Bedtime Metaphysics
A philosophical nocturne by Morri Creech.
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In the throes of fantastical hopes as an aspiring poet, one might easily think to oneself: “If only I could get into such-and-such journal, or win such-and-such prize, or receive such-and-such fellowship, I’d really have it made– then I would truly be embarked on the S.S. Parnassus toward the horizons of immortality! As for all those well-decorated, well-published poets whom no one that I know respects or cares about, what are they to me? My work will stick, because it is actually good. I just need the industry bonafides to give me a chance!”
Following such thoughts, to examine the career of a reasonably successful poet that one admires can be a sobering experience. Our poet for today, Morri Creech, is just such a case. Morri Creech is an uncommonly good poet. Shockingly, he has been recognized as such by the literary establishment, which usually avoids good poetry like the plague. Creech has received both NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships; he has been published in Poetry Magazine, The New Republic, The Hopkins Review, The Hudson Review, 32 Poems, and many other top journals; in 2014, he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Just last year, he won the Rattle Poetry Prize, worth $15,000. Short of winning that Pulitzer, teaching at an Ivy League, becoming Poet Laureate, reading at an inauguration, acquiring an editorship at The New Yorker, getting some swanky deal with FSG, or going back in time and graduating from Iowa, there is little else Creech could do to establish himself as a poet in the literary-industrial complex of contemporary America. We should all hope to do so well.
And yet, outside of a discerning coterie, few people know who he is. Unless you, dear reader or listener, are highly involved in the formal poetry scene, his name is probably new to you too. And this is not only a recognized but an actually good poet we’re talking about here! Is it any wonder that younger poets are desperately turning to self-publication on Substack, pursuing some slim chance of virality over the defunct promises of the establishment? As a Zillennial, I find myself caught in medias res, using half my willpower to submit poems to journals and the other half to force myself to be active on social media. I respect the judgement neither of the Instapoetry-gobbling masses nor the vast inane that is the publishing hivemind, and yet I must seek my readers somehow.
Versecraft is not a project focused on promoting my own poetry, but it is intimately connected to that pursuit insofar as my mission is, in some small way, to reform the taste of our age, molding a culture in which the sort of readers I desire exist and the sort of writing I value is admired by others. In a larger sense, Versecraft is about justice: doing justice to the critical capabilities of readers’ minds, the artistry of good writers, and most of all, to the merit of great poetry. I cannot hope to make the poetry of Morri Creech or Matthew Buckley Smith or Edgar Bowers famous, but I can celebrate it as it deserves to be celebrated, and thereby promote the canon that I wish to see in the world. I would like to thank you, dear listeners and readers, for being part of this project– when social media is barbarous and the poetry establishment is philistine, impotent, and nigh-irrelevant, we must search for our civilizing influences elsewhere, and that elsewhere, I hope, is here.
Well, enough moaning. Let’s look at a good poem by a good poet. Or is it a poem? Stay tuned. It’s called “Bedtime Metaphysics,” and was originally published in one of the few truly good journals, 32 Poems. This work, incidentally, also provides the title for Creech’s upcoming poetry collection, so it is fair to say that it is a significant piece for Creech himself. Like much of his work, it has an undertow of the surreal, but whereas in many of his poems surreality pervades the entire mise en scène, here, surreal imagery is in service to a relatively sober meditation upon the actual strangeness of reality. I am attracted to this lyric not only because it is philosophically serious and interesting, but because it is written in a higher register than most contemporary poems, or most poems of Creech’s for that matter. While I would not call it a grand style, it is certainly a bold, vivid, and dignified middle style, suitable to its subject matter. The lyric goes like this:
