Robert White Creeley
Bibliography:
Robert White Creeley was born in Arlington-Symmes Hospital in Arlington, Massachusetts on May 21, 1926. He was the son of Dr. Oscar Slade Creeley and nurse Genevieve Jules and a brother to one sister. When Creeley was young he lost his father and in addition to that faced difficult challenges with only having one eye, having lost the other in a car accident. Creeley was raised on a farm with his mother and sister and took on the obligations of being the man of the household. When he was fourteen he was granted a scholarship to Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1943 Creeley graduated and went on to continue his education at Harvard Universty, where he made a few of his first publications in the school papers and journals. However, the young poet dropped out the following year to serve in World War One where he worked in the American Field Service driving ambulances around in Burma and India. Creeley returned home two years later and reenrolled into Harvard but instead in 1995 he took his Bachelors Degree from Black Mountain College, a school known for it’s art education and practice. After receiving his diploma he resided in Littleton, New Hampshire for a while working as a farmer on his own land. In 1951 Creeley and his wife, Ann, and their three children picked up and moved to Mallorca, an island that is associated with the Balearic Islands. Here Ann and him established Divers Press, and within three years of their business they had published over a dozen literary pieces. Throughout this time Creeley also taught at Black Mountain College and also continued to serve as a valid editor of the Black Mountain Review, as he did when he was a student. Through 1958 and 1961 the successful Creeley taught at Albuquerque Academy, an all boys school. In 1962 he went to teach at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, where he had gotten his masters in 1960. Through 1963 and 1986 Creeley traveled America teaching and lecturing at various universities such as: the University of New Mexico (1963-1065), State University of New York at Binghampton (1985, 1986), State University of New York at Buffalo (1967). Throughout Creeley’s life he had made several publications one of his biggest was in 1962 with his piece For Love: Poems 1950-1960. Some of his other works include: Poems 195-1965 (1965), Words (1967), Away (1976), Echoes (1982), Mirrors (1983), Memory Gardens (1986), The Company (1988), Later (1979) Myself (1977), About Women (1966), Hi There (1965), The Boy (1968), Mazatlan (1969), Two Poems (1964), Distance (1964), The Whip (1957) and If You (1956). In addition to Creeley’s poetry publications he also had published several essays and fictional short pieces like: The Island (1963), The Gold Diggers and Other Stories (1965), The Collected Prose (1988) and The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (1989). In recogniztion to all of his works Creeley received many awards such as the Bullingen Prize (1999), the Lannon Lifetime Achievement Award (2001), the New York State Poet (1989) and the Robert Frost Medal (1987). two of the Guggenheim Fellowships and the Shelley Memorial Away.
Books:
Some of Robert Creeley's publications include:
[1] Le Fou (1952)
[2] The Immoral Proposition (1953)
[3] The Kind of Act (1953)
[4] The Gold Diggers (1954)
[5] The Gold Diggers and Other Stories (1965)
[6] A Snarling Garland of Xmas Verses (1954)
[7] All That is Lovely in Men (1955)
[8] If You (1956)
[9] The Whip (1957)
[10] A Form of Women (1960)
[11] For Love: Poems 1950-1960 (1962)
[12] The Island (1964)
[13] Words (1967)
[14] Poems 1950-1065 (1966)
[15] The Charm: Early and Uncollected Poems (1971)
[16] Robert Creeley Reads (1967)
[17] A Sigh (1967)
[18] Divisions and Other Early Poems (1968)
[19] The Finger (1970)
[20] 5 Numbers (1968)
[21] Pieces (1969)
[22] Mazatian (1969)
[23] In London (1970)
[24] A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays (1970)
[25] 1234567890 (1971)
[26] St. Martin’s (1971)
[27] A Day Book (1972)
[28]Listen (1972)
[29] For My Mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley 8 April 1887-7 October 1972 (1973)
[30] His Idea (1973)
[31] Inside Out (1973)
[32] Thirty Things (1974)
[33] Backwards (1975)
[34] The Door (1975)
[35] Away (1976)
[36] Hello (1976)
[37] Presences: a Text for Marisol (1976)
[38] Mabel: A Story (1977)
[39] Thanks (1977)
[40] Later: A poem (1978)
[41] Later (1980)
[42] Echoes (1982)
[43] A Calendar 1984 (1983)
[44] Mirrors (1983)
[45] The Collected Prose of Robert Creeley (1988)
[46] Window (1988)
[47] The Company (1988)
[48] The Collected Essays of Robert Creeley (1988)
[49] Dreams (1989)
[50] Places (1990)
[51] Windows (1990)
[52] The Old Days (1991)
[53] Selected Poems (1991)
[54] Life and Death (1993)
[55] Loops: Ten Poems (1991)
Mood:
A Feeling of Love: A great number of Creeley’s poetry express this feeling of love. A love that is simple and pure, not complicated and unknown. Take for example two stanzas that come from Creeley’s poem “The Rain”, “Love, if you love me,\ lie next to me.\ Be for me, like rain,\ the getting out\ of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-\ lust of intentional indifference.\ Be wet/ with a decent happiness” (KLEINZAHLER, New York Times). Here he speaks to his lover and tells her to be like rain, something so authentic and natural. Most of Creeley’s poems address these matters of love. his poems are very personal and are his devoted emotions to his friends and family. Critic Louis L. Martz explains Creeley’s poem The Finger” as a deep apprehension of love he goes further to say, “Here [in the poem] the finger turns out to be the mind reaching out from ‘that time [when] I was a stranger’ toward the apprehension of woman as an abstraction of all the ancient mythological qualities named Aphrodite or Athena; not a woman, then, but rather the varied presence of woman-ness” (Arbor, 241). This thought that is presented to the audience if rather big and deep but those are Creeley’s poems for you. The idea a woman is so extraordinary is presented in the poem “The Finger” in the following lines, “She was tall with\ extraordinary grace. Her face\ was al distance, her eyes\ the depth of all one had though of,\ again and again and again.”
