Robert Creeley was born in Massachusetts in 1926 and graduated from Black Mountain College where he befriended Charles Olson and edited The Black Mountain Review. Publications include: For Love (1962); Words (1967); Pieces (1969); The Finger (1970); St Martin's (1971); A Day Book (1972); Thirty Things (1974); Away (1976); Later (1978) and Memory Gardens (1986). He has also written prose, including The Gold Diggers (1954/65) and The Island (1963); as well as essays A Quick Graph (1970) and Was That a Real Poem (1979).
Creeley has lived in Guatemala, Finland, France and Spain, and served with the American Field Service in India and Burma. He believes his world "has been one insistently involved with the unrelieved consequence of his being literally human - the cultish 'existentialism' of his youth grown universal." He was awarded the Horst Bienek Lyrikpreis from the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant and was New York State Laureate from 1989-91. He is a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and lives in Buffalo, New York. He held the poetics chair at the State University of NY at Buffalo prior to Charles Bernstein.
"Why poetry? Its materials are so constant, simple, elusive, specific. It costs so little and so much. It preoccupies a life, yet can only find one living. It is a music, a playful construct of feeling, a last word and communion" (selected Poems 1945-1990).
For over 50 years Robert Creeley has given shape and breadth to a unique form of verse. Lee Harwood writes: "he has an amazing intensity when he reads. Every 'and', 'the' and 'but' matter. No superfluous words or literary pirouettes. Just trying to get to the heart of the 'matter'".
In October 1995 Robert Creeley gave a reading of his poetry to the Six Towns Poetry Festival (Barracks Studios, Newcastle - under - Lyme), followed by a paper at Keele on the poetry scene in America from the 1950's to 1990's.
