Robert Creeley, Quintessential Postmodern American Poet

Abstract

It was Creeley, the quintessentially American poet, who introduced me to the term “occasion.” Though he was not conversant with the etymology, he deliberately used the word in the dislocating sense that Wallace Stevens used it in the resonant line “Poetry is the cry of its occasion”: a poetry that emanates, not from above, but from humanity’s existential encounter with the profane phenomena of the finite world. Only later, when I became conscious that I was using this word consistently, did I undertake a search into its etymological history. What I found was that “occidere,” the setting of the sun, an extension of cadere (to die) is the Latin word from which the English word “Occident” derives. Henceforth, this resonant word became an indispensable term of my critical and theoretical vocabulary because it expresses so resonantly the onto-political essence of Western civilization, not least, its Orientalism.