What to Look for When Buying Jasmine

When you source your jasmine flowers, there are some key indicators of quality and freshness to look out for:

• Tightly closed buds – Avoid flowers that are already open and blooming; tighter buds last longer.
• Bright white petals – Jasmine blooms should be bright, pure white. Yellowing or wilting suggests age.
• Intact blooms – Flowers should be intact on the stem, not crushed or damaged.
• Ample fragrance – Fresh jasmine is highly fragrant. Give flowers a sniff to check aroma.
• No browning – Leaves and buds should be vibrant green with no browning.
• Good stem length – Longer stems allow more flexibility for arranging and decorating.
• Proper storage – Seller should store flowers chilled and in water to maintain freshness.

Topics For Further Study

• In the 1950s a group of young poets became known as the Beat poets, the harbingers of the Beat Generation. Do research on this group, identify four key participants, and locate at least one characteristic poem from each writer. What do all these poets have in common, and how are their poetic voices distinctive?
• Two influential creative movements of the period from 1950 to 1965 were abstract expressionism and jazz. Locate an art print of an abstract expressionist such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko and find a recording of jazz that you think complements the work of art. Then choose a poem by Creeley or Kerouac or Snyder, or another poet who was writing in that time, and perform the poem in front of the art, with jazz playing in the background.
• Poetry festivals are a relatively recent phenomenon. Using the Internet, try to locate as many poetry festivals as you can. Do not limit yourself to the United States; other festivals occur in Britain and Australia, for instance. Do these festivals identify featured poets? Who are the poets who are identified as special guests? Try to locate poems by these poets.
• Music and poetry have an ancient connection. The word “lyric,” for example, is derived from the early musical instrument called the lyre. Make a personal compilation of songs whose words can stand alone as poetry. Write up the words and try to analyze them as poetry. What literary techniques can you find?
• Poetry readings occur frequently in many locations, including book stores, coffee houses, and other smoke- and alcohol-free environments. Try to attend at least four different readings at different venues if possible. Keep a record of the kinds of poems you hear. What are the subjects and techniques? Do any of them seem especially effective to you? Summarize your results in a brief written evaluation.
• One way to encounter poets for the first time is to read anthologies. Go to a library or a book store and spend some time looking through a collection of work by different poets. What poets appeal to you? Using reference works or the Internet, research their lives and careers.

This is a poem that ends up inside the poets (or is it the readers?) head. In the middle of the poem we find a shift from the immediate occasion of the work, which is a vision of dusk, presumably a winter dusk seen through a window, to a series of meditations and memories. At the end of the fifth line Creeley introduces an unpunctuated question: “is it as / ever this plate of apparent life / makes all sit patient …” Here he ties the present to the recurring past. He also seems to evoke a memory from childhood, sitting patient and waiting for supper to be served. This memory is more likely from childhood than from adulthood in that children are often hungry and impatient to be served, whereas adults are more in control of the food and the supper ritual. He also uses words such as “chute” and “sled,” which seem to allude to a New England childhood. The chute is a coal chute, and coal was often burned to heat buildings seventy years ago, and of course the sled is only used in a snowy climate. The sled is an apparatus of childish pleasure, and Creeley most likely has a particular hill in mind and a particular dark field from his childhood, though he does not identify any of them for his readers. Finally comes supper, but this is not a supper awaiting the poet in the present; rather, it is a memory of “supper here left years behind.” And by the last lines of his poem, the poet makes it extremely obvious that he has gone back into memory when he concludes by saying, “patient in mind remembers the time.”

