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 May 2005 Back to Table of Contents Back to Archives Main Page Section: Arts & Letters Robert Creeley Saying Goodbye By Pat Donovan
He was in Texas conducting a writer’s residency under the auspices of the Lannan Foundation when he succumbed to complications of pneumonia, his wife Penny and the youngest of his nine children, Will and Hannah, at his side. Even the most distant of us will have our little memories of the Creeleys. Had it not been for me, for instance, Will, as a rambunctious two-year-old, would have been trampled (yes, trampled!) by the leaping dancers of the University at Buffalo Zodiaque Dance Company at one of his father’s readings in the now defunct Bethune Hall on Main Street in Buffalo. Like Artemis, patroness of small animals, I snatched the child up as he hopped among twenty flying hooves and held him tight until it was safe for him to be released. In return, he peed in my lap. Grossly belaboring our two degrees of separation, I reminded Bob a few years ago that had it not been for me, his son would have gone through life with toenail scars on his face. He proudly replied that it was the valedictorian of that year’s NYU graduating class who had left me smelling like an excited puppy. Creeley, who is often cited as one of the most important and influential poets of the last half-century, was a member of the UB faculty from 1966 to 2003, when he left to become a Distinguished Professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He was highly regarded as a teacher and founded both UB’s nationally-recognized Program in Poetics and its Wednesdays at 4 PLUS Literary Reading Series. His leadership drew such distinguished and profoundly influential literary figures as Charles Bernstein, Susan Howe and Steve McCaffery to the faculty, not to mention the dozens of others he helped bring here as visiting professors and lecturers. He was a generous and active member of the Western New York literary community, deeply involved with local literary efforts, particularly the Just Buffalo Literary Center, as well as CEPA Gallery, Hallwalls and other institutions for whom he often participated in benefit readings. Among his community efforts was helping to establish a computer program with City Honors High School, usually on his own time and often involving his own money. I Know A Man As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking,—John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy the goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ’s sake, look out where yr going. Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts in May, 1926 and raised in West Acton. He famously lost his left eye in a childhood accident. Famously, because after wearing (and disliking) the glass eye that replaced the original when he was five, he cast it aside at 18 and after that, wore neither patch nor prosthesis, thus provoking in a pronounced idiosyncratic squint when he spoke or read in public. He attended Harvard, leaving to become an ambulance driver in WWII, tried subsistance farming in New Hampshire in the forties, before setting out on long career which changed the face of poetry forever. Robert Creeley will be remembered as an originator of the Black Mountain school of poetry, named after the North Carolina college that he attended and where he taught with poets Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, both of whom also had lasting relationships with UB. Black Mountain established a new and anti-academic poetic tradition that has been reflected in the work of many poets who have come to occupy significant places in the 20th-century literary canon. He wrote more than 60 books of poetry and criticism and is known as well for the diversity of his collaborations with artists outside his own authority. These include records with two decisive jazz composer/musicians, the bassist Steve Swallow and saxophonist Steve Lacy and the alternative mix rock group Mercury Rev. He also worked for more than three decades with visual artists — John Altoon, Robert Indiana, Jim Dine, R.B. Kitaj, Francesco Clemente, John Chamberlain, Georg Baselitz, Alex Katz and Susan Rothenberg among them. He was the recipient of many major honors and distinctions. Among them are the Bollingen Prize, the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writers Award, several Fulbright Awards, and the America Award in Poetry. Creeley was a member of the Board of Chancellors of the American Academy of Poets and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which honors distinguished experts and intellectuals from many fields. He was a recipient of UB’s highest honor, the Chancellor Charles P. Norton Medal, and in 1988 received the Walt Whitman Citation from the New York State Writers’ Institute and, in accordance with the citation, was named New York State Poet Laureate for 1989-91. She Is Far from me thinking her long warmth, close- ness, how her face lights, changes, how I miss her, want no more time without her. While his work was often stunning and always influential, his distinctions were great, his relationships of great importance to American literature, and his honors many, Bob Creeley’s loss is felt most deeply here as a friend, colleague, teacher and neighbor. Michael Basinski, curator of the UB Poetry Collection, speaks for many hundreds of Western New Yorkers when he says, “Bob was a friend to me and to many at UB and in Buffalo, particularly those of us in the literary community. We will miss him very, very much. Buffalo Evening Steady, the evening fades up the street into sunset over the lake. Winter sits quiet here, snow piled by the road, the walks stamped down or shoveled. The kids in the time before dinner are playing, sliding on the old ice. The dogs are out, walking, and it’s soon inside again, with the light gone. Time to eat, to think of it all. Water Music The words are a beautiful music. The words bounce like in water. Water music, loud in the clearing off the boats, birds, leaves. They look for a place to sit and eat-- no meaning, no point. Goodbye Now I recognize it was always me like a camera set to expose itself to a picture or a pipe through which the water might run or a chicken dead for dinner or a plan inside the head of a dead man. Nothing so wrong when one considered how it all began. It was Zukofsky’s “Born very young into a world already very old...” The century was well along when I came in and now that it’s ending, I realize it won’t be long. But couldn’t it all have been a little nicer, as my mother’d say. Did it have to kill everything in sight, did right always have to be so wrong? I know this body is impatient. I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home. “I Know a Man” and “Water Music” from The Collected Works of Robert Creeley. “She Is” and “Buffalo Evening” from So There, Robert Creeley, 1976-1983. “Goodbye” first appeared in The Exquisite Corpse. Reprint courtesy of University of California Press back to top back to table of contents Current Issue | About Forever Young | Where to Find | Advertise | Our Advertisers | Community Calendar | Contest | Clubs | Contact Us | Archives | Home |
