Robert Creeley’s Unsettling Poem “Kore”

Where are you leading me now?

Image: Persephone/Kore, c. 480-460 B.C., Newracc, CC

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) is a poet in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams; his poems and his lines are short and his meanings are gnomic. It seems like his work should be easy to comprehend or get your head around since each poem is so small. But the closer you look at it the more it slips away, like some sort of subatomic Schrödinger’s Sphinx.

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A typically obscure verse, and one of Creeley’s more famous, is “Kore,” published in his 1962 volume For Love. The title “Kore,” is an alternate name for Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the Greek god of the Harvest. Kore/Persephone was abducted by Hades, the God of the underworld, she ends up staying in the land of the dead for half of each year.

The myth wa originally an explanation for the passing of the seasons—Demeter lets the earth fall fallow in winter, when Kore is in the underworld) Modern writers have tended to see it as a story about sexual violence, trauma, and mother’s love.  One of Rita Dove’s poems on Persephone, for example, emphasizes how the moment of terror breaks through everyday life, as Hades’ carriage broke from the ground. “This is how easily the pit/opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.”

There’s hints of this violence in Creeley’s version too, but his approach is considerably more abstract, distant, and mysterious than Dove’s.

Kore

As I was walking
  I came upon
chance walking
  the same road upon.

As I sat down
  by chance to move
later
  if and as I might,

light the wood was,
  light and green,
and what I saw
  before I had not seen.

It was a lady
  accompanied
by goat men
  leading her.

Her hair held earth.
  Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
  made her move.

"O love,
  where are you
leading
me now?"

Creeley’s short, enjambed lines and compacted, odd syntax makes the poem’s voice seem strange and broken, like it is being generated by some chthonic AI that doesn’t precisely understand how language works. In the first stanzas, the narrator sounds like he (Creeley? Hades?) or she (Kore? Demeter?) is being manipulated by fate and/or by grammar. “I came upon/chance walking/the same road upon”; “As I sat down/by chance to move/later.” Is the narrator doing things—walking, sitting— “by chance”? Or is chance an actual, semi-physical presence, moving the narrator here and there? Or, to put it another way, is the poem carefully formed to create meaning? Or is Creeley letting prepositions and rhyme (“if and as I might/light”) push him around the page?

The third stanza is a transition—a deliberately poetic interlude with trees and full end rhyme (“green…seen”) between the initial interrogation of self and the more openly mythical quatrains that follow. The narrator (who, again, we can’t identify) then sees a lady (probably Kore) led by “goat men.”

The image is uncanny, and suggests both sacrificial rituals and S&M. Kore (if that’s who this is) is debased, but she’s also presented as uncanny herself: “Her hair held earth/Her eyes were dark.” In the context of the original Persephone myth, Creeley’s evoking a range of interpretations—Kore, as Queen of the Underworld, is a symbol of death. She’s also, though, a victim of sexual violence. Or you could say that her victimization has stigmatized her (as victims are often stigmatized); she’s a figure of terror because she’s experienced terror.

The last stanza is in quotation marks, but again it’s not clear who is speaking. The most likely candidate is Kore/the lady. But the speaker could also be the goat-men, or the narrator (whoever the narrator is.)

The confusion here is thematic and almost certainly intentional. The quoted lines “O love/where are you/leading/ me now?” are a statement of lack of agency. The speaker (whoever it is) is not the speaker, in the sense that they are led, they know not where, by someone who is not themselves, just as the narrator in the first lines is led “by chance”. The short lines, broken almost at random, suggest the speaker staggering forward, being jerked along on that leash. Whoever is talking is pulled by someone or something through the poem, out of their selves.

Dove’s poem is about how an unexpected crisis can open onto an abyss of trauma; Hades’ violence derails Persephone’s life forever. Creeley, in contrast, sticks perhaps closer to the Greek’s understanding of the Gods as a kind of unaccountable, unpredictable fate. More he suggests that this fate not only affects what happens to you, but is the essence of who you are. There is no settled self or selves in Creeley’s poem—no narrator, no characters, no speaker. Chance, passion, the gods don’t just put obstacles in your path; they create your path, and the “you” that walks it. The poem’s inconsistent, herky-jerk journey—from allegory of fate to idyll to mythological gothic—replicates the herky-jerk blankness of the self, which is unknowable not because it is opaque, but because it is incoherent, without a core (a pun, perhaps, on the title?)

I do love Creeley’s poem, but it’s worth noting that it is built, at least to some degree, on a reading of the Persephone myth that is deaf to feminist interpretations at best and misogynist at worst. If that is Kore speaking at the end of the poem, she seems to be saying that her life has been pulled off course by “love”. There’s no engagement with the obvious contemporary reading of the Rape of Persephone as an act, not of love, but of horrific sexual violence.

Creeley’s work in general isn’t consistently sexist like, for example, that of Yeats. But Creeley’s poems about the collapse of his first two marriages do sometimes dabble in unfortunate gender stereotypes. “Kore” is a poem that dramatizes the ways in which people are not selves, but impulses and discourses. The discourse of misogyny, like the goat men, may be leading Creeley too.