Robert Creeley

While introducing Robert Creeley to an audience at his 70th birthday celebration in 1996, poet Susan Howe painted the definitive picture of Creeley by likening his poetic concerns to those of Walt Whitman. Howe invoked an essay Creeley had once written for the Introduction to the Penguin Selected Whitman, in which he noted Whitman's desire for "absolute communion with others." Like Whitman, Creeley has cultivated in his poetry a supreme desire for absolute communion with others since the establishment of his decades-spanning career as a uniquely American poet with the publication of his first work in the Harvard magazine Wake in 1946.

Creeley's quest for communion was predictably circuitous. He left Harvard in 1944 to join the American Field Service in India, returned a year later but, with one term to go before receiving a degree, dropped out again. He began corresponding with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound in 1949, and began his friendship with Charles Olson the following year. In 1954 Olson invited him to join the faculty of Black Mountain College where he founded and edited the Black Mountain Review. Through the Review and his own sagacious essays, he assisted in defining an emerging counter-tradition to the literary establishment which would be forever changed by the likes of Olson, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others.

Creeley received a B.A. from the University of New Mexico in 1960 while teaching at a boy's school in Albuquerque. Though he has had many visiting posts, he has been a professor at SUNY Buffalo since 1966. For the past 50 years he has been an indefatigable advocate of poetic experimentation, challenging the established canons of literary taste and, through his own idiosyncratic use of language, leading by example the most avant-garde writers of the last five decades in the exploration of the linguistic, lyrical, and musical foundations of poetry.

Written over a three week period while Creeley was involved in a workshop, "Histoire de Florida" is a kind of day-book which Creeley claims is "something that in its own way has to do with the preoccupation of living dearly, and particularly with other people. [It is a] daily preoccupation and activity, and also a curious taking stock of trying to not just define oneself, but to get located - what were one's defining imaginations of whatever it was that one seems to have as a life."

Joe Francis Doerr