20 pages • 40 minutes read
For Love
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Background
Historical Context
Although Robert Creeley would publish more than 60 titles across five decades, “For Love” reflects its own particular historical period, the 1950s, and specifically two influences: the Beat poets and jazz. For Creeley, these contexts are intimately related. Creeley spoke often of his fascination with the experimental rhythms of jazz and how the music of the late 1940s and early 1950s, particularly Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and singers such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, gave him the vocabulary for his own explorations of rhythm. In exploring rhythm, which historically had been realized in poetry through expected rhythmic patterns and then provided its sonic complement with rhymes, Creeley found that words, like notes of music, can be driven not by the da-dum-da-dum-da-dum regularity of beat but rather by the sinewy suggestions of tempo. Poetry could be measured not by pre-established metrics but rather by the ear, intuitively, shifting and changing as the poem itself unfolds. Poetry, then, was designed to be heard, to be recited. Poetry was more a sonic experience than a thematic argument. Poetry was not about metaphors or symbols or themes. Poetry was about lines of words cut to time.
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