The American artist Barnett Newman (1905–70) produced a number of cast steel sculptures, among them Here II and Here III (1965/66). Here II comprises three rectangular poles on a rectangular plate, and Here III is a single rectangular pole, just over nine feet tall, on a plinth. Newman called these sculptures three-dimensional “zips.” A zip was his name for the single vertical lines of colour that distinguish well-known paintings such as Onement I (1948) where a roughly painted vertical stripe of glowing orange-red runs down the centre of a field of dark cadmium red. Newman once said that “The self, terrible and constant, is for me the subject matter of painting.”Footnote ¹ David Anfam argues that Newman's paintings “await our completion as we become the human focus in a rapport with radiance, darkness or varieties of balance.”Footnote ² The effect of paintings such as Onement I is to confront the viewer with what initially looks like fragmentation but turns out to promise wholeness.

Newman's paintings, then, are “about” presence and the present: how are we fully present to ourselves in the present moment? No wonder Newman used titles like Be, Day One, Now, Here and Right Here. As Yve-Alain Boise notes, a lot of Newman's titles are what linguists call “shifters,” words whose meaning changes depending on the position of the speaker.Footnote ³ Another way to describe this is to say that words like “now” and “here” are deictic; that is, orientational features of language which relate to the situation of utterance. Deixis encodes utterances with both the spatio-temporal context and subjective experience of the encoder. Deictic words manage content and indicate a context for their interpretation: “now” implies “then,” “here” implies “there.” So Newman's titles suggest that his paintings might be a type of utterance. Crucially, titles like Here and Now can be read as instructions about how to situate ourselves as spectators in the field of “here” or “now” that the painting creates. Anfam's idea of completion is perhaps not the whole story: it seems to be more a question of habitation or shared embodiment. Indeed, one wonders whether Newman's use of such titles signals attempts to forge a kind of community that transcends self and authorship. Such titles can be read as efforts to create a civic model of spectatorship wherein the “spectator” is released from the subordinate role to become interpreter of the very present moment designated by titles like Here and Now.

Newman's use of deictic titles is one of the more visible examples of a wider concern in the 1960s with the present moment and with how and where the self is present in it. Surveying the period 1945 to 1968 in Bomb Culture (1970), Jeff Nuttall argued that all American art and poetry of the period were “post-Hiroshima” and concerned with the idea of “The Moment, the psychopathic Now in which man was imprisoned when the future became improbable.”Footnote ⁴ “Psychopathic” is not used here pejoratively but descriptively to evoke the replacement of obligation and responsibility with a mixture of hedonism, indifference and fanaticism. In the context of deictics and shifters, the “now” described by Nuttall seems to have been floated free of any relationship with “then.”

The American poet Robert Creeley (1926–2005) appears briefly in Bomb Culture among a list of cool people “passing through London.”Footnote ⁵ It would be perfectly possible to make a selective reading of Creeley that portrays him as a poet of the counterculture. He has a poem called “On Acid” and another that proposes writing “a giggly ode about/motherfuckers – Oedipus – / or Lysergic Acid.” He uses the language of the times. “She turns me on – // There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,” he writes in “A Wicker Basket.” “Peace, brother, and sister, and/mother, and you guys,” he writes in “Heaven.”Footnote ⁶ His diction sounds, as people used to say, “spaced out.” But it is equally clear that Creeley was simultaneously a different type of poet. When he exhorts his lover, at the end of “The Rain,” to “Be wet/with a decent happiness” (207), he swerves from what sounds like crude suggestiveness to a form of address that could be located in any period of lyric from the sixteenth century onward. Something similar happens at the end of “Something” where the woman “shyly pissed. What/love might learn from such a sight” (281). In part, this can be read as an example of what Charles Altieri meant when he identified “many of Creeley's typical poetic strategies as attempts to wrench the formulas of ‘idle talk’ into authentic speech.”Footnote ⁷ The line break shows us Creeley performing that wrenching and makes us perform it too. As Marie Weinel notes, Creeley's poetry “considers language's capacity to impart meaning through the semantic movement of a sentence.”Footnote ⁸

