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Robert Creeley | |
|---|---|
 Creeley in 1972 | |
| Born | (1926-05-21)May 21, 1926 Arlington, Massachusetts, US |
| Died | March 30, 2005(2005-03-30) (aged 78) Odessa, Texas, US |
| Education | Harvard University Black Mountain College (BA) |
| Genre | Poetry |
| Literary movement | Modernism, Post-Modernism |
| Notable works | For Love |
| Notable awards | Bollingen Prize, 1999,Robert Frost Medal, 1987 |
Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005)[1] was an American poet and author of more than 60 books. He is associated with theBlack Mountain poets, although his verse aesthetic diverged from that school. Creeley was close withCharles Olson,Robert Duncan,Allen Ginsberg,John Wieners andEd Dorn.
Creeley served as theSamuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities atState University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleaguesSusan Howe,Charles Bernstein,Raymond Federman,Robert Bertholf, andDennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo.
Creeley lived inWaldoboro,Buffalo, andProvidence, where he taught atBrown University.[2] He was a recipient of theLannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.[3][4][5][6]
Creeley was born inArlington, Massachusetts, and grew up inActon. He and his sister, Helen, were raised by their mother. At the age of two, he lost his left eye.[7] He attended theHolderness School in New Hampshire. In 1943, he enteredHarvard University, but left to serve in theAmerican Field Service inBurma andIndia in 1944–1945. He returned to Harvard in 1946, but eventually earned his BA fromBlack Mountain College in 1955, teaching some courses there as well. After teaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Creeley visited San Francisco for two months in the spring of 1956, having heard fromKenneth Rexroth about a local poetic "renaissance" underway. There he metAllen Ginsberg, who had recently completedHowl, and befriendedJack Kerouac.[8] Creeley later met and befriendedJackson Pollock at theCedar Tavern in New York City.
In a quiet moment I hear Bob pause where I never would have expected it. Such resolve. Such heart. And an ear to reckon with. No truly further American poem without his.
He was a chicken farmer briefly inLittleton, New Hampshire, before becoming a teacher in 1949. The story goes that he wrote toCid Corman, whose radio show he heard on the farm, and Corman had him read on the show, which is howCharles Olson first heard of Creeley.[10]
From 1951 to 1955, Creeley and his wife, Ann, lived with their three children on the Spanish island ofMallorca. They went there at the encouragement of their friends, British writerMartin and his partner,Janet Seymour-Smith. There they started Divers Press and published works byPaul Blackburn,Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and others. Creeley wrote about half of his published prose while living on the island, including a short-story collection,The Gold Diggers, and a novel,The Island. He said that Martin and Janet Seymour-Smith are represented by Artie and Marge in the novel.[11] During 1954 and 1955, Creeley traveled back and forth betweenMallorca and his teaching position at Black Mountain College. He also saw to the printing of some issues ofOrigin and Black Mountain Review on Mallorca, because the printing costs were significantly lower there.
In 1960, Creeley earned anMA from theUniversity of New Mexico. He began his academic career by teaching at the prestigiousAlbuquerque Academy starting in 1958 until about 1960 or 1961. In 1957, he metBobbie Louise Hawkins; they lived together in a common law marriage until 1975 and had two children, Sarah and Katherine. He dedicated his bookFor Love to Bobbie.
Creeley read at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival and at the 1965Berkeley Poetry Conference.[12] Afterward, he wandered about a bit before settling into the English faculty of "Black Mountain II" at theUniversity at Buffalo in 1967. He would stay at this post until 2003, when he received a post atBrown University. From 1990 to 2003, he lived with his family inBlack Rock neighborhood ofBuffalo, New York, in a converted firehouse at the corner of Amherst and East Streets. At the time of his death, he was in residence with theLannan Foundation inMarfa, Texas.
Creeley first received fame in 1962 from his poetry collectionFor Love. He would go on to win theBollingen Prize, among others, and to hold the position of New York StatePoet laureate from 1989 until 1991.[13] He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.[14]
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments inprotest against the Vietnam War.[15]
In his later years he was an advocate of, and a mentor to, many younger poets, as well as to others outside of the poetry world. He went to great lengths to be supportive to many people regardless of any poetic affiliation. Being responsive appeared to be essential to his personal ethics, and he seemed to take this responsibility extremely seriously, in both his life and his craft. In his later years, when he became well-known, he would go to lengths to make strangers, who approached him as a well-known author, feel comfortable. In his last years, he used the Internet to keep in touch with many younger poets and friends.[16][17]
Robert Creeley died in the morning of March 30, 2005, inOdessa, Texas of complications frompneumonia. He is buried inCambridge,Massachusetts.
