April 28, 7:45 p.m.

"Like John Bunyan and the Puritan diarists who initiated modern 'private' writing, Creeley's is a voice of the everyday struggle of the inner life: quiet, sometimes troubled, ultimately to be trusted." --Tom Clark

"Creeley is absolutely mesmerizing"--Joyce Carol Oates

From his roots as a student and a teacher at the postwar avant-garde hotbed Black Mountain College, to travels with the Beats, to further wanderings in Mallorca, Guatemala, New Mexico, London, and Finland, to his now esteemed place at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Robert Creeley has kept his own sharp, terse poetic. His poems are famous for their minimalism, the spare, taut line that, Giacometti-like, dominates the space around it. His is a lineage traceable certainly to William Carlos Williams but also to another New Englander, Emily Dickinson. Creeley is interested not so much in knowledge but in being as a way of knowing: "Were there answers where they were / Time where air was everywhere / Time to make impassioned stir / Place to find an answer for."
His newest volume Life and Death projects that idiosyncratic voice formulated in Creeley's famous remark, often associated with the Black Mountain School, that "Form is never more than an extension of content."