At the same time, “Shyly pissed,” like “Be wet,” tells us that Creeley regards both language and the poem as a kind of event. Creeley said as much, remarking that, like Charles Olson, he wanted “to realise the potentiality and extension of words as a physical event in the world.”Footnote ⁹ Being wet – whether through sexual arousal or with tears of joy or sorrow – and urination are certainly physical events but the line breaks after “wet” and “What” also tell us something about what potentiality and extension might mean in practice. They figure the speaker as lost in the moment and then coming back to making a poem but, crucially, leaving the raw occasion for the poem rawly present within it. “What /” functions almost as “What the – ?” In fact, one thing that these two poems suggest is that if words have any use then it is as extensions of our physical presence in the world, of what might be called our “eventness.” And this “eventness” is concerned with acts of attention and with being called to attention. Indeed, these poems seem quite close to what Heidegger termed the call of the conscience and “conscience as the call of care.” It is a call that “comes from me and yet from beyond me.”Footnote ¹⁰ Creeley's line breaks mean that that “call” is experienced by both poet and reader as what Charles Bernstein identifies in his poetry generally as a process of “materializing the language” into “felt intensities … as waves of thought break into particles of sound.”Footnote ¹¹

Creeley's numerous uses of the word “here” give us a similarly strong sense of language as an event and of what sort of event it might be. In what follows, I want to examine a number of examples of this to see what it tells us about both lyric poetry and reflexivity. I shall concentrate on the Collected Poems 1945–1975 (up to and including Pieces) because it contains some of the more interesting uses of “here” and because space precludes an overview of Creeley's oeuvre. (The two-volume Collected Poems (2006) runs to over 1,300 pages.) The Collected Poems 1945–1975 contains five poems called “Here” and two called “Here Again,” and after only a hundred pages one has encountered at least eight uses of “here.”

Before moving on to discuss Creeley's poetry, we need to understand how “here” functions grammatically, deictically and poetically. Grammatically, “here” is a spatial adverb that can also function nominally. In “what is he doing here?” it is adverbial but in “get out of here” (i.e. this place) it is nominal. As these two examples make clear, the distinction is often a fine one. Used adverbially, “here,” like the temporal deictic “now,” can mark an important juncture, as in “here we can start to bring all the material together.” It can also be used to refer to the present state, and to describe a movement to or into this place, as in “bring it here.” Deictically, “here” functions, as we have already noted, to situate an utterance spatially, but this situation is more than a physical location. In the well-known Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” the protagonist's question “how did I get here?” refers to the whole life situation that he finds himself in. In the context of deixis and lyric poetry, Jonathan Culler has observed that words like “here” can both “force us to construct a fictional situation of utterance” and “force the reader to construct a meditative persona.”Footnote ¹² Deictic terms enable us to accept the production of something that is not “an empirical act of enunciation.”Footnote ¹³ As an aside, Frank O'Hara's famous realization in “Personism: A Manifesto” that “if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem” can be read as simultaneous recognition and rejection of the necessity of fictional situations for poetry.Footnote ¹⁴ To return to Culler, deictic terms are also connected with “the expectation of totality or coherence” that we bring to the lyric.Footnote ¹⁵

J. P. Denny's comparative work on spatial adverbs is also useful for understanding the many usages of “here.”Footnote ¹⁶ Denny compares “here” in English with the additional meanings made possible in both Kikuyu and Eskimo by the addition of prefixes or the use of case endings.Footnote ¹⁷ First, in both languages, “here” can have extended and non-extended meanings. So, for example, “here” in the room where I am typing this sentence would be non-extended while “here” in the sense of the district where I live is extended. This helps us to see that we use “here” in this way in English albeit without a changed form. Second, Kikuyu and Eskimo also allow for forms of spatial deictics which Denny terms “in field” and “out of field.” “In field” means “here” in the sense of something I can see and point to whereas of “out of field” might mean “here in England.” Finally, Denny notes that both languages allow for two different deictic fields: “speaker-centered” and “other-centered.”Footnote ¹⁸ This distinguishes between the normal I-centred use of “here” and the addressee's location. A speaker is also able to refer to a location established earlier which is not the situation of the present utterance.

