A Wicker Basket

Robert Creeley’s poem walks a classic lyric line between particularity and universality, communicating the poet’s specific experiences even as it also communicates a means of being in the world available to all (“So that’s you, man / or me” [Lines 9-10]). However, even with the details of his night vacillating between the particular (“old friend Liz,” “door of her cadillac [sic]” [Lines 16, 17]) and the general (“the time when it’s later,” “the street like a night, / any night” [Lines 1, 13-14]), the poem never wavers from its specifically American identity.

In part, Creeley locates his readers in America by using peculiarly American lingo: in this case, the Bohemian/hepster 1950s youth slang like “these cats not making it” (Line 27) or “There are very huge stars, man, in the sky” (Line 21). Creeley also communicates a specifically American attitude which is reinforced by the values of the subculture which his use of slang invokes. The languid, intoxicated, carefree attitude of the 1950s proto-hippies (e.g., Bohemians, hepsters, hepcats, beatniks, etc.) invoked in the poem is inherently dependent on the vast, wide open spaces of America typified by the open road. Creeley even invokes the “street like a night” (Line 13), alluding to the possibilities of space which have long characterized the American imagination.