Intimate Extension in Robert Creeley's Open Field

Abstract:On the fifth of June in 1950, Robert Creeley wrote a short letter to "O," his mentor and compatriot poet Charles Olson, one of thousands of notes and letters to be eventually exchanged between them in their co-creation of an open field poetics…. Creeley laments the oversaturation of the term "form" with too many definitions—in this case, the conflation of W. H. Auden's "technical wonder" with his "form." "Form," Creeley says, "has now become so useless a term/that I blush to use it." What follows is his attempt to remake the term into something useful, though we can still see him blushing in his proposal of multiple definitions: "To make it clear: that form is never more than an extension of content. An enacted or possible 'stasis' for thought. Means to."