It might be argued that we have travelled some way from poetry in English and from English usage. However, Ian Hunt's account of The Blindings (1993–4) by British sculptor, performance artist and poet Brian Catling suggests otherwise. The Blindings combines sculpted objects, installed texts, reading and writing in situ, and performance. Hunt reports,

Catling's “heres” are different in effect than the usual deictic projection that allows me to imagine myself in a time or a location at which I am not present. We would seem to have uses of “here” that, in Denny's terms, are blurring the distinctions between non-extended and extended, in and out of field, and speaker-centred and other-centred. If Hunt is correct about The Blindings producing the realm of the seeming, then that realm relies, at least in part, on a destabilizing of deictic categories. Indeed, in the context of Culler's discussion, Catling's “heres” seem to be doing much more than signalling fictionality or coherence. Reading them in conjunction with Culler's example poem for “here” – Ben Jonson's “On my first daughter,” which begins “Here lies to each her parents ruth” – suggests that “here” is a location from which the work is usually opened out, somehow enlarged, at the precise moment of signalling an absence.Footnote ²⁰ Hunt's discussion also draws attention to “here” as signalling a kind of liminal state. “Here” seems to describe, at best, a temporary stopping point. Just as importantly, Hunt's discussion suggests that spatial deixis involves psychological as well as physical distance; that, consequently, “being” may be intimately involved with the “realm … of the seeming.”

To return to Robert Creeley's poetry, the early poem “Return” certainly seems to question ideas about fictionality and coherence:

The poem itself offers little help in constructing a fictional situation of utterance – indeed, it is so generalized (“such places,” “they”) as to be opaque. The place exists but it is also largely internal, so well known to the speaker that he does not feel obliged to detail it. If anything, it reads as a fragment of a larger whole or perhaps as the conclusion to a missing poem so that any expectation of totality or coherence is largely disappointed. However, such a reading may be missing the point. If the poem offers anything it is one of those moments of attention or of being called to attention that I referred to earlier. It is better to be somewhere than nowhere, says the poem. Or, perhaps, it is good to have somewhere to come back to. Creeley tells us that the poem “was written on my coming back from India to Cambridge in the winter of 1945” (3). He had been an ambulance driver on the Burma–India front.

What the poem gives us, then, is a moment of belonging and homecoming which also involves a sense of exposure and exclusion: the inclement weather, the unwelcoming “darkened doors.” “Here,” as in Catling's The Blindings, seems liminal: the speaker is out in the street, about to go in, about to return. Charles Altieri notes a movement in Creeley's poetry from saying “there” to being able to say “here”: “‘Here’ for Creeley states an ideal of pure presence, of a relationship between subject and world where each is transparent to and completely adequate for the other”Footnote ²¹ No wonder, then, that the poem utters a quietly grateful “enough.” This makes Robert von Hallberg's reading seem, in contrast, a little overstated: he argues that the poem displays “Creeley's strategy for return: to discover in domestic Cambridge a systematic order clean of the taint of ideological combat.”Footnote ²² Creeley's grasp of the realities of war seems much simpler than that. He would later remember in “Men,” “hauling the dead and dying/along those impossible roads // to nothing much could help.”Footnote ²³ A return to Cambridge is perhaps a return to feeling something other than futility.

In the context of the comments by Jonathan Culler and Ian Hunt, “Return” demonstrates how, for Creeley, “here” is often not a point of enlargement. One of the ways to understand the achievement of Creeley's poetry is its particular combination of confessional lyric and something more abstract; and because “here” is often abstract – unattached, unidentified, ideal as opposed to representational – this has the effect of focussing attention back into the language of the poem. So in the poem under discussion, “return” might mean a return to writing poetry, to the place of writing, and to the poem. If Robert von Hallberg is right about systems, then the poem and its “here-ness” is the only system that counts, and writing “here” is a way of positioning oneself in that system. At the same time, however, Creeley's note about “Return” begs an important question: why did he not locate the story behind the poem in the poem itself? One answer might be that he did not want to write a “war poem” per se but wanted to retain the elegiac dimension that war poetry inevitably evokes. Reading this with the Catling and Jonson examples suggests that saying “here” is often a way of pointing to a lost and/or unobtainable “there.” One consequence of such a dynamic might be that “here” is always, in some sense, in flux.

