Robert Creeley

By Elsa Dorfman [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

An American poet and author of more than sixty books, Creeley is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at UB, and in 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf, and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program.

Through the Black Mountain Review and his own critical writings, Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment—a postwar poetry originating with Pound, Williams, and Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, Edward Dorn, and others.

“Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word. ”

Forrest Gander, A review of "Life & Death"

Creeley published more than sixty books of poetry in the United States and abroad, including If I Were Writing This (New Directions, 2003), Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994 (New Directions, 2001), Life & Death (New Directions, 1998), Echoes (New Directions, 1994), Selected Poems 1945-1990 (University of California Press, 1991), Memory Gardens (Marion Boyars Publishing, 1986), Mirrors (New Directions, 1983), The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (University of California Press, 1982), Later (New Directions, 1979), The Finger (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), and For Love: Poems 1950-1960 (Scribner, 1962).

He also published more than a dozen books of prose, essays, and interviews, including The Island (1963) and The Gold Diggers and Other Stories (1965). He edited such books as Charles Olson’s Selected Poems (1993), The Essential Burns (1989), and Whitman: Selected Poems (1973).

Creeley’s honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation.