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Robert Creeley
1926-2005
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| Robert Creeley is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. (Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow is also buried here.) |
Robert Creeley's Grave
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Creeley was born in Arlington Massachusetts and brought
up on a farm at Acton. At the age of four he lost his left
eye in an accident. He attended Harvard University but
his study was interruped by WW2. He returned to the
university after the war but then abandoned his course in
the final semester and moved to Black Mounatin College where
he gained a BA. (He had previously corresponded with the
poet Charles Olson who became rector at Black Mountain.)
In 1954 Olson invited Creeley to edit the Black
Mountain Review and to teach at the college. The
college was a focus for developments in the arts for the
abstract expressionism generation. Creeley remained a
teacher until the college collapsed in 1957.
From 1951-55
Creeley and his wife and children lived on the Island of Mallorca
where he establsihed the Divers Press and published work by
Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and Paul Blackburn. While on
the island he wrote a collection of short stories entitled
The Gold Diggers and wrote his only novel entitled:
The Island. He travelled back and forth from Black
Mountain College during most of his time on Mallorca.
His first book Le Fou
appeared in 1952 and there followed a book a year for the
rest of his life. He was a prolific writer and his poetry
was very influenced by
William Carlos Williams
exhibiting a similar plain style to his mentor. Creeley
mainly employed free verse with a prose-like style and used
jump cuts at the end of lines. He once said that form was
'never more than an extension of content' - which led to him
abandon traditional poetic forms.
After he left Black
Mountain College Creeley headed west to
San Francisco where he met advantgarde writers such as Jack Kerouac and
Allen Ginsberg and the painter
Jackson Pollack. Pollack taught him that a work of art
should 'manifest directly of the energy inherent in the
materials'.
In 1960 Creeley took an MA at the
University of Mexico and then took up teaching at the New
York State University, Buffalo until 2003.
He won the
Bollingen Prize and was the New York State Laureate from 1989 to
1991. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of
Arts and Sciences in 2003.
He died in Odessa
in Texas from complications of pnuemonia aged 78. At the
time of his death he was a writer in residence with the
Lannan Foundation in Marfa Texas. He was survived by his
three wives and seven children.
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I Know
A Man
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. |
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