_:n8ab23abe7cd74410998bf14b64773fadxb0
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"<p>Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended Harvard University from 1943 to 1946, taking time out from 1944 to 1945 to work for the American Field Service in Burma and India. In 1946 he published his first poem, in the Harvard magazine <i>Wake</i>.</p>\n\n<p>In 1949 he began corresponding with <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/william-carlos-williams\">William Carlos Williams</a> and <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/ezra-pound\">Ezra Pound</a>. The following year he became acquainted with the poet <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/charles-olson\">Charles Olson</a>. In 1954, as rector of <a href=\"/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-black-mountain-school\">Black Mountain College</a> (an experimental arts college in North Carolina), Olson invited Creeley to join the faculty and to edit the <i>Black Mountain Review</i>. In 1960 Creeley received a master's degree from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.</p>\n\n<p>Through the <i>Black Mountain Review</i> and his own critical writings, Creeley helped to define an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment—a postwar poetry originating with Pound, Williams, and <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/louis-zukofsky\">Zukofsky</a> and expanding through the lives and works of Olson, <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/robert-duncan\">Robert Duncan</a>, <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/allen-ginsberg\">Allen Ginsberg</a>, <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/denise-levertov\">Denise Levertov</a>, Edward Dorn, and others.</p>\n\n<p>Creeley published more than sixty books of poetry in the United States and abroad, including <i>If I Were Writing This</i> (New Directions, 2003), <i>Just in Time: Poems 1984-1994</i> (New Directions, 2001), <i>Life & Death</i> (New Directions, 1998), <i>Echoes</i> (New Directions, 1994), <i>Selected Poems 1945-1990</i> (University of California Press, 1991), <i>Memory Gardens</i> (Marion Boyars Publishing, 1986), <i>Mirrors</i> (New Directions, 1983), <i>The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975</i> (University of California Press, 1982), <i>Later</i> (New Directions, 1979), <i>The Finger</i> (Black Sparrow Press, 1968), and <i>For Love: Poems 1950-1960</i> (Scribner, 1962).</p>\n\n<p>In a review of <i>Life & Death</i>, <a href=\"/poetsorg/poet/forrest-gander\">Forrest Gander</a> wrote: \"Robert Creeley has forged a signature style in American poetry, an idiosyncratic, highly elliptical, syntactical compression by which the character of his mind's concentrated and stumbling proposals might be expressed ... Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through feeling at thought and word.\"</p>\n\n<p>He also published more than a dozen books of prose, essays, and interviews, including <i>The Island</i> (1963) and <i>The Gold Diggers and Other Stories</i> (1965). He edited such books as Charles Olson's <i>Selected Poems</i> (1993), <i>The Essential Burns</i> (1989), and <i>Whitman: Selected Poems</i> (1973).</p>\n\n<p>Creeley's honors include the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Rockefeller Foundation grant, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He served as New York state poet laureate from 1989 to 1991 and as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and Humanities at the State University of New York, Buffalo. He was elected a <a href=\"/academy-american-poets/chancellors\">Chancellor</a> of the Academy of American Poets in 1999. On March 30, 2005, Creeley died at the age of 78.</p>"
<https://poets.org/poet/robert-creeley>