Re: R.I.P. Robert Creeley

[Will Dockery]

canticle wrote:
> Did I miss it or has there not been any posting regarding Robert
Creeley's
> passing?
>
> The following is from the New York Times:
> Robert Creeley, 78, Groundbreaking Poet
>
> By DINITIA SMITH/The New York Times
>
> 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."
>
> ©2005 The New York Times

I always remember Kerouac's description of Creeley's character in Big
Sur [or Dharma Bums, been years since I read either] as "the darkly
handsome man with the black eyepatch", and his upstaging of Neal
Cassady in that time period for being the boisterous Beat, making
ruckus in bars and, most infamously, stealing poor little Kenneth
Rexroth's wife, causing years of bad press for the Beats in reviews by
K.R.

--
"You're ruining American poetry, O'Hara!" -Jack Kerouac

"That's more than *you* could ever do, Jack." -Frank O'Hara

Shadowville/Netherlands project:
http://www.kannibaal.nl/shadowville.htm

"Autograph 0f Zorro" Mp3:
http://www.kannibaal.nl/zorro.mp3

[General Zod]

One of the finest poets of the Beat Generation...…….

[Michael Pendragon]

That's a back-handed compliment.

[Hieronymous Corey]

There's dead, and then there's dead in the head, like Elvis.
As you may recall, Elvis was found to be dead in the head.
Creeley is now a dead poet. Of course, he was Beat to death.

[General Zod]

One of the best......