Robert Creeley

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Creeley, Robert [White] (1926–2005), Massachusetts‐born poet, graduated from Black Mountain College, where he became close to Charles Olson, whose Selected Writings he edited (1966), and where he was editor of The Black Mountain Review (1954–57). He subsequently traveled widely and became a faculty member (1963) of the State University of New York at Buffalo. With Le Fou (1952) he began publication of numerous brief collections of poetry, selected in For Love (1962), marked by terse, laconic treatments of love, presented with great immediacy. Later volumes—Words (1967), Pieces (1969), The Finger (1970), St. Martin's (1971), A Day Book (1972), Thirty Things (1974), Away (1976), Later (1978), Mirrors (1983), A Calendar (1983), 12 poems, one for each month, among others—show him continuing a stripped‐down style and diction in presenting the problems of understanding in dealing with personal feelings and relations, and he has been described as more existential and spontaneous. Still later volumes of poems include Memories (1984), Memory Gardens (1986), The Company (1988), and Windows (1990). He has also written stories, The Gold Diggers (1954, enlarged 1965); a quasi‐autobiographical novel, The Island (1963), about a young American writer living on Majorca; and critical essays, A Quick Graph (1970) and Was That a Real Poem (1979). The Collected Poems, 1945–75 appeared in 1983 and The Collected Prose in 1984. The so‐called Collected Essays (1989) includes a good deal of fiction written since 1951.

Robert Creeley 1926-2005, American poet, b. Arlington, Mass. He lived in Asia, Europe, and Latin America and taught at various universities in the United States. With Charles Olson , he was a leading member of the Black Mountain school of poetry and for a time (1954-57) was editor of the Black Mountain Review. Creeley's poems have an effect of purity and elegance, with their combination of emotional directness and reticence, their conversational tone, brevity of development, and spare lyricism. His works include the poetry of Pieces (1969), Selected Poems (1976), Memory Gardens (1986), Echoes (1994), Life & Death (1998), Just in Time (2001), and the posthumously published On Earth (2006), and a novel, The Island (1963). Creeley was also a short-story writer and essayist. In addition, from the 1960s on he collaborated on a variety of projects with such artists as Robert Indiana, Georg Baselitz, R. B. Kitaj, Alex Katz, and Susan Rothenberg. Creeley's collected poems were published in 1982 and 1998 and his collected prose in 1984.

Bibliography: See his Autobiography (1990); correspondence with Charles Olson, ed. by G. F. Butterick (8 vol., 1980-87); correspondence with Irving Layton, ed. by E. Faas and S. Reed (1990); studies by A. Mandel (1974), C. D. Edelberg (1978), A. L. Ford (1978), J. Wilson, ed. (1987), T. Clark (1993), A. Cappellazzo and E. Licata, ed. (1999), and L. Rifkin (2000).

Creeley, Robert (1926–2005), American poet and lecturer, and one of the Black Mountain group; he edited (1954–7) the Black Mountain Review. His Collected Poems 1945–1975 was published in 1983.