It is important to remember that this is a poem by a man approaching old age. Like many modernist writers, Creeley does not take comfort in the promises of traditional religion; there is no hope of heaven or redemption in his work. Death induces anxiety and insecurity for him. Anxiety is not totally negative, however, if it sharpens perceptions and leads to a cherishing of all the mundane events of daily life. For a poet who abhors simile, this work nevertheless employs something similar, a metaphor, which is an implied comparison between two dissimilar things. The fading light of the title can be compared to the waning life force of any person. Always one to eschew melodrama, Creeley makes his poem impersonal and universal. Everyone is fated to die. Death is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both the most personal and the most impersonal of fates. The impersonality of this poem, its uncertainty, and its lapse into early memory all find a culmination in the poems overriding existential concern, which is the poets confrontation with anxiety and his own mortality.

At first the diction of the poem seems unremarkable. There are no odd, unusual, or difficult words. A careless reader might not even think of noticing the diction, but that would be a mistake. Creeley has very consciously picked out words that do not call attention to themselves. There has long been a struggle in American writing between stylists who utilize uncommon diction and unusual ry and those, like Creeley, who try to use common speech. This struggle goes back centuries, hearkening back to the English Civil War and the elaborate and erudite poetry of the cavaliers on the one hand, and the sturdy and direct Puritan texts on the other. Creeley has enlisted the banner of plain speech and straightforward expression.

The poet makes extensive use of the device of enjambment in this poem. Enjambment is the technique of continuing the sense of a line forward into the next one. It is to be contrasted with the endstopped lines that are characteristic of much metered and formal poetry. In this poem the last word of every line, except for the last, leads the reader on into the subsequent line. There is no reason to pause at the end of each line, at least no reason that would lead to a comprehensible and natural reading of the poem. It is very apparent that Creeley deliberately enjambs each line in order to produce poetic effects. The first effect is that of a breathless tumbling into the s of the following lines. A second effect is to isolate subject from verb and to shatter phrases, isolating words in space at the end of the lines. In most enjambed poems, the technique makes for a more fluid and natural oral interpretation, but here the enjambment does just the opposite, calling attention to the artifice of the work.

Many poems do not resolve themselves until their concluding lines. This phenomenon is true of Shakespearean sonnets as well as this poem. What Creeley does that is distinctive here is to present a long “sentence” that is not a conventional sentence at all. Though expressed in common words, and containing elements of a sentence such as multiple verbs and associated phrases and clauses, and though it does hang together to make a comprehensible sequence of thoughts, it is not a prosaic expression, but a poem that uses the rules of language for an unconventional purpose. It is not until the very last phrase, “remembers the time,” that the reader can see what the first line signifies, that the fading light of the title triggers a memory of supper years before. The poet suspends the syntax in several ways, using enjambment, lack of conventional punctuation, and omission of words that would help clarify the meaning, all to postpone the readers comprehension of his poem until the very last line. This syntactic suspension makes the poem challenging to interpret.

When Creeley published “Fading Light” in 1988, he was entering a phase of his career as a distinguished elder statesman of American poetry. Having gone to India during the 1940s, he had been associated with important creative writers at Black Mountain College, and later with the Beat poets. By the time he published this poem he, along with other formerly radical members of his generation, had become converted into fixtures of the poetic establishment. It is a familiar progression, from radical to tenured and respected professor, but by the late 1980s he, along with such luminaries as his old friends Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, had found themselves embraced by an establishment they had once opposed.

During the early days of Creeleys career, modernist formalism, epitomized by the work of W. H. Auden and T. S. Eliot, was at the center of American academic poetry. Things started changing rapidly during the late 1950s with the rise of confessional poets such as Robert Lowell, as well as the emergence of Creeleys Beat friends. The 1960s were anarchic in many ways. Frequently poets felt obliged to take political stances, but Creeley, though he sympathized with the anti–Vietnam War activists, did not employ his poetry as a political tool. By the 1980s, as this poem was written, the American poetry scene had fragmented into multiple segments, each with its own audience, purposes, publications, and venues.

