Creeley, Robert White

(b. 21 May 1926 in Arlington, Massachusetts; d. 30 March 2005 in Odessa, Texas), avant-garde poet and influential teacher associated with the experimental Black Mountain School and the Beat generation.

Creeley was the second of two children born to Oscar Slade Creeley, a doctor, and Genevieve Jules Creeley, a nurse. His early years were marred by two tragic incidents: his father’s death in 1930 and the loss of his left eye a year later. Nevertheless, Creeley enjoyed a relatively normal childhood. Raised in a fourteen-room farmhouse in West Acton, Massachusetts, he attended the local public school, worshipped at the Baptist church, and played in the woods behind his home, where he developed a New Englander’s love of nature.

In 1940 Creeley won a scholarship to the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. The atmosphere of the all-male boarding school proved to be a liberating experience after fourteen years spent in a household dominated by women. Stimulated by his studies in literature, he began to write for the Dial, the school’s literary magazine. His literary interests drew him to Harvard in 1943, where his classmates included the novelist John Hawkes and the poet Kenneth Koch. Although Creeley’s eye injury kept him out of the military during World War II, he left school in 1944 to drive an ambulance for the American Field Service in India and Burma, an experience that left him with a lifelong distaste for war.

Creeley returned to Harvard in 1945, leaving again in 1947 without completing his degree. A year earlier he had married Ann MacKinnon, a Radcliffe student with a trust fund of $215 per month. He began corresponding with the poets William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Charles Olson and promoted his own poetry on Cid Corman’s radio show This Is Poetry. Hoping to reduce expenses by living abroad, the Creeleys settled on Majorca in 1952, where they raised three children and founded the Divers Press to publish work by Creeley and his friends. In December 1953 Olson asked Creeley to edit the Black Mountain Review. He accepted the editorship as well as an invitation to teach at Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, in the spring of 1954. His new job offered him an opportunity to join a community of experimental artists and to escape a foundering marriage. He and MacKinnon divorced in 1956.

In March 1956 Creeley left Black Mountain for San Francisco, connecting with the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac as well as the San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. Over the next three months, he lived up to his reputation as a hard-drinking, pugnacious womanizer. Carousing with Kerouac, Creeley was involved in several fistfights. He also had a tempestuous affair with the wife of the poet Kenneth Rexroth, Marthe. Nevertheless, Creeley’s visit to San Francisco resulted in the seventh issue of the Black Mountain Review. Including work by Snyder, McClure, Kerouac, Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Olson, and Creeley himself, it brought together three of the most important literary movements in the second half of the twentieth century: Beat, San Francisco Renaissance, and the Black Mountain School.

In the fall of 1956 Creeley received a BA in English from Black Mountain College and began teaching at the Academy for Boys in Albuquerque, New Mexico. To further advance his teaching career, he enrolled at the University of New Mexico, completing an MA in English in 1959. In January 1957 Creeley met and married his second wife, Bobbie Louise Hoeck (whose last name has also been reported as Hawkins and Hall), who had two children from a previous marriage. The couple had two children of their own before divorcing in 1976.

Throughout the 1950s Creeley’s work appeared mostly in little magazines and small-press publications. In the 1960s, however, he began to receive mainstream recognition. In 1960 he appeared in Don Allen’s influential anthology The New American Poetry and won Poetry magazine’s coveted Levinson Prize. In 1962 Scribners published For Love: Poems 1950–1960. The volume received generally positive reviews, had brisk sales, and was nominated for the National Book Award. Scribners followed with The Island (1963), Creeley’s autobiographical novel based on the dissolution of his first marriage, and an enlarged edition of The Gold Diggers and Other Stories (1965), a collection of stories first published by Divers Press in 1954. Scribners also issued Words (1967) and Pieces (1969), books that helped establish Creeley as an important new voice in American poetry. Creeley’s publishing success advanced his academic stature. After teaching at the University of New Mexico and the University of British Columbia, he landed an appointment at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1966. He remained there for thirty-seven years, leaving in 2003 to accept a position at Brown University.

