Robert Creeley, poet, was born 97 years ago.
Creeley wrote more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn.
Creeley served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo. In 1991, he joined colleagues Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Robert Bertholf and Dennis Tedlock in founding the Poetics Program at Buffalo.
Creeley lived in Waldoboro, Maine; Buffalo, New York; and Providence, Rhode Island, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
Creeley died at sunrise on March 30, 2005 in Odessa, Texas of complications from pneumonia.
Above, Creeley in 1972
Photo by Elsa Dorfman