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."
