for Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
In Memory
Memorial
Reading
for Robert Creeley
Tributes by Carla Harryman, Kathryne Lindberg
Glen Mannisto, Ken Mikolowski, Ted Pearson
George Tysh, and Barrett Watten
The
Welcome Center, Wayne State University
20 April 2005, 7:00-9:00 pm
Program
Videotaped readings
NET Outtakes 1 (interviews recorded in 1965) and 2 (readings from Creeley, "For Love," "The Heroes," and "Heroes")
Ted Pearson
"Apropos Creeley"; click here
Ken Mikolowski
Remarks; letter from Penelope Creeley; reading of Creeley, "Caves" (2004)
Kathryne Lindberg
Content t/k
Glen Mannisto
Content t/k
Carla Harryman
Content t/k
George Tysh
Content t/k
Barrett Watten
Reading from Watten, "The Beneficent Eye: Reflections on Creeley"; Creeley, "Surgeons," "The Hole," "The Tiger," and "For Anya"; click here
DVD compilation
From Robert Creeley (The Lannan Foundation, 1989), Poetry USA (NET, 1965), and "The Word," from Poetry USA Today (t/k). Courtesy C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander, Brown University
Biographical Note
In a career that spanned six decades and was international in scope, Robert Creeley (1926-2005) was one of the most influential American poets of the last half century as well as a gifted fiction writer and essayist. He taught at SUNY Buffalo, Brown University, San Francisco State University, and elsewhere. Creeley is known as a central figure of the Black Mountain School of poetry, which became widely known with Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poets, in 1960. The 1960s witnessed the publication of the For Love, Words, Pieces, and A Day Book, volumes that established Creeley's incisive, minimalist style and anticipated the "turn to language" of postmodern poetry in the 1970s. His novel The Island and collection of stories The Gold Diggers appeared in that period as well, followed by volumes of literary criticism and interviews (A Quick Graph and Contexts of Poetry). In 1975, University of California Press published the first of his Collected Poems; titles appearing in the next decades included Mirrors, Memory Gardens, Windows, Echoes, Life and Death, and most recently If I Were Writing This, as well as two further volumes of collected poetry.