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Authors
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
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The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945– 1975 appeared in 1982, and The Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1975–2005 in 2006. The Collected Prose appeared in 1988 and The Collected Essays in 1989. Creeley’s many volumes of poetry include The Whip (1957), A Form of Women (1959), For Love (1962), A Day Book (1970, 1972), Away (1976), Selected Poems (1976), Later (1978), Echoes (1982), Memories (1984), Memory Gardens(1986), The Company (1988), Echoes (1994), Life & Death (1998), If I Were Writing This (2003), and On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay (2006). Creeley has also written fiction, including The Gold Diggers (1954) and The Island (1963). Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961–1971, edited by Donald Allen (1973), is engaging and valuable, and a new selection of interviews, Tales Out of School, appeared in 1993. Many of the essays in Creeley’s Collected Essays illuminate Creeley’s work; the collection also includes important commentary on the work of other poets. The nine volumes of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, edited and published by George Butterick in 1950–52, constitute a remarkable glimpse into the history of contemporary poetry. An important critical discussion of Creeley’s poetry appears in Sherman Paul, The Lost America of Love (1971). Robert von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture, 1945–1980 (1985), includes a discussion of Creeley, as does Libbie Rifkin’s Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avantgarde (2000).
Born in Massachusetts, Robert Creeley began his undergraduate education at Harvard but left after his first year to join the American Field Service in India. Although he returned to his studies a year later, he did not complete a degree. While attempting to establish a literary magazine with a friend, Creeley met the poet Charles Olson, with whom he began a voluminous correspondence. Olson later invited Creeley to join the faculty at Black Mountain College, where Creeley founded and edited the Black Mountain Review. In his poetry, Creeley treats form as an extension of content, often writing about the dynamics of love, a past moment made fresh through memory, and the process of discovery. His collections include The Whip (1957), For Love (1962), Away (1976), Memory Garden (1986), and Selected Poems (1991). Nine volumes of Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence have been published.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
In experimental American verse since 1955, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley are often thought of as a pair. They corresponded vigorously for years about poetry; they taught together at Black Mountain; and they both affirmed a poetry of great freedom, in which form would grow naturally from meaning, from the language of the utterance, and from the self. Out of these shared values, the poems of Olson and Creeley evolved in different directions. Looking at their work comparatively, we can learn more about the tradition of "anti-tradition" and the individual talent.
1. Read carefully the Creeley poems For Love (1962) and Fathers (1986) and the Olson poems Maximus, to Himself (1953) and Celestial Evening, October 1967 (1975).You will notice that in each of these poems, there are sentences which are long or unended and arrangements of words which are difficult to sort out grammatically. What is the effect of these long, difficult, open strings? Is that effect different from one Creeley poem to another? From one Olson poem to the other? Or from the Creeley poems to the Olson poems?
2. A long-standing debate about Walt Whitman's Song of Myself has to do with whether the "I" of that poem transcends the individual ego, becomes more than "Walt Whitman," becomes disembodied and universal. What about the "Maximus" in these selected Maximus Poems? What of the "I" in the Creeley poems? Do they achieve some measure of escape from the ego? If so, where, how, and to what extent?
3. In Creeley's The Door (1959) and Olson's Where Do Poppies Bloom (1975), we see verse in arrangements which suggest traditional forms. The Door makes interesting, erratic use of repetition and even of rhyme; and Where Do Poppies Bloom is written in sprung pentameters and hexameters. Why might these poems have a more "formal" shape than others in the NAAL selections from these two poets? What themes in each poem might resonate with or find strong expression in these forms?