Even without Creeley's note, the title “Return” implies a “there” before the moment of the poem. We can perhaps add something more to Altieri's comment about “pure presence,” and Heidegger is again useful. He argues that “Dasein [human existence] understands its ‘here’ in terms of its environmental ‘yonder’”; and that, consequently, its sense of “here” always involves a sense that “from this ‘yonder’ it comes back to its ‘here’.”Footnote ²⁴ It seems that “Return” records as a felt moment the sense that saying “here” always includes a “coming back from.” It is a sense that we also find in “Littleton, N.H.”, whose protagonist “wanders alone here,/finds drift and satisfaction equally off & away from him” (24). The relationship between “drift” and “satisfaction” would seem likely to produce another version of “enough.” Heidegger's comments on proximity and distance are also useful. He argues that the two things do not function exactly as we might imagine. The act of walking might seem to be an activity that is extremely close to us, “And yet it is farther remote than the acquaintance whom one encounters ‘on the street’” at a distance of twenty paces. This is because it is “circumspective concern” that decides what is close and what is distant. Clearly, this is different than spatial proximity and, for Heidegger, is crucial to our sense of “occupying a place” which “must be conceived as a desevering of the environmentally ready-to-hand into a region which has been circumspectively discovered in advance.”Footnote ²⁵ The street and doors of “Return” have been discovered in precisely this way and “here” signals both desevering and circumspection.

Before proceeding with the discussion of particular poems, it is worth noting that Peter Middleton has speculated whether one way of describing the poetics of Creeley and his contemporaries among the New American Poets might be through the concept of the punctum.Footnote ²⁶ The punctum comes from Roland Barthes's book on photography Camera Lucida and describes a detail in a photograph that becomes a point of singularity.Footnote ²⁷ Barthes writes,

Later in the book, Barthes identifies “another punctum … which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that has been’), its pure representation.”Footnote ²⁹

We may seem at some distance from Creeley's poetry, but my point is to wonder whether, if Middleton's speculation is correct, Creeley's use of “here” works in a similar way to Barthes's concept. “Here” in many of Creeley's poems, as in Brian Catling's installation texts for The Blindings, seems, like Barthes's punctum, to be a private marker of idiosyncratic experience that is made public and seems to be inviting wider application. The “here” of winter 1945 that Creeley puts into “Return” not only contains a sense of “that has been” but also becomes a present “here” every time the poem is read by a new reader or reread by a reader without knowledge of that original temporal location. The making public of a highly personal “here” may work to some extent in the way that Ian Hunt identified in Catling's texts; that is, it becomes a realm of imaginative possibility. But what is also relevant here is Creeley's sense of language itself, everyday speech, containing the possibility of community. He explored this idea in a talk given in 1991:

“Here” might be, then, one of the words in this imagined extraordinary language. Indeed, “Return” uses it precisely in the context of coming home and feeling at home. Creeley's “everyone” perhaps reminds us that “here” is often used collectively as “now everyone's here, we can begin.” And, like Barnett Newman's titles, Creeley's “everyone” suggests a sense of community made possible through co-interpretation.

The movement from “there” to “here” identified by Altieri is paralleled in the early poetry by a movement from saying “he” or “they” to saying “I.” This is also connected with saying “here.” “Love” records both wood and wood-grain as “particulars” of “the time of this moment/which I do not see as time,” particulars which also include “what supple shadows may come/to be here” (26). If a moment is not time, or, rather, is not only time, then it is also everything else attended to during and contained in its duration. “Shadows” might “come” but the line break also suggests that noticing them contributes to being “here.” Here, then, starts to become a question of form and this is made explicit in the first poem of the two-part “Divisions” in which “The bottle contains/more than water” and its “form/is imposed.” In contrast to “Littleton, N.H.” “[wandering] here” now involves making “a sense/of limit.”

However, “the questions” remain and what also remains, although understated, is the relationship between “here” and “yonder.” The poem asks, “will I come again here, most desperate and all questions,/to find the water all/leaked out” (33). As with the moment, the wood and its grain, and the shadows, form is a combination of container and what it contains. “Divisions – 1” seems to imply two questions about form. The first of these is whether it involves a return, a movement back from “there” or “yonder.” The second is whether form is a matter of the perfected or the broken, the full or the empty. In the context of form, “here” also functions as a way of locating the poem as an occasion for abstraction or relatively abstract meditation. To return briefly to Heidegger, language which, like walking, is so close to us that we do not see it is brought into the realm of circumspective concern. Charles Altieri is one of the few critics to have paid attention to Creeley's “heres” and argues that by the time Creeley wrote Words (1967) and Pieces (1969) “here” was a problem at once of location and of ideal presence.Footnote ³¹ However, the poetry leading up to those collections and some poems within them also make clear that “here” involves both agency and the body, which leads, in turn, to questions of location and presence.

