If I Were Writing This

"Robert Creeley has created a noble life body of poetry that extends the work of predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson and that provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."--Allen Ginsberg
"If I were writing this" was the last book of poems completed by Robert Creeley and published during his lifetime (New Directions, 2003). The words that he wrote to describe this book are oddly prophetic: "Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actual--each day another--until there is no more. These poems have been my company, my solace, my feelings, my heart. When they cannot speak it will all be silence." Though Creeley died in 2005, his poems are not silent--they vibrantly continue to embrace life while acknowledging, with no self-pity, the inevitability of death. The message (as he always ended his letters) is "Onward!"