Comments on: Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

Robert Creeley (1926-2005)

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:17:05 -0800

one of the most exquisite and influential poets of our era, died this morning at age 78. I'd link to a story, but it's not in the news yet. This is a note from one of Robert's friends: "American poet Robert Creeley passed away this morning at 6:15 am in Odessa, Texas, where he was fulfilling a Residency at the Lannan Foundation. (Mr. Creeley was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.) His wife of twenty-eight years, Penelope, and son Will and daughter Hannah were at his side. The cause of death was complications from respiratory disease." Though a comrade and muse for Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Creeley was much less well-known, and had a style rather unlike theirs, distinguished by extreme economy of words and an understated approach toward emotion. Creeley was often cited as a pioneer by the so-called language poets, and his most creatively generative friendship was with another poet's poet, the late Charles Olson. Creeley's subtlety and balance will be missed.

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:20:55 -0800

A Song I had wanted a quiet testament and I had wanted, among other things, a song. That was to be of a like monotony. (A grace Simply. Very very quiet. A murmur of some lost thrush, though I have never seen one. Which was you then. Sitting and so, at peace, so very much now this same quiet. A song. And of you the sign now, surely, of a gross perpetuity (which is not reluctant, or if it is, it is no longer important. A song. Which one sings, if he sings it, with care. -- Robert Creeley

By: dlugoczaj

dlugoczaj — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:32:05 -0800

Tell story simply as you know how to. This road has ending, hand in hand. -- Thanks, digaman. Glad I heard it here rather than in the news.

By: glider

glider — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:32:11 -0800

"So There", done with Mercury Rev on the EP 'The hum is coming from her' is incredible if you can find it...

By: n9

n9 — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:43:56 -0800

God. That man was my hero, him along with Gilles Deleuze for so long and now they are both dead. I saw him read several times and met him once. What a remarkable man he was. I can't give him anything (especially now) except thanks. Thank you, Robert Creeley.

By: Floydd

Floydd — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:49:34 -0800

Goodbye

By: prettyboyfloyd

prettyboyfloyd — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:49:59 -0800

If you are here, you likely already know, but Creeley was a member of the Black Mountain College school of poets. Audio of a seminar given by Creeley at the Naropa Institute is available at the internet archive. . . .

By: n9

n9 — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 09:50:59 -0800

Goodbye --- Now I recognize it was always me like a camera set to expose itself to a picture or a pipe through which the water might run or a chicken dead for dinner or a plan inside the head of a dead man. Nothing so wrong when one considered how it all began. It was Zukofsky's "Born very young into a world already very old..." The century was well along when I came in and now that it's ending, I realize it won't be long. But couldn't it all have been a little nicer, as my mother'd say. Did it have to kill everything in sight, did right always have to be so wrong? I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home. -- Robert Creeley

By: ubueditor

ubueditor — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:03:02 -0800

It's actually thanks to Robert Creeley that UbuWeb survives today. Back in 2000 our ISP had a devastating crash that totally wiped-out the site. As the site lay smouldering, Creeley sent an email saying what a great loss for the poetry community this was and made a personal appeal for rebuiding. 6 months later, it was up and running, fueled by his encouragement.

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:05:48 -0800

Bresson's Movies A movie of Robert Bresson's showed a yacht, at evening on the Seine, all its lights on, watched by two young, seemingly poor people, on a bridge adjacent, the classic boy and girl of the story, any one one cares to tell. So years pass, of course, but I identified with the young, embittered Frenchman, knew his almost complacent anguish and the distance he felt from his girl. Yet another film of Bresson's has the aging Lancelot with his awkward armor standing in a woods, of small trees, dazed, bleeding, both he and his horse are, trying to get back to the castle, itself of no great size. It moved me, that life was after all like that. You are in love. You stand in the woods, with a horse, bleeding. The story is true. -- R.C.

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:09:04 -0800

That's a fantastic site, UbuEditor -- one of my favorites.

By: rafter

rafter — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:13:22 -0800

"Bresson's Movies" is my favorite Creeley poem. He's been teaching at Brown University for these past two years (where I am a student in the Literary Arts department). Wonderful poet, wonderful man. He'll be missed.

By: diftb

diftb — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:32:44 -0800

By: Kellydamnit

Kellydamnit — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:45:29 -0800

One of my best friends took a class with him when he was a professor at SUNY Buffalo. I always regretted that I wasn't able to. .

By: malaprohibita

malaprohibita — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:04:53 -0800

damn. another great poet gone. sigh....

