Robert Creeley isn’t a New York School poet; he’s generally associated with the Black Mountain poets or the Beats. His work is inward-turned, psychological—a poetry of elliptical depths in contrast to the New York School’s poetry of elliptical surfaces.
Nonetheless, Creeley was friends with John Ashbery—they studied at Harvard together—and the men admired each other’s work. Given that, I think it’s reasonable to see at least occasional flashes of influence, or at least nods of acknowledgement, in Creeley’s writing.
One Creeley poem that feels to me like it’s thinking about, or thinking near, the New York school style is “Damon & Pythias,” from his famous 1962 collection For Love.
Damon & Pythias
When he got into bed,
he was dead.
Oh god, god, god, he said.
She watched him take off his shoes
and kneeled there
to look for the change which had fallen
out of his pocket.
Old Mr. Jones
whom nobody loves
went to market for it,
and almost found it
under a table,
but by that time was unable.
And the other day two men,
who had been known as friends,
were said to be living together again.
Compare this to John Ashbery’s gestures towards sexual revelation (“Once I let a guy blow me./I kind of backed away from the experience./Now years later I think of it/Without emotion.”) and you can see why Creely and Ashbery aren’t generally grouped together. Ashbery puts his “confession” in quotation marks, treating it as a trope to contemplate, chuckle at, and set aside (“Probably if the circumstances were right/it could happen again, but I don’t know,/I just have other things to think about.”).
In contrast, Creeley’s poem uses its nursery rhyme clang and double entendre to point to an unsettlingly eerie, dream-like sense of shame, self-loathing and impotence. The man who gets into bed is “dead,” which suggests physical death, spiritual death, and inability to perform. The references to money (“the change which had fallen”; “went to market for it,”) suggest that he may be in bed with a sex worker, or that he sees the relationship as transactional. Either way, the man appears debased; he’s someone “whom nobody loves,” and he kneels, scrabbling under the bed for change, taking god’s name in vain as he orgasms or, alternately, as he doesn’t.
The sordid scene takes a queer turn (in various senses) in the final three lines, where Creeley turns away from the failed heterosexual heterosexing to “two men…who had been known as friends.” This points to the Damon and Pythias of the title—Greek heroes who were such close friends that they risked their lives for each other.
There are a couple ways to read this abrupt jump out of a women’s bed and into a male/male household. One is to put it in the context of Creeley’s not always especially enlightened gender politics. Rachel Blau DuPlessis in her 2012 study Purple Passages points out that Creeley often “ascribes male gender to experiment and innovation,” framing women as a dreary domestic anchor on male avant-garde questing—“psychic baggage that one must cast off.”
From that perspective, “Damon & Pythias” contrasts a grimy, dull heterosexual psychic milieu of capitalism and disempowerment with an all-male homosocial utopia of calm and uplifting amity. It’s not an accident that the utopia is classical and presented as an alternative to the Christian trinitarian (“god, god, god”) and Freudian complications of sex, sin, and shame. To escape women is, supposedly, to escape the bland conservatism of the Church and the bland conservatism of the market for an unstained ideal of purer aesthetics and art.
Alternately, it’s possible to see the shift in the last lines of the poem as a transition not (just) of gender, but of style. The last three lines (with their ending rhymes) have a more casual, distanced feel; the hammering, immediate, on the scene single syllable banging of “When he got into bed/he was dead” transitions to a more distanced narrative. At the conclusion, you no longer see the scene directly, but only hear about it from a third party (“who had been known as friends/were said to be living together again.”) The final line of 11 syllables is the longest in the poem, and the last three words are all multi-syllabic; there’s no other example in the poem of even two multi-syllabic words following each other.
Creeley’s compacted style of tight inner space opens out at the end into a more cosmopolitan, more chatty diction—one which is a closer approximation to the relaxed, gossipy style of New York School poets like Ashbery or Schuyler.
Ashbery and Schuyler (and Frank O’Hara) were also, not coincidentally gay, and Damon and Pythias were often seen as classical exemplars in gay subcultures. The poetic jump—which itself recalls Ashbery’s collage-like shifts in tone, context, and topic—could be interpreted as a move not (just) from female to male, but from heterosexual to queer.
In that case the alternative to the dreary convention of the market is a community that patriarchal capitalism in the 1960s had viciously marginalized. The New York school, in this reading, provides a distanced deflation of the agonized heterosexual confessional drama of being a man, offering Creeley (who was heterosexual) a different vantage and a different aesthetic dream.
Is this what Creeley was thinking about when he wrote the poem, or when he went off on that particular tangent in those final three lines? There isn’t any way to know for sure. I think that what this poem shows in part, though, is that the New York school wasn’t just an approach to writing poems, but an approach to reading them.
You can read “Damon & Pythias” as a confession about Creeley’s sexual concerns or issues; you can read it as an expression of his thoughts on gender and sex. But there’s also a more New York School style approach to the poem in which you can look at the surface of the poem—at the way in which it juxtaposes different kinds of rhetoric to surprise you, make you laugh, make you think about how certain kinds of selves and identities are created by, and disappear into, certain kinds of language or images or styles. Creeley isn’t a New York School poet. But maybe Damon and Pythias are, depending on how they are said.