Agency is alluded to in “Divisions” because, after all, what is to be done, what can one do, if all the water has leaked out? A different sense of “here” as agency can be found in “Follow the Drinking Gourd” in Pieces, a poem set on a drive from Bloomington, Indiana to Lexington, Kentucky (392–94). The poem is sequence of twenty quatrains but its apparent coherence is fractured by italicized passages, questions and a movement between linked quatrains and quick notations and observations. Movement and travelling immediately raise questions about where “here” might be located and also about where the present is. A reference to “apparent forms” leads into “The “present dented”,/call it “long/distance”, come/here home.” Later, the poem tries to resolve those two questions:

Agency, then, is associated with movement and it is not only a case, as in “Return,” of moving from “there” to “here.” “Here,” the poem seems to imply, exists because of my being present. In terms of deictic “in field” and “out of field,” movement is continually changing the distinction so that “out” is always becoming “in” and its location is constantly being revised.

“Here” in relation to the body as well as to movement appears in “The Invitation” in Words (271). An unidentified “they” are said to “think in clusters/round the interminable/subject,” and to say “here I am” or “here you are,/them, and it.” The poem then imagines building a house out of body parts and hair which will make it possible to “face/facts as accumulations” or to return home, rolling along the street as “balls of clear substance.” Why would one want to build such a house when we all already own such a house and inhabit it? The ending of the poem suggests that “the interminable subject” might be the self and questions whether the self is a thing or the sum of lived-through experiences. The “body house” is a way of understanding that all bodies are the same in their living through. “Acccumulations” suggest such processes. The “clear substance” is not “clear” as in pure but as in graspable, understandable. The “invitation” of the poem would seem to be a Heideggerian one: to understand that “here” is within the individual and that substance equals existence; or, to rephrase that slightly, that substance equals existence equals substance. “Clear substance” may, of course, describe the sort of poetry Creeley is trying to write: a poetry that engages large questions, interminable subjects, without the usual poetic encumbrances of identified objects, places and individuals.

Several poems in Words bring the combination of lyrical/confessional and abstract/existential more sharply into focus around the word “here.” “Going” opens with what seems a generalized portrayal of life as movement – “no // way other/than forward” – in which there is nothing to turn from or to (330). There are only places where the self “[marks] time.” But the ending of the poem shifts abruptly from the abstract/existential to the lyrical/confessional: “Let me/leave here a/mark, a // way through/her mind.” This turns the poem into a story of leaving a relationship in which the speaker perhaps feels trapped or, at least, inadequate in the face of his partner. Or perhaps the poem means that it is impossible to enter into the mind of someone else, and it is the poem as a linguistic artefact which will make the mark as opposed to the everyday speech suggested by phrases such as “no way” and “mark time.” Something similar happens in “The Window,” where “here” is “a day, not a/but the” and love or the act of love leaves the speaker “senseless, with relief” (336). “Enough,” which seems to mark the end of a relationship or a moment of crisis within one, opens with a statement of the inadequacy of language (359–63). Words make it possible “to speak/of what has happened – a sense/of there and here, now/and then,” but “It is some other // way of being, prized enough,/that it makes a common // ground.” The syntax is complicated but the “it” that “makes” refers to “what has happened.” The common ground is located in the bodies of the speaker and his partner – her “white” body and his “tentative” one – both in actuality and in the mind of the speaker. In the words of section 6,

The lack of the expected comma after “pieces” means that “here,” that crucial sense of the self's location, always involves another. The movement between “here” and “there” has not only shrunk to two bodies but the fact of its confinement to two bodies means that the two terms become interchangeable. Thinking in two pieces sounds almost as if Creeley is saying the opposite to Lacan's famous observation, “You never look at me from the place at which I see you.”Footnote ³² In the context of Denny's researches into Eskimo and Kikuyu, Creeley's poem suggests that subjectivity's field is derived from a blurring of “speaker-centered” and “other-centered” deixis. We might also recall Heidegger's comment that the call of care “comes from me and yet from beyond me.” “Here,” then, cannot only be where I am.

