Autobiography

by Robert Creeley

Creeley, