Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Just in case anybody didn't hear, Robert Creeley has died.

From the NYTimes
April 1, 2005
Robert Creeley, 78, Groundbreaking Poet, Dies
By DINITIA SMITH

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."

Nice summary and analysis, lescaret.

Like me, Robert Creeley had one eye and wore a patch ( I did so as a child).

That automatically made me want to read him.

He was a truly wonderful poet, too often referred to as a "minimalist", therby sealing him in a convenient and trendy category and missing nearly entirely what his work is about.


Many years later I discovered he was one of the closest friends of one of my favorite artists, R.B. Kitaj. Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov died before him, but he was close to both of them.


By the way, letters exchanged between the great grey GAY poet, Marvelous Bob the polyglot sage, and Ms. Levertov are published in a compendious volume I strongly recommend to anyone seeking an insight into their ( and your own) work:

http://www.shambhalasun.com/Archives/Re ... May_04.htm


( the link above is a fine review of the book by Aram Sayoyan)


Here is the Amazon lin to the Duncan/Levertov letters:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de ... ce&s=books



This letters collection, along with "One Art" and the Collected Letters of Marianne Moore, were among the collections I most often recommended to my students who aspired to make poems-- you know, in that former incarnation of mine as a teacher.


Whew! Glad I was able to peel myself off THAT wheel!



Zlatko

Though not a poet, I have savored a few of Creeley's syntactical pirouettes, and I would dare yawp that he is as authentic a scribe ever hatched by ahht school-incubation.....somewhere between Pound and zen and WC Williams perhaps, with some decent beat fuckspeak in spots, Creeley was also no slouch as linguist.....

as the tune went, ave--mutha-f-in-- vale. Would that they would let a bard lie in state, in place, of, a, sterile potentate


hola Paddy Z


Myself

What, younger, felt
was possible, now knows
is not - but still
not chanted enough -

Walked by the sea,
unchanged in memory -
evening, as clouds
on the far-off rim

of water float,
pictures of time,
smoke, faintness -
still the dream.

I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are

so torn, so lost,
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.

Shelley is dead and gone,
who said,
"Taught them not this -
to know themselves;

their might could not repress
the mutiny within,
And for the morn
of truth they feigned,

deep night
Caught them ere evening . . ."

(1980) Later, Marion Boyars, London
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


A Form of Women

I have come far enough
from where I was not before
to have seen the things
looking in at me from through the open door

and have walked tonight
by myself
to see the moonlight
and see it as trees

and shapes more fearful
because I feared
what I did not know
but have wanted to know.

My facd is my own, I thought.
But you have seen it
turn into a thousand years.
I watched you cry.

I could not touch you.
I wanted very much to
touch you
but could not.

If it is dark
when this is given to you,
have care for its content
when the moon shines.

My face is my own.
My hands are my own.
My mouth is my own
but I am not.

Moon, moon,
whn you leave me alone
all the darkness is
an utter blackness,

a pit of fear,
a stench,
hands unreasonable
never to touch.

But I love you.
Do you love me.
What to say
when you see me.


(1956-1958) Poems 1950-1965, Coldar and Boyars, London, 1966