Like Henry James' early but decisive 'The Madonna of the Future', [Creeley's 'Three Fate Tales'] are explanatory, illustrative, cautionary, an attempt to reach down to the basis for his stance, with nothing more primary,

nothing more strange, taken or not, than just that, the self, which is single. And I make it such, so call it, because it is so. I only call it what it is.

The self is single, separate, apart, keeping its own time in its own spaces. Creeley's attempts to explore the implications of this fact dominate his writings in much the same way that Hemingway's work is dominated by the fact of violence or Faulkner's the fact of fear. But just as it isn't Faulkner's desire to murder us, so it isn't Creeley's to use his stories as launching pads to hoist readers out into some incomprehensible blue, leaving us hung up out...