poet Robert Creeley, 78

[alankin]

Poet Robert Creeley Dies

Listen to this story... by Michele Norris

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4568156

All Things Considered, March 30, 2005 · Massachusetts-born poet Robert Creeley died Wednesday in Odessa, Texas. Creeley is associated with a group of writers often referred to collectively as "The Black Mountain Poets." He authored 60 books of poetry and criticism.

--

& did several collaborations with jazz musicians, including Steve Lacy and Steve Swallow

& artists, including Francesco Clemente and R.B. Kitaj

Edited March 31, 2005 by alankin

[sheldonm]

...very sad !

[SEK]

Why was he in Odessa?

[maren]

Why was he in Odessa?

He had been at a writers' retreat in Marfa:

Robert Creeley, 78, Groundbreaking Poet, Dies

By Dinitia Smith, New York Times, 4/1/2005

Robert Creeley, who helped transform postwar American poetry by making it more conversational and emotionally direct, died on Wednesday in Odessa, Tex. He was 78 and had been in residence at a writers' retreat maintained by the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Tex.

The cause was complications from lung disease, his wife, Penelope, said.

"Visible truth," Mr. Creeley once wrote, quoting Melville, is "the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things." That was the goal of his own work - emotion compressed in short, sparse sentences and an emphasis on feeling.

Mr. Creeley wrote, edited or was a major contributor to more than 60 books, including fiction, essays and drama. He belonged to a group of poets - beginning with Modernists like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and continuing through the Beats and the Black Mountain poets like Charles Olson - who tried to escape from what they considered the academic style of American poetry, with its European influences and strict rhyme and metric schemes.

The critic Marjorie Perloff called Mr. Creeley an heir to Williams. He took Williams's vernacular style, casual diction and free-verse rhythms that stressed the concrete, she said, and made them "new, more consonant with our times - nervous, anxious, moving, erotically charged."

One of Mr. Creeley's most widely anthologized poems is "I Know a Man." It embodies his compressed style, with shortcuts, directness and slang:

As I sd to my

friend, because I am

always talking, - John, I

sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for

christ's sake, look

out where yr going.

Another well-known poem, "A Wicker Basket," describes the end of an evening of dining out. A woman is waiting for him, he writes:

And she opens the door of her cadillac,

I step in back,

and we're gone.

She turns me on -

There are very huge stars, man, in the sky,

and from somewhere very far off someone hands

me a slice of apple pie

Mr. Creeley was born on May 21, 1926, in Arlington, Mass. He enrolled at Harvard in 1943, but took a break to be an ambulance driver abroad. While working on his writing, he took many odd jobs, including running a farm in New Hampshire. In 1954 Olson invited Mr. Creeley to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He became associated with the Black Mountain poets, who included Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn and Robert Duncan. He edited the short-lived but influential Black Mountain Review, and helped Olson develop a theory of "projective verse," free verse that took form while being composed.

In 1962 he gained early recognition with "For Love," about the breakup of his first marriage and the beginning of his second one. From 1966 to 2003 he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and he then joined Brown University in 2003.

Mr. Creeley married three times. In addition to Penelope, he is survived by his first two wives, Ann MacKinnon and Bobbie Louise Hawkins, and by eight children: David Ebitz of State College, Pa.; Thomas, of Hudson, Me.; Charlotte, of Brockton, Mass.; Kirsten Hoeck of Benicia, Calif.; Sarah, of Hercules, Calif.; Katherine, of Boulder, Colo.; William, of Brooklyn; and Hannah, of Manhattan.

Mr. Creeley won several major awards, including the Bollingen Prize in 1999. He was also a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Hugh Kenner, reviewing a collection of Mr. Creeley's poetry in The New York Times in 1983, noted that his writing could be "so minimal it's barely there."

"But again and again he'll risk all on pure openness," Mr. Kenner concluded, and "it is, mysteriously, triumphantly, poetry."

Nonetheless, Mr. Creeley had detractors. There are two things to be said about Creeley's poems, the critic John Simon wrote. "They are short; they are not short enough."

Mr. Creeley's work was strongly influenced by jazz, and he collaborated with musicians and visual artists, including Robert Indiana, Francesco Clemente and Susan Rothenberg.

In his later years, Mr. Creeley's work became less colloquial, darker and more ambitious. In the poem "Age" he wrote of the beloved woman lying next to him who can "hear the whimpering back of the talk, the approaching fears when I may cease to be me."

[Larry Kart]

I think he was in Texas because a writers' colony there was putting him up, probably with physical assistance that he needed by this time. BTW, a friend and I were wondering if Creeley was the last major figure of his particular group/generation of poets. The only name I could come up with who might belong, is arguably major and is still around is Barbara Guest (Sorrentino is a half-generation further on, I think). "Life and Death" is a remarkable book. I remember shortly after it came out when a friend of mine -- an acquaintance of Creeley's and a brilliant novelist who would die in 2000 in his early 50s and must have known then that he hadn't much time -- told me that I ought to read it, in effect saying that he thought it was battle-tested.

[Nate Dorward]

Larry--I think many would add Robin Blaser to the list of surviving New American Poets. Whatever, it's a small list...

I count myself lucky to have actually been in the famous Buffalo firehall home, when Tom Raworth was visiting (knocking back glasses of gin like they were water--he'd just had some serious medical trouble & was self-medicating)--due to a tangled set of circumstances Raworth's reading was held in Creeley's house rather than at the university. I was talking to Creeley just before the reading started--it was hilarious how he switched from ordinary conversation (we were talking about Charles Tomlinson) to fluent Creeleyese when he had to give the introduction.

My copy of the collected poems is as brokenbacked as any reference-book on my shelves.