One of the trends in American poetry when Creeley wrote this poem was the rise of a new type of academic poetry. It is true in some sense that much poetry has been academic, in that poets often are drawn to teaching, and good poets are sometimes rewarded with teaching positions at colleges, though William Carlos Williams was a practicing physician and Wallace Stevens had been a corporate attorney. But by the 1980s, the proliferation of creative writing programs in universities around the country had led to the rise of what poet Albert Goldbarth called “po-biz,” in which recipients of graduate degrees in creative writing wrote books of poetry, reviewed the books of others in similar programs, and were rewarded with academic jobs and the occasional monetary prize. The increasingly academic direction of poetry coincided with a dramatic fall-off in the size of the poetry-reading public, as poets began to write primarily for small specialized audiences. Creeley had participated in the prototype of the master of fine arts programs back in his years at Black Mountain College. Though that school did not survive long, subsequent generations of aspiring poets went in the academic direction.

Another trend in the late 1980s was a countercurrent in poetry, the rise of a new formalism. Poetic tastes had veered from popular tastes; rhyme and meter seemed to have fallen out of favor sometime before the death of Robert Frost. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s free verse became the dominant form of poetry. Some of it could be superb, as Sylvia Plath at her best, but as poetry became easier to compose, it also could tend toward sentimentality, slackness, and narcissism. A number of poets returned to formal structures with new enthusiasm. Poets as different as Derek Walcott, Dana Gioia, Anne Stevenson, Donald Justice, and Seamus Heaney published new work in The Formalist, The New Criterion, and other places. A number of important anthologies of formalist verse were published, and displayed a far different aesthetic intent than does most of Creeleys work.

Finally, at the time “Fading Light” was published, other poets initiated still other movements in American poetry. The first slam poets came on the scene. Slam poetry is a competitive poetry event in which audience members judge poetic performances by assigning scores to them, and these scores are added and tabulated much like the scores in figure skating or Olympic diving. In a typical slam poetry night, several poets pay entry fees and some advance to second or third rounds, and at the end of an evening a winner is announced. Many of the successful performances turned out to be comic or dramatic, with expressions of outrage at sexual, racial, or social oppression a staple of the slam scene. Around the same time, poetry festivals sprang up. In 1986 the Geraldine R. Dodge Festival began. It is a juried festival, in which organizers invite distinguished poets to give readings and workshops in a festive environment of public performance. Other festivals, such as the Austin International Poetry Festival in Texas, are non-juried, and provide multiple stages and microphones to all participants. Both types of festivals try to return poetry to its origins in the spoken word and in performance. What all these movements try to do is to take poetry off the printed page and to showcase it for listeners.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Creeley found himself securely placed among the grand elder statesmen of American poetry. His Bollingen and Lannan awards cemented his critical reception. Yet not all critics are impressed by the kind of poetry his career presents. Writing in an article on Creeleys mentor William Carlos Williams, Christopher MacGowan writes in The Columbia History of American Poetry that “The whole line of American poetry to which Williams is such an important figure, the line that includes such figures as Olson and Creeley, comes under similar attack from time to time.” A great deal has been written about him in the last fifty years, both positive and negative. Carol Muske Dukes has said that “some critics find that he is occasionally hyper-oblique, self-consciously cute, and for all his brevity, overwrought.” She quotes critic John Simon who said, “There are two things to be said about Creeleys poems: They are short; they are not short enough.”

Other critics are more charitable. Don Byrd wrote that “When Creeleys poetry is dull, as it sometimes is, it is the dullness of the real, and when it is exciting, as it often is, it is the excitement of the real.” Noting that Creeley began his career in rebellion against academic poets only to end up as an academic himself, Byrd distinguishes between academic and underground poets by their different approaches to poetry. “The academic poets, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, write writing as it is prepared: Creeley writes writing as it is written.” Writing in 1996, Bill Piper remarks on Creeleys ability to avoid self-repetition when he states that, “Unlike many artists who reach a stride and remain with it, often becoming stale, he seems to diversify, and his work gains in interest with his deepening experience.”

