Robert Creeley - Part 1

Robert Creeley 1926-2005
Robert Creeley, like Robert Duncan, was involved with Black Mountain College, the New American Poetry, and the Beat movement. He was an iconoclastic and modest person who, at some personal cost to overcome his lack of ease in public, nevertheless made himself available to many scholars and students who sought to understand the social and cultural upheavals of the latter half of the 20thy Century. He lived a somewhat nomadic literary life but settled for long periods in certain places-luckily, during the 1970s in Bolinas, California a legendary bohemian village on the Pacific Coast north of San Francisco. When he came to class, he was interested in helping with the goals, or as he put it, “preoccupations” of the class and to that end, he read from prose accounts of earlier, iconic times in the Bay Area including a rollicking party with Jack Kerouac and others at The Dharma Bums house in Mill Valley. In stark contrast to Robert Duncan’s expansive and all inclusive poems, Creeley’s tend to be compact, concise, compressed snapshots of things. At their best, they capture the essence of a moment of perception-as Kerouac put it, explaining his coined phrase, “The Naked Lunch,”-“that frozen moment when everyone sees what’s on the end of the fork.”