[Nate Dorward]

Clem--I tend to think that habitually turning threads to abuse of irrelevant targets is either the mark of opportunism or of a cultivated tone-deafness. Start a thread on David S Ware & it becomes a rant about Francis Davis & Borah Bergman; start a thread on Robert Creeley's widely mourned death & it becomes potshots directed at Marjorie Perloff. If you really feel like dumping on someone, start a new thread; a memorial thread is not the place.

[Nate Dorward]

Clem: you're frigging thick as a post: as I said, I don't care whether you dump on Perloff & Kenner, but TAKE IT ELSEWHERE.

[paul secor]

here's something ya'll might like--

Creeley on Douglas Woolf (don't say who, please)

professor clementine

gritsville art institute

Thanks for posting Creeley's words on Douglas Woolf.

A story: Though I was a student in Buffalo for a couple of years while Robert Creeley taught there, I never met him nor, so far as I know, saw him. I did meet him many years later in New York City at a memorial service for Douglas Woolf. I had spoken to Mr. Woolf several months before his death and he said that he felt that Robert Creeley was a true friend, someone who had remained supportive throughout the years.

I'm not a person who feels comfortable approaching and speaking with people I regard as "heroes" (for want of a better word), and I regarded Robert Creeley as one of those people. However, I felt that it was important for him to hear Doug Woolf's words, so I went with my feelings and told him what Woolf had said. Creeley's response was simply, "I loved him."

Clem, thanks for recommending "Life and Death". I read several of Robert Creeley's early poems this evening and I'll go to a good friend's bookstore tomorrow and order that one.

Never thought about it until now, but in a way Robert Creeley is with me every day. In our bedroom there's a photograph (taken by Jonathan Williams, probably in Mallorca) of Robert Creeley (staring directly and intently at the camera) and his first wife (I believe), standing in a doorway, with a black cat off to one side of them.

It's hard to know exactly what to say when someone who's given so much passes on.

Thank you for turning words into poems, Mr. Creeley.

[Larry Kart]

I wrote a pretty good long review of Woolf's "Hypocritic Days" (Black Sparrow) and the Dalkey Archive reissue of "Wall To Wall" back in 1993 for the Chicago Tribune (I was book editor then and could get away with some things). Does anyone remember Woolf's "Spring of the Lamb" or that incredible story about the bird, "HAD"?

Nate -- I forgot about Blaser. Also, we just lost Lamantia.

Clem -- J. Williams was there and real and somebody but not quite a major leaguer, no? Is the perhaps comparable Fielding Dawson still among the living? About Sorrentino, it's not wholly a matter of birthdates but of ... well, Waller and Basie were both born in 1904, but Waller was Waller well before Basie was Basie, and who Basie became was shaped by his awareness of what the young but already mature Waller had done.

[Nate Dorward]

David--hm, by "was 'retired'" I take it there was some pressure brought to bear to make him leave? I'm surprised--my understanding had been that actually it was of Creeley's own volition & that they wanted him to stay. I'd assumed it was part of the general unravelling of the department that started in fact exactly at that time I was in his house (the fact that it was held there was one of the minor aspects of the fallout from Loss Glazier's failed tenure bid, if my memory serves). Bernstein had already left for instance, Susan Howe was only a fleeting presence, &c.

[Larry Kart]

Clem -- Could you recommend an available Dukas piano music recording? I've been told that the one I have, by Hessier, is not nearly good enough.

I have the old Coyote Journal "Migrant Worrier." Strange to think that the days when those were new books being eyed, bought, and read by an adult bearing my name were so long ago.

You're no doubt right about Williams vis a vis Dawson (I have read "Magpie's Bagpipe" BTW), but that still doesn't make Williams a major writer IMO. I asked Dawson to do a book review or two, and what he wrote was so bad it was unprintable, perhaps in part because of personal wear and tear on him by that time (mid 1990s). On the other hand, I got some marvelous reviews at about the same time out of the I'm sure no less worn and torn Donald Phelps. That was a privilege. Then I couldn't track down Phelps anymore. A few years ago I heard from Gary Groth -- of The Comics Journal and (unless I'm mistaken here) Fantagraphics Books -- who was trying to collect all of Phelps' essays for possible publication. As I recall, he'd made some headway in tracking down vagrant pieces, and I was able to pass along copies of the reviews I'd elicited. A Collected Phelps would be great.

Morris is just a name to me, though I vaguely recall trying something at one point and not being moved to read on. Where would you suggest I try again?

[alankin]

Just found "The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley" while strolling through the web:

http://texts.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft4t...c&brand=ucpress

Edited April 3, 2005 by alankin

[Larry Kart]

Clem -- I've read a lot of Wyndham Lewis over the years, though not recently.

What Ronald Johnson I've seen struck me as water soup. This may not be fair or accurate, but it seems to me Creeley dispensed blurbs with a very free hand, especially in later years.

[Larry Kart]

I do have the Paul Edwards W. Lewis book (found it used, still cost a bundle though). Haven't cracked it yet, but it looks like it will be really good.

About R. Johnson, I didn't say "word soup" but "water soup" -- that is, not language (or L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E) games but stuff that seems so thin as to be without flavor. Not that I'm necessarily right about this (I'm going on old dim memories), but that's what those memories are or were (unless, God forbid, I'm confusing Johnson with someone else of his vintage). I will try to track down "Ark" and report.

[Larry Kart]

Yes, I have read Svevo but a long time ago (thought "Zeno" was terrific). I bought the two newish translations (of "Zeno" and "Senilita") that virtually all agree improve a great deal on the old ones but haven't jumped in yet. Too many books (and records), too little time.