In 2016, a short documentary was made about Robert Creeley's son, Will Creeley, in which Will shared stories of his father's legacy and their relationship. The film was entitledFor Will.[18]
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Arthur L. Ford in his bookRobert Creeley (1978, p. 25) describes the poet,
Creeley has long been aware that he is part of a definable tradition in the American poetry of this century, so long as 'tradition' is thought of in general terms and so long as it recognizes crucial distinctions among its members. The tradition most visible to the general public has been the Eliot-Stevens tradition supported by the intellectual probings of theNew Critics in the 1940s and early 1950s. Parallel to that tradition has been the tradition Creeley identifies with, the Pound-Olson-Zukofsky-Black Mountain tradition, what M. L. Rosenthal [in his 1967 bookThe New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II] calls 'The Projectivist Movement.' This "movement" Rosenthal derives from Olson's essay on "Projective Verse."
Le Fou, Creeley's first book, was published in 1952, and since then, according to his publisher, barely a year passed without a new collection of poems. The 1983 entry, titledMirrors, had some tendencies toward concrete imagery. It was hard for many readers and critics to immediately understand Creeley's reputation as an innovative poet, for his innovations were often very subtle; even harder for some to imagine that his work lived up to the Black Mountain tenet—which he articulated to Charles Olson in their correspondence, and which Olson popularized in his essay "Projective Verse,"—that "form is never more than an extension of content," for his poems were often written incouplet,triplet, andquatrain stanzas that break into and out of rhyme as happenstance appears to dictate. An example is "The Hero," fromCollected Poems, also published in 1982 and covering the span of years from 1945 to 1975.
"The Hero" is written in variableisoverbal ("word-count") prosody; the number of words per line varies from three to seven, but the norm is four to six. Another technique to be found in this piece is variable rhyme—there is no set rhyme scheme, but some of the lines rhyme and the poem concludes with a rhymed couplet. All of the stanzas are quatrains, as in the first two:
Each voice which was asked
spoke its words, and heard
more than that, the fair question,
the onerous burden of the asking.
And so the hero, the
hero! stepped that gracefully
into his redemption, losing
or gaining life thereby.— The Hero
Despite these obviously formal elements various critics continue to insist that Creeley wrote in "free verse", but most of his forms were strict enough so that it is a question whether it can even be maintained that he wrote in forms of prose. This particular poem is verse-mode, not prose-mode. M. L. Rosenthal in his bookThe New Poets quoted Creeley's "preoccupation with a personal rhythm in the sense that the discovery of an external equivalent of the speaking self is felt to be the true object of poetry," and went on to say that this speaking self serves both as the center of the poem's universe and the private life of the poet. "Despite his mask of humble, confused comedian, loving and lovable, he therefore stands in his own work's way, too seldom letting his poems free themselves of his blocking presence" (p. 148). When he used imagery, Creeley could be interesting and effective on the sensory level.
In an essay titled "Poetry: Schools of Dissidents," the academic poetDaniel Hoffman wrote, inThe Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, which he edited, that as he grew older, Creeley's work tended to become increasingly fragmentary in nature, even the titles subsequent toFor Love: Poems 1950–1960 hinting at the fragmentation of experience in Creeley's work:Words, Pieces, A Day Book. In Hoffman's opinion, "Creeley has never included ideas, or commitments to social issues, in the repertoire of his work; his stripped-down poems have been, as it were, a proving of Pound's belief in 'technique as the test of a man's sincerity'" (p. 533).
In 1979, jazz bassistSteve Swallow released the albumHome (ECM) featuring poems by Creeley set to music, and Creeley later collaborated with Swallow on three further albums, includingSo There (ECM, 2005).[19]
Early work by Creeley appeared in theavant-gardeliterary magazineNomad at the beginning of the 1960s. Posthumous publications of Creeley's work have included the second volume of hisCollected Poems, which was published in 2006, andThe Selected Letters of Robert Creeley edited byRod Smith, Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker, published in 2014 by theUniversity of California Press.
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Spanish translations:
Bobbie Louise Hawkins.
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