By: all-seeing eye dog

all-seeing eye dog — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:10:40 -0800

Creeley was one of the writers I caught the writing bug from, too... If there's any justice left in the world, he'll be remembered as one of the greats.

By: xowie

xowie — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:12:37 -0800

America America, you ode for reality! Give back the people you took. Let the sun shine again on the four corners of the world you thought of first but do not own, or keep like a convenience. People are your own word, you invented that locus and term. Here, you said and say, is where we are. Give back what we are, these people you made, us, and nowhere but you to be. p.s. The first copy of Howl was typed by Creeley and mimeographed by Martha Rexroth.

By: joe lisboa

joe lisboa — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:18:35 -0800

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:42:01 -0800

xowie, how do you know that? Very curious.

By: thinkpiece

thinkpiece — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:52:47 -0800

I took two classes with Creeley at Buffalo. He was craggy-faced and wall-eyed and shaggy-haired and sexy and intense and he smoked like a fiend. He taught me how to read a poem, and admitted me to a senior seminar (grudgingly, as he was a bit of a chauvinist) when I was just a junior, and a baby poet. I wrote a (pretty embarrassing ...) paper on Robert Duncan, and his only comment written in scratchy black at the bottom of the page (which I still have) was vintage Bob: "Well, well, well. You can see and say! B+". He loved words and women and shooting the breeze, up where the air was rare.

By: xowie

xowie — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:16:01 -0800

It's in Linda Hamalian's biography of Rexroth, for one thing. "At their first meeting over supper that April, Marthe [Rexroth] and Creeley were drawn to one another. Creeley himself was emerging from the dissolution of his marriage, and was hanging out with Jack Kerouac. As Ginsberg put it, 'Once they met, the two Catholic, New England, mill-town writers really loved each other.' Creeley was drinking heavily, and Kerouac often rescued him from violent bar scenes created by Creely's funny but vicious temper. He also needed money, and Marthe was able to get him a freelance typist's job [through] the Dean's office at State College. (One assignment was typing up Howl for a mimeographed edition that was to circulate among the various San Francisco poets.) Creely was an attractive, romantic, and serious young writer, who in spite of his dangerous antics was yearning for stability. Marthe was a lovely, intellectual young mother, acutely sensitive to the struggles of a poet's life, but miserable in her subservient and at times masochistic relationship with Rexroth. They fell in love, and saw no reason to hide their intent. Marthe declared an open break." ... [Wrote Rexroth:] "I heard that you and your friends - Kerouac and all - are having orgies with Marthe in your cottage in Berkeley - you, Creeley and Kerouac." Ginsberg denied that Marthe had ever visited him... Rexroth's behavior became a local scandal; he would talk about his degrading fantasies, "of gangs of people fucking his wife."

By: Toecutter

Toecutter — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 12:23:58 -0800

< sigh> What would my undergraduate experience have been like without Creeley's vast collected poems, a little weed, jugs of cheap wine and a screened-in porch?

By: tsarfan

tsarfan — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:29:15 -0800

as an undergrad i had the pleasure of interviewing him on the phone and later meeting him. he told me a great story about meeting william carlos williams and being scared to death "ever the doctor, he said, son you look white" creeley told me. at the reading he stumbled across the words as if he hadnt read them before. i thought that was so punk rock.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:45:58 -0800

Kore As I was walking I came upon chance walking the same road upon. As I sat down by chance to move later if and as I might, light the wood was, light and green, and what I saw before I had not seen. It was a lady accompanied by goat men leading her. Her hair held earth. Her eyes were dark. A double flute made her move. "O love, where are you leading me now?" When I was passing through the town he lived in in the late '70s I wanted to call him up but chickened out. He'll be missed. Thanks for posting this, digaman.

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:56:51 -0800

You're welcome. A little tribute from Anne Waldman, poet and co-founder of Naropa University, courtesy of Patti Smith.

