Hold Still, Lion

In post—World War II America there were several loosely affiliated, overlapping strands of poets who began publishing—poets rejecting the epistemological and anglophile models of W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot. They were known variously as the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, and the Black Mountain poets. They came up on the heels of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and along the spur of the Objectivists, aka Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Niedecker, et al. Robert Creeley was the bridge. He distributed the differences and sounded parallel concerns. He began corresponding with Pound and Williams in 1949. He and John Ashbery were seated two desks apart at Harvard. In Majorca, his Divers Press published Robert Duncan and Paul Blackburn. He typed Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which was then mimeographed in an edition of twenty-five. At the now legendary and gone Black Mountain College, he studied with Charles Olson and "earned" his successorship. At Black Mountain Creeley edited the Black Mountain Review(initially from Majorca) and picked up the degree he had managed not to complete at Harvard. Over the years he would edit works of Charles Olson and George Oppen (and Robert Burns and Walt Whitman), as well as anthologies of new American writing. His correspondence was carried on at a rate and level not to be believed. The Olson/Creeley letters alone consume ten volumes (if e-mail had been available to those two the number of volumes might have been squared). He wrote tense stories and a superb short novel along with scores of word-perfect essays. Overall he published in the vicinity of seventy books. Checking a familiar book site, 227 titles are instantly identified with his name. His collaborations with artists including Francesco Clemente, Elsa Dorfman, Sol LeWitt, R.B. Kitaj, and Susan Rothenberg were the occasion of fine-edition books and traveling exhibitions. His collaborations with musicians such as Steve Lacy and Steve Swallow were performed for packed, hip audiences and are featured on numerous recordings. He could and did fill Albert Hall, but he had no qualms about reading to a crowd of four. No qualms, either, about talking extemporaneously in lieu of giving the promoted reading. He was not there to accommodate anyone's prepackaged expectations—he was there to discover the direction of his own thinking. And in that lies, as he often quoted William Carlos Williams, the profundity.