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Robert Creeley

April 10–11, 2000

Bio

Robert Creeley is among the most accomplished and most influential living poets. He was born in Massachusetts in 1926 and as a young poet after WWII was strongly swayed by William Carlos Williams, who later praised Creeley has having "the subtlest feeling for the measure...except in the verses of Ezra Pound." Creeley helped launch Cid Corman's magazine Origin, conducted a huge and profound correspondence with Charles Olson, and soon joined Olson at Black Mountain College where he edited The Black Mountain Review. Olson admired how Creeley "lands syntax down the alley." His collections of poems include For Love (1962); Words (1967); Pieces (1969); The Finger (1970); A Day Book (1972); Thirty Things (1974); Away (1976); Later (1978); Memory Gardens (1986); Windows (1990). The Collected Poems, 1945-75 was published in 1983; So There: Poems 1976-83 appeared in 1998. He has lived in Guatemala, Finland, France and Spain, and served with the American Field Service in India and Burma. He was awarded the Horst Bienek Lyrikpreis from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, and, among many other honors, was New York State Laureate from 1989-91. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in Buffalo, New York. Edward Dorn praised Creeley as "the master of immediate speech," while Allen Ginsberg revered Creeley's "syllable by syllable intelligence." Robert Creeley held the Poetics Chair at SUNY Buffalo, prior to Charles Bernstein.


April 10, 2000 reading segmented by poems

  1. Place (0:31): MP3
  2. Won't it be Fine? (2:57): MP3
  3. Bresson's Movies (1:12): MP3
  4. Echoes (0:43): MP3
  5. En Famille (5:13): MP3
  6. Help (1:03): MP3
  7. Love (0:25): MP3
  8. Myself (2:02): MP3
  9. The House (1:32): MP3
  10. There (1:03):MP3
  11. Thinking (0:52): MP3
  12. This World (0:08): MP3
  13. end of Presences: A Text for Marisol (9:07): MP3
  14. "Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang..." (4:20): MP3

Also see this material on PennSound.

April 11, 2000 discussion segmented by content

  1. introduction (5:45): MP3
  2. on using Monologue (6:29): MP3
  3. using tools to make objective writing and sound (5:49): MP3
  4. poems of memory and assumption (4:46): MP3
  5. making it new (6:11): MP3
  6. on the impact of William Carlos Williams's angry poetry (3:57): MP3
  7. on young poets (2:54): MP3
  8. form as an expression of content (4:08): MP3
  9. on having few precedents (4:59): MP3
  10. on Denise Levertov (4:31): MP3
  11. poetry, the internet, and social power (3:35): MP3
  12. conversation with Marjorie Perloff about love poetry (7:01): MP3
  13. on making objective texts (4:05): MP3
  14. on Bob Dylan (3:08): MP3
  15. on hearing poetry read out loud (3:24): MP3
  16. influences (3:03): MP3
  17. reading and discussing "A Valentine for Pen" (3:55): MP3

Also see this material on PennSound.