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Have you ever been a passenger in a car where a friend gets so
carried away by what he’s telling you that he starts driving
erratically, and you are so concerned for your safety that you feel
compelled to tell him to slow down or stay in his lane? If so,
Robert Creeley’s poem will strike a nerve.
In a short story you would know in detail who the friend is, where
he and the driver are going, what each of them says, maybe even
what they are thinking. Readers would explicitly experience the
passenger’s nervousness, turning to outright fear as his friend
almost runs off the road or veers towards and almost hits the car
next to them. The passenger would very likely shout words not
unlike those that end Creeley’s poem: “Look out, John, or Bill, or
Lois! Pay attention. Let’s not get in an accident.” Some stories
might even end with a car crash and its aftermath.
The story could be two or three or twenty pages long. Creeley,
however, is writing poetry. He wants us to experience the
essential dynamic at the heart of all such infinitely variable,
always dangerous driving situations. Amazingly, it only takes this
witty, inventive poet 53 words in 12 short lines to accomplish his
goal.
Aristotle said poems should begin in medias res, in the middle of
things. Creeley’s driver quickly puts us inside the car with his
friend in the middle of their journey.
Notice, however, that his opening line “
As I sd to my / friend
”
is addressed not to his friend, but to someone else, sometime after
the drive he chronicles took place. “As I said” lets us know that he
is not just in the middle of a drive but in the middle of a one-sided
“conversation”; that he is exemplifying some statement or
observation that precedes his opening line. Though we feel that
we are with him and his friend in the car, we could be anywhere
but there—at his home or a bar, possibly even in the much bigger
car he said he wanted to buy, with him driving even more
erratically.
Notice also that the words in the final stanza (
Drive he sd, for /
christ’s sake look / out where yr going
) erupt with such force
that we almost feel that the passenger is saying them in real time,
but they are actually words from the past being quoted by the
driver. That fact is reinforced by his
sd for said and
yr for your,
plus his odd, line hopping hyphenation
sur- rounds and
substitution of an ampersand
&
for its conjunction. Such
abbreviations are part of our driver’s idiosyncratic lingo, so are
unlikely to be the passenger’s.
But hold on. Are we listening to someone talking to us or reading
something he has written? His abbreviations only make sense if
we are reading a text rather than hearing him speak. Abbreviating said to
sd
and your to
yr
will cut the words in half space-wise,
but a speaker will still have to expand them back to said and your
when reading the text out loud. That, in fact, is what we do
mentally or orally when we create the poem in our imaginations.
Creeley’ is, of course, having it both ways. He is creating a fictional
driver talking to a fictional passenger at the same time that he is
playing with language to create a distinctly witty and original
poem for his readers. The abbreviations clarify that double
existence.
As for our driver, he admits that he spoke to his friend, not to say
something interesting, compelling, or important, but simply
because I am / always talking
. His hilarious compulsion to
tell us that John is not his friend’s real name suggests that he is
afraid that John
might throw us offtrack in our attempt to
identify his friend; that he has substituted the name John to spare
his friend the notoriety or harassment it might cause him had he
divulged his “real” name. (Bob, perhaps, or Tom, or Bill?)
We are being treated to the wild language of a man with a
machine-gun mouth who simply rattles on without any concern
for those who must listen to him. Then suddenly, we get
something to chew on with his ominous revelation that
the
darkness sur- / rounds us
. Taken literally, we now know that
we are inside the car at night and may be in danger.
Metaphorically, we are in spiritual darkness, in a world not unlike
that of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” where “Things fall apart” and
“The center cannot not hold.” The melodramatic tone with which
our driver springs those heavy implications on us, however, does
not encourage us to take him seriously. The absurd non-sequitur
that follows—what / can we do against it, / or else, shall we
& / why not, buy a goddamn big car
—assures us that Creeley
is not impressed by his driver’s pseudo-angst. (Nor do I feel, as
some critics do, that he is criticizing the rise of consumerism in
America.)
I Know a Man is a satiric poem about the importance of resisting
the temptation to disassociate oneself from reality. Like many
comic figures in literature—Moliere’s Tartuffe or Misanthrope,
Jaques in As You Like It, Willy in “Holy Willy’s Prayer,” and, most
archetypically, that tilter at windmills, Don Quixote, our driver is
a figure of fun whose absurdities entertain us, at the same time
that they offer a serious warning.
Creeley’s poem was first published in 1955. His driver’s jazzy,
disorganized, fragmented language sounds like a parody of the
affected hipster lingo of that era. He is so consumed by his desire
to be “always talking” that he cannot pay attention to what is
going on around him. His oscillating, obfuscatory language
provides a linguistic metaphor for someone who is driving “all
over the road” mentally; weaving back and forth, speeding up and
slowing down, crossing lanes syntactically and grammatically.
Something happens between the third and final stanza. Although
Creeley is careful to spell it out, we know our driver has done
something to alarm his friend. Though only quoted, the wisdom
voice that erupts to end the poem speaks to us forcefully because
we identify, not with the blithely fragmentary and disconnected
language of the driver, but with the brutally honest and concise
language of his worried passenger.
That voice shatters our driver’s rhetoric, insisting that he stop
talking about buying a car in favor of being in one; that he break
out of the word salad world he’s creating and direct his attention
to what actually sur-rounds
him.
Not that our driver has learned anything from his friend’s
admonition. He is merely repeating his words. They are just more
verbiage to spew at the imaginary void. He may be reciting them
to us in a new vehicle, providing more dangerous horsepower for
himself and anyone unlucky enough to be a passenger in his
goddamn big car
.
Although easy to miss, there’s a third voice in this poem, the voice
behind its title. “I Know a Man” is an observation about what is
going on inside the poem that can only be coming from the Poet.
The words of Creeley’s title are usually followed by who did this
or that. When I asked AI if he knew other poems or stories that
begin with Creeley’s title, he answered:
I know a man is a classic storytelling trope, especially in oral
traditions and anecdotal literature. For example: In oral
storytelling or jokes, as in: “I know a man who once tried to
outwit a fox…” In folktales and parables, this opening often
introduces a character with a peculiar flaw or extraordinary
trait.
Much of Creeley’s brilliance depends on his leaving crucial
matters offstage for us to surmise so we can be active participants
in creating the poem. I believe that if we try to imagine the words
that might plausibly follow his title we’d come up with something
like this:
“I Know a Man who never holds his tongue, must always be
babbling, dominating every conversation, with very little sense
and no regard for his listeners. I Know a Man who does not
live in the real world and as a result is dangerous both to
himself and others. Take the advice of the passenger in his car
and try not to behave like a fool. Your life may depend on it.”
Of course we don’t need to say or think any of that, although we intuitively feel all of it when we read the poem a second time.
Robert Creeley’s title lets us know that we are not simply
experiencing the mindset of a specific individual but rather an
archetypal human being. The next time you are at a restaurant
where there are six people at a table near you and one of them,
who is much louder than the others, is responsible for 75% of the
“conversation,” just say to yourself:
the darkness sur-rounds
us.
Or if there’s a loving couple at the next table, who barely say a
word to each other, their attention almost wholly devoted to
whatever is happening on their phones, until it comes time to pay
the waiter (with their phones) and depart? Pray that as they get
into their goddamn big car
or SUV they will look out where
they’re going
as they (hopefully) drive,
all the way home.
All images courtesy of ChatGPT’s AI
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