Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) was an American poet and writer who authored more than 60 books. He was linked to the Black Mountain poets, though his style of writing was different from theirs. Creeley had close relationships with other writers, including Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, and Ed Dorn.

He held the position of Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he worked with colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock to create the Poetics Program at Buffalo.

Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He received the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Early life

Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, and lived in Acton as a child. He and his sister, Helen, were raised by their mother. When he was two years old, he lost his left eye. He studied at the Holderness School in New Hampshire. In 1943, he began attending Harvard University but left in 1944 to work with the American Field Service in Burma and India. He returned to Harvard in 1946 but later earned his bachelor’s degree from Black Mountain College in 1955. He also taught some classes there. After teaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Creeley visited San Francisco in the spring of 1956. He went there after hearing about a local poetic movement from Kenneth Rexroth. In San Francisco, he met Allen Ginsberg, who had recently finished writing Howl, and became friends with Jack Kerouac. Later, Creeley met and became friends with Jackson Pollock at the Cedar Tavern in New York City.

In a quiet moment, I hear Bob pause where I never would have expected it. Such determination. Such courage. And someone who could understand and appreciate poetry. No truly great American poem would exist without his contribution.

Creeley briefly worked as a chicken farmer in Littleton, New Hampshire, before becoming a teacher in 1949. It is said that he wrote to Cid Corman, whose radio show he listened to while farming. Corman invited Creeley to read on the show, which is how Charles Olson first learned about Creeley.

Work

From 1951 to 1955, Creeley and his wife, Ann, lived with their three children on the Spanish island of Mallorca. They moved there with the help of their friends, British writer Martin and his partner, Janet Seymour-Smith. In Mallorca, they started a publishing company called Divers Press and published works by writers such as Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Creeley wrote about half of his published stories while living on the island, including a short-story collection called The Gold Diggers and a novel called The Island. He said that Martin and Janet Seymour-Smith are shown as Artie and Marge in the novel. Between 1954 and 1955, Creeley traveled back and forth between Mallorca and his teaching job at Black Mountain College. He also helped print some issues of Origin and Black Mountain Review on Mallorca because printing costs were much lower there.

In 1960, Creeley earned a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico. He began teaching at the well-known Albuquerque Academy in 1958 and continued there until about 1960 or 1961. In 1957, he met Bobbie Louise Hawkins. They lived together in a common-law marriage until 1975 and had two children, Sarah and Katherine. He dedicated his book For Love to Bobbie.

Creeley gave poetry readings at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival while teaching at the University of British Columbia and at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. Later, he moved around before joining the English department at "Black Mountain II" at the University at Buffalo in 1967. He stayed in this position until 2003, when he began working at Brown University. From 1990 to 2003, he lived with his family in the Black Rock neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, in a converted firehouse located at the corner of Amherst and East Streets. At the time of his death, he was living with the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Creeley became famous in 1962 for his poetry collection For Love. He later won the Bollingen Prize and served as New York State Poet laureate from 1989 to 1991. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 1968, Creeley signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, promising not to pay taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War.

In his later years, Creeley supported and guided many younger poets and people outside the poetry world. He made a point to help others, no matter their connection to poetry. He believed being helpful was important in his life and work. Even when he became well-known, he tried to make strangers feel comfortable when they approached him. In his final years, he used the Internet to stay in touch with younger poets and friends.

Death

Robert Creeley died on the morning of March 30, 2005, in Odessa, Texas, due to problems caused by pneumonia. He was buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 2016, a short documentary was made about Will Creeley, Robert Creeley's son. In the film, Will shared stories about his father's legacy and their relationship. The film was called "For Will."

Poetry

Arthur L. Ford, in his book Robert Creeley (1978, p. 25), describes the poet.

Le Fou, Creeley’s first book, was published in 1952. Since then, his publisher reported that a new collection of poems was released almost every year. The 1983 collection, Mirrors, included more use of clear, visual images. Many readers and critics found it difficult to understand why Creeley was known as an innovative poet, because his changes were often very small. It was even harder for some to see how his work matched the Black Mountain idea—something Creeley explained to Charles Olson, and Olson later shared in his essay Projective Verse—that “the form of a poem is always connected to its meaning.” Creeley’s poems often used short groups of lines, such as pairs, triples, or four-line stanzas, and sometimes rhymed in an unplanned way. An example is “The Hero,” from Collected Poems (1982), which covers events from 1945 to 1975.

“The Hero” uses a style where the number of words in each line changes, usually between three and seven words, with four to six words being most common. Another feature is that the poem does not follow a strict rhyme pattern, though some lines rhyme, and it ends with a rhyming pair of lines. All the stanzas in this poem are four-line groups, as seen in the first two:

Despite these clear formal choices, some critics still say Creeley wrote in “free verse.” However, most of his poems followed strict structures, making it unclear whether they could be considered prose. This poem is clearly written in verse, not prose. M. L. Rosenthal, in his book The New Poets, wrote that Creeley focused on creating a personal rhythm, believing that finding a match between the spoken voice and the poem’s meaning was the true goal of poetry. Rosenthal noted that this personal voice is both the center of the poem and a reflection of the poet’s private life. He also wrote, “Despite his appearance as a humble, confused comedian, Creeley often prevented his poems from fully expressing themselves because of his strong presence in the work.” When Creeley used images, they were often effective in creating sensory experiences.

In an essay titled “Poetry: Schools of Dissidents,” academic poet Daniel Hoffman, in The Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing (which he edited), wrote that as Creeley grew older, his work became more broken into parts. Titles of his later collections, such as Words, Pieces, and A Day Book, suggested the fragmented nature of his themes. Hoffman noted that Creeley rarely included ideas about social issues in his work, instead focusing on proving the belief, shared by poet Ezra Pound, that “technique is the test of a person’s sincerity.”

In 1979, jazz bassist Steve Swallow released an album called Home (ECM), which included music set to Creeley’s poems. Creeley later worked with Swallow on three more albums, including So There (ECM, 2005).

Creeley’s early work appeared in the experimental literary magazine Nomad in the early 1960s. After his death, his work was published in a second volume of Collected Poems (2006) and The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, edited by Rod Smith, Kaplan Harris, and Peter Baker, and published in 2014 by the University of California Press.

Film appearances

• Creeley, directed by Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, 1988.
• Poetry in Motion, directed by Ron Mann, 1982.
• Black Mountain Blues, a film still being made directed by Colin Still from Optic Nerve, 2017.
• "For Will," a short film directed by Grayson Goga and Grace Stalley, 2016.

Research resources

• Faas, Ekbert (1990) Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence 1953-1978. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• Faas, Ekbert (2001) Robert Creeley: A Biography. McGill-Queen's University Press.
• The Robert Creeley Papers (432 feet) are stored in the Special Collections and Archives at Stanford University Libraries.
• The Robert Creeley Papers are located at Washington University in St. Louis.
• Records of Robert Creeley are held by Simon Fraser University's Special Collections and Rare Books.