A Feeling of Isolation and Fear: Even though Creeley’s poems discuss these feelings of adulation and passion towards particular people he still wraps his thoughts and imagery around this inkling of mere fear of isolation. One particular poem that exemplifies this notion is in his poem “Language”.
Locate I
love you some-
where in
teeth and
eyes, bite
it but
take care not
to hurt, you
want so
much so
little. Words
say everything.
I
love you
again,
then what
is emptiness
for. To
This excerpt from the poem “Language” goes far to say that Creeley’s thoughts are bound up by images and feelings of isolation and seclusion. Here knows that there is someone out there for him but he can not find her and only at this point in time he feels alone.
One other poem that does a good job demonstrating Creeley’s thoughts of alienation is in the poem “Somebody Died”. The following stanzas demonstrate a figure whose mere being is to be alone and whose passing image just appears to be nothing more but a passing person:
What Shall we know we don’t know,
that we know we know we don’t know.
The head walks
down the
street with
an umbrella.
People
were walking
by.
The image that Creeley creates in this poem is remarkable. It is such a simple creation, nothing too extravagant yet manages to convey his feelings of despair. One other poem that does a good job in doing this is “The Act of Love.” His words again are very simple. He does not elongate his ideas or his thoughts, he is very straightforward in his writings.
In
bed I yearn
for softness, turning
always to you. Don’t,
one wants to cry,
desert me! Have I
studied
all such isolation
just to
be alone?
MOVEMENTS:
Robert Creeley along with all his other fellow writers were part of the “Projective Verse Movement”. The idea in the movement was to replace the traditional poetry that was being written at the time. Charles Olson, a distinguishable American poet, labeled this type of poetry and also gave it other names such as “Open Composition” or “Composition by Field”. The idea behind Olson’s term was to allow more relaxation and freedom within writing. And his idea later became an inspiration for all following poets. However, in addition to this small movement Creeley became a influential poet in the American Poets.
SIMILAR ARTISTS:
Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsbery, John Wieners, Denise Leverton, Lary Eigner and Edward Dorn.
INFLUENCE BY:
The distinguishable poet was influenced by partner Charles Olson, another American Poet who took part in the same movement. Creeley looked up to him when he was just starting and eventually formulated a bond with him and eventually had the opportunity to work with him in his writings.
FOLLOWERS:
Robert Creeley was one of the most influential poets of his time and he had a great impact on the future of poetry. He was not afraid to be different and took the chance to be and in return changed the world of poetry. his poetry shaped the minds of the group of poets in the New Critics and this included artists like F.R Leavis, William Empson, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Cleathe Brooks, T.S Eliot and R.P Blackmur.
WORKS CITED
Creeley, Robert W. So There. New York City, NY: New Directions Company, 1998.
Faas, Ekbert. Robert Creeley: A Biography. Montreal , Canada: McGill Queen's UP, 2001.
http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/creeley/bib.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/books/review/Kleinzahler-t.html?ei=5088&en=c4d04c3bbcfe48ab&ex=1361509200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Critics
http://project1.caryacademy.org/echoes/03-04/Robert_Creeley/defaultcreeley.htm
http://www.diacenter.org/prg/poetry/87_88/creeleybio.html
http://www.poltroonpress.com/creeley.html
http://www.lib.uconn.edu/online/research/speclib/ASC/findaids/Creeley/MSS19780008.html#d0e56
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/creeley.html
http://www.lib.uconn.edu/online/research/speclib/ASC/findaids/Creeley/MSS19780008.html