By: donfactor

donfactor — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 15:59:11 -0800

In the early sixties I edited a magazine called Nomad. We did a manifesto issue and this was Creeley's contribution: A NOTE Robert Creeley I believe in a poetry determined by the language of which it is made. (Williams: 'Therefore each speech having its own character the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form.') I look to words, and nothing else, for my own redemption either as man or poet. Pound, early in the century, teaches the tradition of. man- standing-by-his-word,' the problem of sincerity, which is never as simple as it may be made to seem. The poet, of all men, has least cause and least excuse to pervert his language, since what he markets is so little in demand. He must find his living elsewhere. His aim must never be deflected by anterior commitment, even to those whom he loves. Words cannot serve responsibly as an apology for those who may wish to make them one. I mean then words - as opposed to content. I care what the poem says, only as a poem - I am no longer interested in the exterior attitude to which the poem may well point, as sign-board. That concern I have found it best to settle elsewhere. I will not be misled by the. niceness, of any sentiment, or its converse, malevolence. I do not think a poet is necessarily a nice man. I think the poem's morality is contained as a term of its structure, and is there to be determined and nowhere else. (Pound: 'Prosody is the total articulation of the sound in a poem.') Only craft determines the morality of a poem. Louis Zukofsky offers. A Test Of Poetry' as. the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection.' I am pleased by that poem which makes use of myself and my intelligence, as a partner to its declaration. It does not matter what I am told - it matters, very much, how I am there used. Our world has been so delivered to the perversion of language ( the word qua trick or persuader) that my own soul, such as I know it, comes to life in whatever clarities are offered to it. Poems allow me to go on living, and I am grateful for my life.

By: rafter

rafter — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:20:13 -0800

(Letter to students and faculty.)

By: digaman

digaman — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:26:04 -0800

That's fantastic, donfactor. I'm sending it to Creeley's friends.

By: punkbitch

punkbitch — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:32:23 -0800

Too sad. Noone is as precise as this man was

By: juv3nal

juv3nal — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 19:51:12 -0800

By: dobbs

dobbs — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:25:15 -0800

By: pyramid termite

pyramid termite — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 21:47:16 -0800

By: ori

ori — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:47:44 -0800

WATER Your personal world echoes in ways common enough, a parking lot, common cold, the others sitting at the table. I have no thoughts myself, more than myself. I feel here enough now to think at least I am here. So you should get to know me? Would I be where you looked? Is it hands across this body of water? Is anyone out there, they used to say, or was they also some remote chance of people, a company, together. What one never knows is, is it really real, is the obvious obvious, or else a place one lives in regardless.

By: donfactor

donfactor — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 22:59:50 -0800

Matt, this may be a first - at least its the first I remember here - where everybody has had something positive to say or quote in memory of this great American human being and poet.

By: matteo

matteo — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 03:25:42 -0800

. thanks for the post, d.

By: lilboo

lilboo — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 07:16:36 -0800

By: TomSophieIvy

TomSophieIvy — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 22:30:36 -0800

If I'd spent half the energy trying to get into his class as I spent drinking at Anacone's in Buffalo, well, damn. Great posts, and now I'm digging some stuff out. I've always found Creeley a 'say it out loud' poet - no mumbling to myself but rather finding myself reading his poems out loud, playing with the rhythm, finding the stresses and discoveries that just reading won't uncover.

By: psmaps

psmaps — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 09:46:05 -0800

I had the privilege of being a student of Robert Creeley's at U of New Mexico in 1963-4. While I never became a poet, nor an academic, what I learned from Bob Creeley has been a part of my ethos for all my life. He opened doors---metaphysically at least---for me and I am profoundly thankful for his influence. We later crossed paths in Knokke, Belgium in, I believe 1969 and it was like getting 'booster shot' of poetic influence. A fine man who was a credit to to arts and the community of man.

By: AncestralManor

AncestralManor — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 23:21:32 -0800

Sadly, I had recently discovered that Robert Creeley's mother and ancestors were from the Bucksport, Bangor etc area of Northern Maine and I was looking for his whereabouts to contact him for an interview about what his mother's rememberances might have been for a documentary of a particular stagecoach and inn centered in Bucksport Maine - but encompassing all of Downeast Maine from Gardiner to Calais. He is gone now just a few days, so I missed the opportunity to make his aquaintance by a bit, but am happy to report that an audio of one of his sessions gave me a sense of what you folks have said and what he was all about - much more than the many photos and obits. While my reading in recent decades is largely historical non-fiction sources, a wonderful introduction to Elliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" changed my life as a pre-teen New England student - and I can see from these recent posts in remembrance of Creeley that the genealogy of modern poets has a pattern of evolution that even I can follow. Robert Creeley was of my father's generation, and I see that he lived a full life and produced an enormous body of work that will inspire folks for generations to come. If any of Robert Creeley's friends or family have a rememberance that Creeley might have had regarding our Downeast Stagecoach Maine project, please reference the overview at http://ancestralmanor.com/?tabid=92 and contact us. Condolences to all who will miss this man and I am extremely sorry I did not make his aquaintance in person. Sharon Sergeant Ancestralmanor.com