In Memoriam:

Robert Creeley

BY BARBARA GALLETLY

"I cannot cut down trees with my bare hands, which is the measure of both tree and hand. In that way I feel that poetry, in the very subtlety of its relation to image and rhythm, offers an intensely various record of such facts. It is equally one of them."

-Robert Creeley, 1964

ROBERT CREELEY was born in 1926 in Arlington, Massachusetts. He lost his father at age four and his left eye at five, but nonetheless enjoyed his childhood, much of which he spent in the fields and woods surrounding his New England home, according to Mary Novik's A Creeley Chronology. A precocious child and teenager, he attended Harvard, where he soon developed a reputation as a gifted writer. Creeley did not graduate, however; instead, he left school in 1944 to drive an ambulance in the India-Burma theater of the Second World War. It was there that he was introduced to the poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams.

Though he would return to Harvard, Creeley never did finish his degree, choosing instead to focus his efforts on the publication of various avant-garde magazines and on getting his own work included in them. During that time he and his first wife, Ann, produced three children. Together the family moved to France and then Spain, where he established close relationships with many of the best-known poets of the 50s. The couple divorced, and Creeley returned alone to the United States.

From then on he taught regularly-first at the legendary Black Mountain College in North Carolina alongside many other influential artists like Charles Olson, Jasper Johns, and John Cage, and then in New Mexico at an all-boys day school. He married a woman by the name of Bobbie Louise Hoeck with whom he had two children. As the couple spent the early 1960s in Guatemala and Vancouver, Creeley gained increasing recognition in the States. During that time his work appeared in the New York Times as well as in the highly respected Black Mountain Review and Origins magazine, which he helped to create, organize, or edit. In 1976 he divorced again and within a year had remarried, this time to Penelope Highton, who would survive him. In 1978, he became the Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo where he stayed for more than two decades, until coming to Brown in 2003.

At Brown, Creeley taught courses in the English Department as he maintained his highly active engagement in the world of poetry. Hardly a relic of the past, he had a notorious knack for talking with great authority on things old and new. Most recently, he taught a class on New American Poetry-still, the subject matter for the class was never more than a jumping off point for a deep cultural investigation aimed at contextualizing poetry and establishing its importance in our society.

According to undergraduate and graduate students who knew him, Professor Creeley could not only write but also talk on any topic, thanks no doubt to 78 years of wide-ranging life experience. Though he may never have fully answered even the simplest of questions, he had a knack for guiding his discussions around them and most of all for talking without end. Adam Tobin, MFA '05, characterized his humor as peculiar, dry and distinctively "Maine," a holdover from his New England childhood. Appropriately, Tobin received an email last week that included a picture of Professor Creeley at his desk-with oxygen tanks in the background.

Creeley spent the last week of his life away from the school, writing under the aegis of the Lannon Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Even on his deathbed, Creeley maintained a prolific correspondence with fellow poets and students, never tiring of writing in any form. He died the recipient of many prestigious awards like a Rockefeller Grant and a Guggenheim fellowship and the object of much respect, adulation, and inspiration. He was the author, editor, or compiler of more than 60 volumes of poetry, the father of eight, and a dear friend to many more.

Barbara Galletly B'05 puts the bite back into obituaries

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