and others. I told Creeley I kept my pot in a wicker basket in his honor. He told me, “Don’t get caught.” 

Over the years Creeley taught me how to write as well as how to read so many poets: Whitman, Pound, Bunting, etc. In my fifties I became obsessed with Louis Zukofsky, and Creeley’s writing gave me entry into Zukofsky’s world.  

Thank you, Mr. Creeley.  

 

Robert Creeley and Eric Wagner in 1985.