In her review of Windows, the collection in which “Fading Light” was originally published, Penny Kaganoff relates the books title to its contents: “these carefully honed poems themselves function as frames through which Creeley measures with mature insight and inventiveness the limits of reality and existence.” Numerous critics have remarked on the immediacy and directness of Creeleys poetry, as does Terry R. Bacon, who declares, “Creeleys perceptions are epiphanies: glimpses of moments in the life situation that are brought into sharp focus through the high energy transference that is presumed to occur.” In a 2002 review of Just in Time, Stephen Whited says, “The authors comforting, bebop inner voice chatters away insistently, harmonizing and connecting moment with moment, like a Charlie Parker solo.” Remarking on the development of themes in Creeleys work, Whited goes on to note, “Aging has changed the focus of the familiar subjects to whom the seventy-five-year-old Creeley continuously returns; the pleasant influence of narrative and memory has been more evident in his work since the mid-80s.” Regardless of their enjoyment of his austere and oblique poetry, critics agree that Creeley has been a major influence on many younger poets and a significant presence in late twentieth-century American poetry.

Pool is a published poet and reviewer and a teacher of high school English. In this essay, Pool discusses elements of formal structure in Creeleys poem.

A young or inexperienced reader of poetry might well be perplexed upon first encountering Robert Creeleys poem “Fading Light.” The poem lacks many of the features that are prominent in other poems. There is no rhyme and no meter, as in traditional verse, and yet the poem also lacks the colloquial familiarity of much contemporary free verse. Instead, the poem is difficult to grasp upon first reading, and even in subsequent perusals does not easily yield up its meaning and structures. Still, Creeley is regarded as a major poet, and as with many works by major writers, this poem reveals a structure that, while not obvious or simple, nevertheless connects the apparently chaotic lines and ry into a coherent whole.

Some critics believe that a poem can best be interpreted in isolation, that close reading of the words on the page will generate a sound understanding, that biography and literary history are extraneous to the comprehension of a poem. On the other hand, it seems undeniable that knowing about the history and circumstances of a poems composition adds to our appreciation. Creeley began his writing shortly after World War II. He became associated in the early 1950s with a group of writers and artists at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, an avant-garde experimental school where Creeley worked with the man who most influenced his early work, Charles Olson. There he also met Jackson Pollock and other pioneers of abstract expressionism in art. Like the abstract expressionists, Creeley faced the problem of form. He rejected the traditional verse forms that were the fashion of his time, striking out for a different modernist style. Serious art makes substantial demands on its creators; slackness and laziness are constant temptations when one has thrown over the old rules and old canons of style. Arthur Ford has stated that Creeley often quoted Pollocks proclamation: “When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing.” As Ford also explains, “The form that a poem takes never precedes the poem itself but rather comes from the demands of the poem as it is in the process of being uttered.” Given this aesthetic, what are the formal demands of “Fading Light,” and how does Creeley meet them?

In striving for an alternative way of making poems, Creeley was influenced by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, but most especially by Charles Olson. Olson devised a theory of “projective verse” in which the determining factor of line length is the poets breath. Creeley was influenced by the way that Williams would sprinkle words vertically down the page in very short lines. He instinctively believed that the poet should pause momentarily at the end of each line, emphasizing and highlighting it. Ironically, in hearing recordings of Williams, Creeley was struck by the way the older poet did not read his work that way. Nevertheless, Creeley had picked up an important formal technique by his creative misreading. He always pauses a bit at the end of each line. As he said in an interview with Charles Bernstein, “I read the breaks. To me, like percussive or contrapuntal agencies, they give me a chance to get a syncopation into the classic emptiness….” By “contra puntal,” he refers to the technique in music of having two independent but harmonically related melodies playing together. He further says, “I mean, it gives me, not drumming precisely, but its a rhythm of that character.” It is the counterpoint of end-stopped lines played off against the syntactic enjambment of the meaning that provides the most important structure of this challenging poem.

