New poetry from the winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Fdtn., and a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

By any measure—international reputation, influence upon fellow writers and later generations, number of books published, scholarly and critical attention—Robert Creeley (1926–2005) is a literary giant, an outstanding, irreplaceable poet. For many decades readers have remarked upon the almost harrowing emotional nakedness of Creeley’s writing. In the years since his death, it may be that the disappearance of the writer allows that nakedness to be observed more readily and without embarrassment. Written by the foremost critics of his poetry, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work is the first book to treat Creeley’s career as a whole. Masterfully edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, the essays in this collection have been gathered into three parts. Those in “Form” consider a variety of characteristic formal qualities that differentiate Creeley from his contemporaries. In “Power,” writers reflect on the pressure exerted by emotions, gender issues, and politics in Creeley’s life and work. In “Person,” Creeley’s unique artistic and psychological project of constructing a person—reflected in his correspondence, teaching, interviews, collaborations, and meditations on the concept of experience—is excavated. While engaging these three major topics, the authors remain, as Creeley does, intent upon the ways such issues appear in language, for Creeley’s nakedness is most conspicuously displayed in his intimate relationship with words. Contributors Charles Altieri Rachel Blau DuPlessis Stephen Fredman Benjamin Friedlander Alan Golding Michael Davidson Steve McCaffery Peter Middleton Marjorie Perloff Peter Quartermain Libbie Rifkin

In his new collection of poems, Robert Creeley continues to explore the limits and resonances, public and personal, of age. Indeed, the title itself, Echoes, recurs throughout his poetry of the last two decades. Thus "Sonnets" speaks out against the waste of human violence and dogmatism ("Come round again the banal/belligerence almost a/flatulent echo of times"), while the book's closing sequence, "Roman Sketchbook", contemplates with wit and affection the measure of one's literal body in echoing time and place. Creeley as ever articulates the givens of life, its daily fact and possibility, with careful, concise invention. What wind's echo, uplifted spirit? Archaic feelings flood the body. Ah! accomplished.

If youth asks the mirror, "Am I the fairest?" then age, in Robert Creeley's voice asks, "Do you remember me?" And the poems of Life & Death are the mirror's answers: a collage of recollection and salvage, a gathering-in before winter's night. The first section, "Histoire de Florida," is a partial autobiography at a specific time and place. It captures the poet in an engaged and highly compacted moment that deliberately echoes Wallace Stevens's "The Anecdote of the Jar"--A reverberation from the poet's youth. The second section, "Old Poems, Etc.," contains classic reflections - from the doggerel humor of "'Present (Present)'" to parody of early Metaphysical models like George Herbert in "Echo's Arrow." The capstone of this section is the sustained "The Dogs of Auckland," which focuses impressions from an extended time spent in that city and becomes a resume of age and its effects, made vividly objective by the contrasting culture of New Zealand. Artists have always proved decisive company for the poet, and the third section contains the texts of three collaborations with the painter Francesco Clemente.

A critical retrospective of Creeley's work from 1952 to 1982

By Robert Creeley and Elsa Dorfman.

"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."—William Carlos Williams "It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes."—Charles Olson "Robert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."—Allen Ginsberg "His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond." —John Ashbery "Robert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument." —Paul Auster "American poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley."—Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems "Creeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh."—Michael McClure "There is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His Collected Poems extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on."—Charles Bernstein "'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art,' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry making includes breaking) each written line is as consummately fine-tuned as Robert Creeley's."—Susan Howe "He was the main support in the old house of poetry—the main beam."—C.D. Wright, Brown University alumni newsletter "There is no poet like Creeley. His multiple subjectivities and magic syllables have kept us curious and honest. Never a false step, never a less than tender heart for the sound, and the brilliant cognitive, often fierce power therein. What a glorious long life in writing. These late poems keep the brilliant tempo. We are very lucky he is still so much among us."—Anne Waldman "Robert Creeley transformed the momentary, spontaneous music of being alive into a profoundly enduring American art: brilliant, necessary, impeccably scored. He made it new for always."—Peter Gizzi

Letters written during the spring and summer of 1951 convey the artistic concerns of the two writers and share commentary on their poems and essays in progress.