Robert Creeley 1926-2005
Robert Creeley quoted Melville as saying "Visible truth [is] the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man...who... declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself....)" He said of his own writing: "I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible."
Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts May 21, 1926. His father was a doctor who was the head of the medical staff at Symmes Hospital in Arlington. By the time he was five he had experienced both the loss of an eye in a car accident, and the death of his father. After his father's death, his mother relocated with Robert, his sister Helen and their housekeeper to a farm in West Acton that had been their summer home. Because his mother worked as a nurse to support the family, Creeley looked to their immigrant housekeeper as his "emotional center" growing up. He later recalled the West Acton woods as a place of solace as well: " I could go out into those woods and feel completely open...all kinds of dilemmas I would feel sometimes would be resolved by going out into the woods...."
He attended Holderness School in New Hampshire, which he remembered fondly. He attended Harvard, but was not happy there. While there he was suspended for stealing a door from Lowell House. He left to serve in the American Field Service as an ambulance driver in Burma and India in 1944-45. Then returned to Harvard in 1946 and became involved in Wake, a Harvard magazine started in the prior year that rejected the prescriptive "New Criticism" aesthetics of the Harvard Advocate.
During this time Creeley frequented the jazz clubs around Boston, He would later credit jazz as influencing his poetry. He said of the influence of Charlie Parker's and Miles Davis' improvisations: " I am interested in how that is done, how 'time' there is held to a measure peculiarly an evidence (a hand) of emotion which prompts (drives) the poem in the first place."
Creeley married Ann Mackinnon in the spring of 1946 and moved to Provincetown. He commuted to Cambridge, but left Harvard before graduating. The Creeleys moved to a farm in Littleton New Hampshire to try subsistence farming. There Creeley read and wrote, and it was in Littleton that he began his correspondence with Charles Olson in 1950. Their correspondence developed into daily communication, and in 1954 Olson invited Creeley to teach at Black Mountain. There Creeley explored and helped Olson develop "projective verse" theory adding that "form is never more than the expression of content."
He left Black Mountain before its dissolution in 1957, and headed to San Francisco where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen and became immersed in the San Francisco renaissance. His publication in Poetry in 1957 brought him a wider attention. After a bitter divorce, he married Bobby Louise Hawkins in Albuquerque. He earned a Masters from the University of New Mexico in 1960. In 1970, he moved with his family to Bolinas, California, an artist's colony. A year after divorcing Hawkings, he married Penelope Highton in 1977. He settled into the Faculty at the University Of Buffalo in 1967 and remained until 2003.
Creeley published sixty poetry books and numerous other titles. A Bollingen Prize and Guggenheim Fellowship are among many awards he received.
Robert Creeley died March 30, 2005 of pneumonia.
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Text of poems:
Somewhere
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171568
The Rain
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171562
If You:
Not available on line from The New American Poetry 1945-1960, University Of California Press, 1960
For No Clear Reason
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171571
Inside My Head
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171578
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Webliography:
Modern American Poetry "Creeley's Early Life and Career" by Cynthia Dubin Edelberg
http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/creeley/life.htm
Poetry Foundation Robert Creeley
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=1509
Poets.org Robert Creeley
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/184
Wikipedia Robert Creeley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Creeley
Harvard Square Library Robert Creeley
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/creeley.php
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Sites of interest:
Penn Sound Robert Creeley
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Creeley.html
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Robert Creeley reading "Please"by hogweed19756,817 views
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