| Subject: RIP Robert Creeley |
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pjk
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Date Posted: 04/ 7/05 5:05:47pm
I missed this while away. At one point in my life he was important to me. I remember reading him in the American LIbrary in Milan (the American Librairies in Europe were a great source for a poor poet with nary a sous... you could check out all kinds of books with just a passport and an address... I read all of Jack London and Leaves of Grass while prostrate in Greece due to a golf ball sized karbunkle leaving me unable to walk). I saw him read somewhere in the early 80's... maybe Mnpls. Anyrate... it's sad. He reminded be of another Robert who also sported a goatee at one point.
Robert Creeley, 78; Postmodern Poet, Professor
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 1, 2005; Page B06
Robert Creeley, 78, a prolific poet and a major American artist in the second half of the 20th century, died March 30 at a hospital in Odessa, Tex. He had pneumonia and complications from lung disease.
Mr. Creeley was in a two-month literary residency at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Tex., in the remote Big Bend area of the state, when he became ill.
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Marfa, a tiny town in the arid reaches of the American Southwest, was an appropriate setting for the postmodern poet, although he had been there only a few days before he had to be hospitalized. Like the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who lived and worked in Marfa and who attracted like-minded artists to the sparse and open space, Mr. Creeley the poet sought to pare down and distill, while maintaining the power, potency and richness of the words and images that remained.
"He was a nomad," said the poet C.D. Wright, a colleague at Brown University, where Mr. Creeley was a distinguished professor of English. "He was an old Yankee who loved New England, but he thought of Marfa as a clean, well-lighted place."
Like the jazz riffs of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis or Keith Jarrett, his poems were impressionistic and improvisational. Wright described him as an "essentialist as far as language is concerned."
to sit and eat --
no meaning
no point.
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He had been at Brown for the past two years. He also had taught at the University of New Mexico, the University of British Columbia, San Francisco State University and, for 25 years, the State University of New York at Buffalo. He lived in Providence, R.I.
Robert White Creeley was born May 21, 1926, in Arlington, Mass., and grew up in nearby West Acton. He became interested in writing while a student at the Holderness School, in Plymouth, N.H.
He was admitted to Harvard University in 1943 but interrupted his education during World War II to serve as an ambulance driver in India for the American Field Service. In 1947, he dropped out of Harvard shortly before he was scheduled to graduate. He lived for a while on a farm in New Hampshire, as well as in Spain and France.
In the 1950s, he was one of the "Black Mountain poets." These were writers, including Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn and Charles Olson, who had some connection to Black Mountain College, an experimental, communal college in North Carolina, in the mountains near Asheville.
Olson was particularly influential. He and Mr. Creeley developed the concept of "projective verse," poetry that abandoned traditional forms in favor of something more organic, something that took shape as the process of composition was underway. "I see as I write," Mr. Creeley noted.
His work also tended to focus on the everyday experiences, emotions and relationships rather than on history and public events. "Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word," the poet and translator Forrest Gander wrote in a review of Mr. Creeley's last book, "Life & Death" (1998).
Mr. Creeley's first marriage, to Ann McKinnon Creeley, ended in divorce in 1955. His only novel, "The Island" (1963), drew on that relationship; the book is set on the island of Mallorca, off the coast of Spain, where he lived with his family in 1953-54.
After the divorce, he returned briefly to Black Mountain before moving to San Francisco, where he associated with Allen Ginsburg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac and other members of the Beat Generation of writers. His work appeared in the influential anthology "The New American Poetry: 1945-1960" (1960), edited by Donald Allen.
In 1956, Mr. Creeley accepted a teaching position at a boys' school in Albuquerque, where he met his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hawkins Creeley, and continued to publish poetry and fiction throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In 1962, Scribners published his first major collection, "For Love: Poems 1950-1960."
Mr. Creeley's second marriage ended in divorce in 1976. His poetry from that time reflects a brooding sense of loss.
In his next major collection, "Later" (1979), Mr. Creeley's work reflected a preoccupation with aging. In "Myself," the first poem in the collection, he wrote:
"I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made," Mr. Creeley wrote in 1960. "I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption. . . . I mean the words as opposed to content."
The poem "Water Music" illustrates his elliptical approach:
The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.
Water music
loud in the clearing
off the boats,
birds, leaves.
They look for a place
I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women are torn, so lost
why hopes cannot
find a better world
than this.
Mr. Creeley published more than 60 books of poetry, numerous essays and articles and more than a dozen books of prose. His numerous honors include two Fulbright fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, Yale University's biennial Bollingen Prize in Poetry and a National Book Award nomination.
Survivors include his wife of 28 years, Penelope Highton of Providence; three children from the first marriage, David Ebitz of State College, Pa., Thomas Creeley of Hudson, Maine, and Charlotte Creeley of Brockton, Mass.; two daughters from the second marriage, Sarah Creeley of Hercules, Calif., and Katherine Hoeck of Boulder, Colo.; two children from the third marriage, William Creeley and Hannah Creeley, both of New York; and a stepdaughter, Kirsten Hoeck of California.
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