Events to celebrate Creeley and his work
Exhibition, readings, panel discussion among festivities to take place this month

By PATRICIA DONOVAN
News Services Editor

Robert Creeley, one of the country's best-known poets, will be honored during a series of events to be held this month at UB.

Creeley has deserved the sobriquet "eminent" for many years but during the last few months his face and name have become, well, ubiquitous. He's on the news, he's in newspaper ads, he's in the middle of a literary controversy and now he's about to be the focus of a major Robert Creeley panegyric, something that is becoming an annual event in Western New York.

In February, Creeley was awarded the Yale University Library's coveted Bollingen Prize for Poetry, one of the most prestigious awards of its kind in the United States. As a result, Creeley and his work once again were applauded by his colleagues and students, the national press, America's poetry community (at least most of it) and no doubt by Stanford University, which just saw an increase in the value of its substantial Creeley archive.

In March, following a nationally-reported literary coup de poets, he was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the American Academy of Poetry (AAP) along with several other pioneering writers who represent minority forms, themes and approaches to fin de siecle American life.

His election puts Creeley in a position to influence the distribution of a number of the academy's prizes and fellowships in a manner that is expected to take the academy in new directions. It's just sauce for the goose, though. Even before his election, Creeley had been publicly lauded and widely recognized as one of the most influential poets of the late 20th century.

This Sunday, Creeley will appear in a full-page advertisement for the State University of New York in the "Education Life" supplement of The New York Times.

And coming up this month, UB will participate in a series of events celebrating aspects of the poet's longtime collaborations with important figures in jazz, poetry, painting, printmaking, sculpture and other plastic media.

The hoopla speaks not only to Creeley's success as a poet, but to the quality of his engagement with colleagues, students, other writers and artists and the Western New York community in which he has lived for more than 30 years. He is a friend to many in Buffalo and his softspoken, sincere, everyguy demeanor makes him amazingly approachable for a man of his literary stature.

In connection with the current celebration, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities will sponsor a panel discussion featuring major American artists who have worked with the poet to produce collaborations involving performance, words, visual representation and contingent themes. "Walking the Dog: Robert Creeley and the Visual Arts" will take place April 10 at 2 p.m. in the Screening Room, Center for the Arts, UB North Campus. It is free and open to the public.

The discussion will focus on the many joint artistic ventures between Creeley and the panel participants. They include Jim Dine, the eminent American painter, sculptor and graphic artist; John Chamberlain, one of America's most distinguished sculptors, noted for the improvisational air of his colorful welded scrap constructions; the prolific and popular historian and author William Loren Katz, whose documentation of black life in the 19th century overturned many erroneous assumptions about African American history.

Texas sculptor James Surls will also join the talk, as will Jonathan Williams, the idiosyncratic publisher of the idiosyncratic and highly-regarded Jargon Press, a poet long associated with Black Mountain College, which Creeley helped to found.

The panel will be moderated by curator, writer and critic Kevin Power, chair of American literature at the University of Alicante, Spain, who has written extensively on American poetry and art.

On the same day, the Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University will open its special exhibition, "In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations," curated by Elizabeth Licata, with a public reception from 6-8 p.m. The exhibit will run through June 13 before traveling to New York City, the University of North Carolina, the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Stanford University and other sites. Museum hours are Wednesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, 1-5 p.m.

A concurrent exhibition sponsored by the UB Poetry/Rare Books Collection, Apropos Robert Creeley, will be on display April 12-June 31 in the Poetry/Rare Books Room, 420 Capen Hall, on UB's North Campus. The exhibit, curated by Robert Bertholf, will be open to the public Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The festivities will also include a poetry reading, featuring writers Bobby Louise Hawkins and Michael Palmer, who also recently was named to the Board of Chancellors of the AAP. The reading is April 9 at 8 p.m. in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 2495 Main St., Buffalo.

Finally, Creeley buffs can get jazzed at a performance for the poet by jazz artists Assif Tsahar and Susie Ibarra April 18 at 8 p.m. at Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.