Robert Creeley is one of the most celebrated and influential American poets. A stylist of the highest order, Creeley imbued his correspondence with the literary artistry he brought to his poetry. Through his engagements with mentors such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, peers such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, and mentees such as Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe, and Tom Raworth, Creeley helped forge a new poetry that re-imagined writing for his and subsequent generations. This first-ever volume of his letters, written between 1945 and 2005, document the life, work, and times of one of our greatest writers, and represent a critical archive of the development of contemporary American poetry, as well as the changing nature of letter-writing and communication in the digital era.
Robert Creeley (1926—2005) published more than sixty books of poetry, prose, essays, and interviews in the United States and abroad. His many honors included the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University.
Rod Smith is the author of several collections of poetry, including Deed (2007), editor of the journal Aerial, publisher of Edge Books, and manager of Bridge Street Books in Washington, D.C.
Peter Baker is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Towson University in Maryland. He is the author or editor of six previous volumes, including Detecting Detection: International Perspectives on the Uses of a Plot (2012).
Kaplan Harris is Associate Professor of English at St. Bonaventure University. He has published widely on twentieth-century poetry, including recent articles on Susan Howe, Ted Berrigan, Hannah Weiner, and Kevin Killian.
"Along with his poetic hero, William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley is the great 20th century American poet of the everyday. In these letters, beautifully and meticulously edited and annotated, we get to the see Creeley’s daily life and thoughts up-close, informal, familial, immediate, generous, grieved, stuffed to the brim with poetic insights. These letters show Creeley as exemplary in his support of younger poets who rejected a poetics of complacency that reigns now, as it did in his time. They reveal how he championed the radical modernists of the generation before him. And most important, they place him in the company of those of his own generation in their successful transformation of postwar poetic thinking. 'There is nothing that does not yield its beauty to that sight, not one human term that will not come true there.'” —Charles Bernstein, author of Attack of the Difficult Poems
"Great to watch Bob’s unique style be born and transfigured over years of contact with his chosen company. As he goes to amazing places, always exactly there, speaking to circumstance and stalking circumstance, certainly. Personal address the foundation of both the poetry and the life—a beautifully enacted poetics and ethic." —Alice Notley
512 pp.6 x 9Illus: 1 b/w photograph
9780520241602$65.00|£55.00Hardcover
Jan 2014