All the lines end without completing a thought; a reader cannot pause and make sense. The meaning of the lines compels the reader to keep on going until there is a comprehensible place to pause. Creeley makes the task more difficult by refusing to provide any punctuation except for a period at the very end, as though this poem were one coherent sentence. The pauses make the poem sound strange. Nobody talks that way; language is not being used for its accustomed purposes; what readers encounter is a poem with everyday words arranged in a puzzling rhythm and expressing thoughts that do not make immediate sense. Thom Gunn, the critic and poet, assures readers that Creeley always reads the line breaks as little silences. Creeley knows full well that he emphasizes words such as “it” and “as” and “on” and “for.” None of these words allow the reader to pause, but since readers are expected to pause, readers experience the rhythm of voice and silence in counterpoint to the flow of phrases and s in the poem.

Besides setting up a contrapuntal struggle between sound and sense, Creeleys lines also echo and rhyme words in the lines. In the Bernstein interview, talking about poems from the same collection that includes “Fading Light,” the poet says about his line breaks, “Its also an agency for a lot of half-rhyming or accidental echoing that I really enjoy. Its sort of like water sloshing into a pan … Lapping at the edges.” As the poem concludes it accelerates almost like a sled reaching the bottom of a hill.

The repetition of “down” within, at the beginning, and at the end of only two lines emphasizes the motion of the poem and sets up a melody of repeated sounds. Likewise, “time,” “behind,” “mind,” and “time” set up a repeated rhyming structure in an otherwise unrhymed poem. If these are what Creeley calls “accidental echoing,” they are certainly improvised melodies that he sets up in counterpoint to his strange and halting rhythm. Ford has said about Creeleys poems that

While there is indeed a contrapuntal texture of rhyme and near rhyme in this poem, the most important structure is that provided by syntax. Due to the enjambed lines and the lack of punctuation, it is not immediately apparent where phrases and clauses begin and end, except that they evidently never end at the conclusion of a line. The reader has to determine where to pause within the lines to make the poem meaningful. If the poem were to prove meaningless after all the effort it demands, critical readers would react negatively. Fortunately, the poem can be read in ways in which there are meaningful s and ideas. The poem begins with a reference to a light that seems to shift as it fades. This is followed by musing about the world, and an elliptical question, “is it as / ever …” Then halfway through the poem Creeley introduces ry of sitting “patient” (not patiently) followed by the accelerating phrases and s of a sled plunging down “beyond sight.” As Gunn remarks, “The result is a kind of eloquent stammering; there is a sense of small persistent difficulties all right, but of each being overcome in turn, while it occurs—the voice hesitates and then plunges forward.” Far from being left beyond the poems field of vision, however, readers are brought back to “supper here left years behind” and a repeated motif of “waits / patient in mind” and, in a parallel rhythmic vein, “remembers the time.”

The key to the poem is its last word. Creeley has said about his work that, “Nothing is permitted to quite end, or stop, until the final word of the poem.” The poem is a meditation on time, on times passage, on the endurance of the world, and resolves with a memory of time gone by. In baroque contrapuntal music, the disparate yet harmonious melodies must resolve themselves in the concluding bars. In Creeleys poem, the syntactical problems and the eloquently stammering line breaks resolve themselves in the announcement of the poems true theme: time. It is somewhat ironic that this poem should reflect a classical or baroque structure, given its deliberate understated diction and its refusal to fly away into theory or metaphor. The words are the most plainspoken imaginable, and the poet is one who early in his career turned away from verbal pyrotechnics, elevated diction, and erudite allusions. Indeed, as Tom Clark, writing in Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place, asserts “In the dialectical unfolding of literary history the moment of the common comes typically as an antidote to periods of over-refinement and baroque difficulty.”

Creeley began his career writing poems that were significantly different from those of W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Frost, only to find himself, late in life, perhaps without thinking about it, incorporating formal techniques akin to musical composition. Perhaps this reversion to formalism is less surprising than it might first appear. Ford notes that Creeley is more of a formalist than most readers realize.

fading is true while flowering is past,