The poems in Pieces that use “here” can be said to work through similar interlocations of agency, body and place. In contrast to the earlier poems, “here” does sometimes mark a point of enlargement. “America,” for example, critiques nation as a sufficient “here”: “Here, you said and say, is/where we are” (412, original emphasis). However, the poem goes on to say that the nation has somehow taken the people from themselves and must give them back. Being a citizen of a national “here” is, then, a kind of disassociation and displacement. Charles Altieri argues that where Words found Creeley able to say “here,” “the task for Pieces [remains] the problem of locating that here.”Footnote ³³Pieces, he continues, is a search for place in the context of an “absent system” that nevertheless defines the terms and “rhythm of one's life.”Footnote ³⁴ There is something of that in a prose section of “Again”:

This certainly exemplifies how many of the poems in Pieces push Creeley's reflexive style to breaking point but also implies that “here” is, in contrast to “now,” relatively meaningless. Movement confronts time and enables the articulation of “now” but how does “here” work? A similar point seems to be made in a section of “Echo”: “Nowhere one/goes will/one ever/be away/enough from/wherever/one was” (420). This seems to imply that where we are always in a “now,” “here” is something that we carry in us. Indeed, to return to J. P. Denny's researches, it is almost as if Creeley's desire to articulate his own “speaker-centered” “here” finds itself overburdened with “other-centered” “heres.” After all, “wherever one was” only goes on existing because of our relations with others in that “where.”

The primary concern of Pieces, however, seems to be not with place but with form. The word appears over fifteen times and what is notable is that in the majority of cases form is not conceived as a fixed thing or property. So, for example, in “As real as thinking...”, forms are “as real as thinking/wonders created/by the possibility” and there are “No forms less/than activity.” And both these senses of form are clearly linked to language – “A period,” “All words” – in the sentences that follow them (379). Similarly, in “The Finger,” “whatever is said/in the world, or forgotten,/or not said, makes a form” (379). In “A Step,” form is a matter of light (383); and in the fragmented sequence “Here” the poet is “Counting age as form” (444). Other manifestations of form include writing (407) and people (398). In most of these examples, Creeley does little except identify that something is or has a form. The implication seems to be that we all know what these things are, how to use to them, and how to inhabit them. Maybe these forms are another version of the common language that Creeley imagined would “be utterly familiar to someone else.”Footnote ³⁵ At the same time, these various forms can be related to the sense of form that Creeley derived from Charles Olson:

James Bunn allies Creeley's comment with a wider turn in twentieth-century American lyric from a cyclical and sequential conception of space–time to a radial one. This leads to a sense of a greatly “expanded duration of here and now” in which any act is a “focal act” which “requires every other action to reorient around the dimensions [of itself]. This relativism is nothing less than an awareness of cosmic parallax, the seeming disproportion of an object due to a shift in the observer's point of view.”Footnote ³⁷ Reading this back into multiple manifestations of form in Pieces, we can see that while some of those forms may have sequential properties, form as possibility, activity, words, saying or not saying, light, age, writing and people is predominantly radial and requires constant reorientation. Crucially, these multiple forms allow us to see what Creeley is doing with all his “heres.” Reference to Kikuyu and Eskimo uses of “here” has shown how complex its English meanings are. Creeley's “here” is a search for location that discovers that each new articulation is a disorientating reorientation.

The constant reorientation that Pieces enacts is emphasized by the way the book folds out what was always potentially present in Creeley's work up to that point: serial form. Short poems, often untitled, are mixed in with fragments or fragmented poems separated by a single black dot. Creeley himself connected this form to when the book was written:

Robert J. Bertholf reads this “serial possibility” as a “major intention to demonstrate the process of the mind conceiving thought … of the mind's present views, which can change instantly.” Repeated references – to “form” or “here' – sustain the sense of process instead of being “forced into structural roles.”Footnote ³⁹ One of the fragmented poems goes, “Here here/here. Here” (388). It might be the ultimate affirmation of presence or, as Bertholf finds in the later poetry, an assertion of “the power of the mind to create and value its own place, its own sense of here.”Footnote ⁴⁰ But in the context of Pieces and of Creeley's work as a whole it suggests here as a hard-won, temporary stopping place.

To return to our starting point of Barnett Newman's paintings, they suggest that, to a greater or lesser extent, all art casts us as its “focal act” and challenges us to recognize ourselves. Crucially, Newman's paintings and their titles work to destabilize an important relation between art and literature. Wendy Steiner notes that the idea of “the pregnant moment in painting has generated a literary topos in which poetry is to imitate the visual arts by stopping time.” She terms it “the still-moment topos.”Footnote ⁴¹ It is not just that Newman's zips may be a very late version of the pregnant moment but also that his titles demand that the spectator identifies and locates himself or herself as the still moment. In Creeley's work, the writing of every poem also risks restating that demand and its challenges for both poet and reader.