21 pages • 42-minute read
A Wicker Basket
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Themes
Particularity Versus Universality
Robert Creeley’s poem walks a classic lyric line between particularity and universality, communicating the poet’s specific experiences even as it also communicates a means of being in the world available to all (“So that’s you, man / or me” [Lines 9-10]). However, even with the details of his night vacillating between the particular (“old friend Liz,” “door of her cadillac [sic]” [Lines 16, 17]) and the general (“the time when it’s later,” “the street like a night, / any night” [Lines 1, 13-14]), the poem never wavers from its specifically American identity.
In part, Creeley locates his readers in America by using peculiarly American lingo: in this case, the Bohemian/hepster 1950s youth slang like “these cats not making it” (Line 27) or “There are very huge stars, man, in the sky” (Line 21). Creeley also communicates a specifically American attitude which is reinforced by the values of the subculture which his use of slang invokes. The languid, intoxicated, carefree attitude of the 1950s proto-hippies (e.g., Bohemians, hepsters, hepcats, beatniks, etc.) invoked in the poem is inherently dependent on the vast, wide open spaces of America typified by the open road. Creeley even invokes the “street like a night” (Line 13), alluding to the possibilities of space which have long characterized the American imagination.
In addition to these implicit and tonal American quirks, Creeley makes use of details and imagery to reinforce his American lyric. While he uses normative rules of grammar everywhere else in the poem—capitalizing the first words in sentences, making liberal use of commas, etc.—Creeley eschews capitalizing “cadillac [sic]” (Line 17), despite the rules of grammar calling for brand names to be capitalized as proper nouns. Nonetheless, he does choose to include this detail about the model of car his “old friend Liz” drives (Line 16). Cadillacs are American-made automobiles and, especially in the 1950s of the poem’s composition, were symbols of American luxury and national identity.
Most notably, though, is the Americanness of “A Wicker Basket’s” longest and most developed image: the “apple pie” and “ice cream” (Lines 22, 23). Just as Jack Kerouac’s famous On the Road (1957) immortalized apple pie as the ultimate symbol of Americana, so Creeley’s text invokes the power of the pie to communicate a uniquely American identity. The pie is even handed to him as “a slice” (Line 22), perhaps echoing the buy-the-slice pie of American roadside diners. The “gob of white, white ice cream” (Line 23), presumably vanilla, only strengthens the Americana of the apple pie. Because the image metaphorically stands in for the speaker’s encounter with various sensory and emotional experiences, the night’s experiences all filter through this American lens.
Intoxication
At no point in “A Wicker Basket” does the text explicitly refer to drinking, drugs, or intoxication. However, the speaker’s disjointed and dreamy experience of his surroundings implicitly alludes to some level of intoxication. That the speaker feels his “hands like a walrus” as he moves to “pick[ ] up change” (Line 5) evokes the bodily disorientation of being drunk or high. That the speaker seems to move in his own personal world—his own “wicker basket” (Line 28)—as he is swept from one portion of his night to the next also communicates a certain element of the substance use experience.
Shortly before the end of his life, Robert Creeley responded to a high school student’s letter about his poem “A Wicker Basket.” The student wrote him under the assumption that the poem was about death. Creeley responded, “[the poem] had to do with the social and personal sense of being high” (Winston, Bridget B. “Literature for the Living.” Herald Journal.) While Robert Creeley was still alive, the Los Angeles Times called “A Wicker Basket” “his most famous, hipster-manifesto 1950s poem about smoking dope” (Dukes, Carol Muske. “Straight From the Hearth: Selected Poems.” 1991. Los Angeles Times.). Poet and scholar Jerome Mazzaro, in a review of Creeley’s work, cites “A Wicker Basket” as an example of the “drug experiences [that] have been part of [Creeley’s] vision for a long time” (Mazzaro, Jerome. “Review: Integrities.” 1970. The Kenyon Review.). Even the towering figure of American literary criticism, Marjorie Perloff, called the poem “that now classic ballad of drunken regression and solipsism” in her review of another poet’s work (Perloff, Marjorie. “Tom Raworth: Collected Poems.” 2003. Times Literary Supplement.). In other words, the poem has a long history of being read as an ode to being drunk, high, or both, and Robert Creeley himself has stated the poem describes the experience of being stoned.
With this kind of intoxication in mind, the dreamy sensuousness of the poem’s speaker can quite easily be read in terms of substances. In fact, the titular “wicker basket” (Line 28) can be understood as the bubble of psychological space which the stoned person inhabits. Whether this poem is read as an explicit description of intoxication or not, the carefree state of being it describes remains adjacent to inebriation. Creeley’s decision to avoid any mention of smoking, drinking, or imbibing of any substances (aside from the metaphoric apple pie) allow the poem to represent a way of moving throughout the world—whether induced by mind-altering substances or not. In this way, the poem echoes Charles Baudelaire’s famous 19th-century poem “Be Drunk,” which urges its readers to be “continually drunk” on “Wine, poetry or virtue as you wish[—]But be drunk.”
Success & Contentment
In the poem’s final lines, the speaker of “A Wicker Basket” notes the “racket / of these cats not making it” “all around [him]” (Lines 26-27). While the failure of the people around him acts as a counterpoint to how “they are all laughing at” the speaker (Line 26), it also communicates the poem’s interest in success and failure. The poem is not a typical text on ambition, as its central character does no more than wander from restaurant to night to car. Even when the speaker acknowledges his attraction to his ride, “old friend Liz” (Line 16) who “turns [him] on” (Line 20), he doesn’t so much as give a second thought to pursuing that attraction. Instead, his energies are devoted wholly to enjoying the experiences which come his way. The speaker does not plan ahead, he “make[s] it as [he] can” (Line 10). When presented with the beauty of life, he takes its sensory delights and “eats it— // Slowly” like a slice of apple pie (Lines 24-25).
That the poem calls out other people’s failures just before concluding sets its own focus up as an alternative to failure. The speaker doesn’t fail, but instead “make[s] it // in [his] wicker basket” (Lines 27-28). The speaker’s success does not seem a result of any material or traditional successes, the poem describes no money or achievements, no professional or romantic victories. Instead, the speaker’s success is the success of survival. Like Moses, who avoids death by floating down a river in a basket, so the speaker “make[s] it” (Line 27) by floating down his own lazy river, wrapped in his own way of living. In this way, the poem redefines success: not by concrete achievements, but by flourishing in the simple pleasures of life, savoring the “apple pie” which “someone hands” you, “Slowly” (Lines 22, 25).
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