21 May Remembering Robert Creeley: Onward #5

At Just Buffalo Literary Center we’re proud to present this ongoing collection of community remembrances honoring Robert Creeley’s life & legacy in Western New York and beyond. Thank you to everyone who has shared your memory, reflection, or personal story.

With Bob, March 1987

Quite by chance, Roy Roussell, Bob and I found ourselves at the Buffalo Airport waiting to board the plane to Boston, Roy to see his wife in Cambridge, Bob to read at Harvard, I to read at Wellesley.

It was Bob’s first return to Harvard for what he later called his “vindication.” From nervousness perhaps, he spoke to me about his social difficulties as a Harvard undergrad who came from a chicken farm in Western Mass.

I put my hand on Bob’s shoulder and said with great solemnity, “Bob, you should have gone to City College like me.”

—Irving Feldman

CREDO

after Robert Creeley

No one is holding my hand right now
but someone is playing the cello
in the corner of the cafe and I drift
into whatever life is. Outside, the moon
wears an eyepatch and its light is hitting
cracks that haven’t been touched in years.

—Justin Karcher

I only met “Bob” a couple times, but the first was when I emailed him in 2002 or so to ask a question about a paper I was writing. He had no reason to get back to me, an undergraduate not in his classes. I asked if he thought the Beats should be introduced in high school rather than college courses. He wrote back thoughtfully and thoroughly, and I wish I would’ve saved that email. I do remember that he said the Beats wouldn’t have liked any label that made their work general rather than specific as each writer hoped to be seen as an individual. Many professors would not have responded, I’m sure.

The second time I met him was when Jim Sampas came to Buffalo with a lost Kerouac manuscript and asked Creeley to record a reading of it at a studio I recorded at often in those years (same building as The Cave now). The studio manager called me knowing I’d love it and let me pretend to be an intern. I could tell Sampas was a little uncomfortable with anybody being there, so I left after running out of pencils to sharpen. 😌 I ran into him on my way home asking for directions at a Tim Horton’s (before smart phones) and admitted I just wanted to be a fly on the wall. Sampas was friendly enough. Bob could not have been a gentler human being, from what I have gathered, and I love hearing stories from friends who knew him.

Cheers to all who value such hearts and spirits all for the love of words. 🙏

—Maria Sebastian

I’ve never had the honor of meeting Robert Creeley in person, but I’ve always admired him from afar as a writer who built a new world and changed the minds inhabiting it. I have always imagined him undertaking a voyage to my home country, Morocco, during his time in the Spanish Mallorca. What poems could have he composed about our medina’s mazes, their bustling souks, mesmerizing public gardens and strange characters?

I first came across his name when I embarked on my doctoral research on the Beats and Morocco. I was then reading and examining the Beats’ poems, journals, photographs and letters with the hope of stumbling upon something that would divulge their impressions, conceptions and representations of Morocco, its people and culture. Together with Kerouac, Orlovsky, Burroughs, Corso and Ferlinghetti, Creeley would regularly appear in Allen Ginsberg’s letters as a trusted editor, close confidant, and fellow vanguard poet; all legitimate reasons that pushed me to look him up. I would learn that Creeley helped type up copies of Ginsberg’s magnum opus Howl in San Francisco before its official publication by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights. I would learn that Creeley and Ginsberg were born in the same year and mutually contributed to the American avant-garde poetic tradition through their different streams: The Black Mountain College and the Beat Generation. As a matter of fact, Creeley acted as the crucial bridge between the academic Black Mountain Poets and the countercultural Beat Generation. After the Black Mountain College shut down, Creeley devoted the final volume of the Black Mountain Review to feature and introduce the work of the Beat poets to a wider literary audience.

From my preliminary readings of Creeley’s poems in Donald Allen’s highly influential 1960 anthology The New American Poetry: 1945-1960 ( which I bought from Powell’s Books during one of my Beat trips in USA), I would venture into his vast poetic world by perusing his Just in Time: Poems 1984–1994; Life & Death; Selected Poems 1945–1990 and Collected Poems published by the University of California. I must admit that as a high school rebellious egghead, I fell under the spell of Ginsberg’s breathless, expansive and sprawling epics. However, as I aged, I got infatuated by Creeley’s sense of distinct wisdom that he always manages to succinctly work into his pruned, minimalist verse. This a feature that is not vividly observed in his contemporaries, in Robert Duncan, Charles Olson or Paul Blackburn. What I admired most about his poetry is his profound immersion in the present, in the actual moment of his composition as a total sum of both the physical and the emotional experience of the world outside of his subjectivity. This is a distinctive feature that permeates his poetry and helps retrieve the silences that he could not keep for himself: retrieval of silences resulting from broken marriages and other vicissitudes of mundane life. As I developed my own poetic style, I aspired most towards Creeley’s absolute honesty that seeks to make sense of a chaotic world through highly minimalist, highly measured, highly compressed poems that championed spontaneous speech and broken syntax over rigid academic norms. When I compose my poems I think of the artistic dictum he coined: “Form is never more than an extension of content.” Equally, I am indebted to his collaboration with poet Charles Olson who penned the famous 1950 manifesto “Projective Verse” which I extensively use for my poetry/ poetics classes.

The admiration and appreciate I have for Creeley took me on a Beat trip in 2013 from Morocco to Bolinas where Creeley joined a famous countercultural community of writers and poets. I was visiting the great late poet Joanne Kyger at the time. Just before I got to Bolinas, I was at Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetic, Naropa, where I also had the honor of meeting and chatting with Bobbie Louise Hawkins, a prominent Beat Generation writer and the common-law wife of Creeley for over their 18-year marriage. In 2015, I ventured on another trip to what remains of the premises of the Black Mountain College while I was doing doctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on a Fulbright grant. I would walk Asheville, visit the BMC Museum, Black Mountain town and the Blue Ridge mountains thinking of all the good spirits that roamed there. I would go later on up north to visit Charles Olson’s house and Olson’s library in Gloucester accompanied by my dear friend Jim Dunn who also introduced me to Gerrit Lansing.

The beat goes on and the memory of Creeley lives on in the minds of the coming generations of artists, poets and writers

! Sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the organization of this wonderful event celebrating the life and legacy of Robert Creeley. Special thanks go to Prof. Stephen Fredman who lately honored the English department at Ibnou Zohr University, Morocco with his memorable visit and talk on Olson. He remains my inexhaustible source of information on Creeley and his legacy. Warmest thanks also go to Prof. Charles Bernstein who also honored us and gave an engaging talk on difficult poems.

Here is a poem I dedicated man years to Creeley:

Taking Time
For Creeley

I knelt
Gave up
Stepped aside
Drifted
like a leaf
in a stream
carried away,
then withered
in the shade
of uprooted trees
I quit joking
I quit talking
I quit igniting flames
I am standing
on the edge, waiting
for the herd to return
without a shepherd.

From Rotten Wounds Embalmed With Tar (Editions du Cygne, Paris, 2020)

—El Habib Louai

Share YOUR Remembrance

Do you have a Robert Creeley memory or tribute to share? Let us know! Through this community remembrance project, your words will join others across time & place to honor the life that Robert Creeley lived here, among us.

Learn More