The 1970s began painfully for Creeley with the deaths of Olson in 1970 and of his mother in 1972. He remained productive, however, as evidenced by the Scribners edition of his Selected Poems (1976). Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Creeley enhanced his reputation by reading at numerous universities and poetry festivals, including the Vancouver Poetry Festival in 1963, the Berkeley Poetry Conference in 1965, and the International Festival of Poetry at the University of Toronto in 1975. In 1976, after the breakup of his second marriage, he embarked on a whirlwind international reading tour. While he was in New Zealand, he met Penelope Highton, twenty-five years his junior. They married in 1977 and had two children. Many of the poems in Hello: A Journal, February 29–May 3, 1976 (1978) reflect the poet’s musings on love and loss.

The 1980s saw the publication of several important collections by New Directions, including Later (1979), Mirrors (1983), and Memory Gardens (1986). Creeley’s later poems evince a growing concern with aging and mortality, something that prompted Penelope to label this period his “graveyard shift.” The University of California’s publication of The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–1975 in 1982 secured Creeley’s reputation. Honors followed one after another. He received the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal in 1987, Yale’s Bollingen Prize in 1999, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1988 and served as New York State Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1991. The University of New Mexico awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1993, the same year the New York Public Library mounted “In Company: Robert Creeley’s Collaborations,” a major exhibit devoted to Creeley’s collaborations with visual artists.

In addition to teaching, Creeley maintained a busy reading schedule and kept in touch with old friends. He visited Ginsberg’s “History of the Beat Generation” class at Brooklyn College in March 1987 and appeared with him at the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! conference in 1994. Creeley suffered from emphysema in later years but never slowed down. He died from complications of lung disease while he was a writer in residence at the Lannan Foundation. He is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Memorial services were held 7 April 2005 at the State University of New York at Buffalo and on 15 April at Brown University.

Creeley, who published more than sixty books and taught for nearly half a century, played a major role in reshaping the course of American poetry in the twentieth century. He will perhaps best be remembered for his declaration that “form is never more than an extension of content,” a major contribution to Olson’s theory of “Projective Verse.” Like the Beats, he was heavily influenced by jazz, sharing their insistence on spontaneity and their concern for process over content. His interest in language contributed to a lean, abstract style, which some critics faulted. Critiquing Creeley’s poems, John Simon once quipped: “They are short; they are not short enough.” John Ashbery, however, took a more generous view. “Robert Creeley’s poetry,” he noted, “is as basic and necessary as the air we breathe; as hospitable, plain and open as our continent itself.” Instrumental in freeing American poetry from the New Critics’ stranglehold, Creeley helped forge a new, postmodern American prosody fit for the twenty-first century.

Creeley’s papers are housed in Stanford University’s Green Library. Other libraries with significant holdings include the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana University, and Yale. Creeley’s autobiography is Autobiography (1990). It is reprinted in Tom Clark’s composite biography, Robert Creeley and the Genius of the American Common Place (1993). Ekbert Faas, Robert Creeley: A Biography (2001), focuses on the first forty years of the poet’s life and includes a substantial memoir by Ann MacKinnon. Published correspondence includes George Butterick, Charles Olson and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence, 10 vols. (1980–1996); and Ekbert Faas and Sabrina Reed, eds., Irving Layton and Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence 1953–1978 (1990). Special issues of journals devoted to Creeley include Athanor 4 (Spring 1973) and William V. Spanos, ed., “Robert Creeley: A Gathering,” boundary 2, 6, no. 3 (Spring–Autumn 1978). The Review of Contemporary Fiction 15, no. 3 (Fall 1995), contains several articles on Creeley, including an interview by Bruce Comens. Interviews with Creeley are collected in Donald Allen, ed., Contexts of Poetry: Interviews, 1961–1971 (1973). Obituaries are in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post (all 1 Apr. 2005). Creeley’s life and work are well documented in audiovisual sources, including Robert Creeley (1990) and Robert Creeley: A 70th Birthday Celebration (1996).

William M. Gargan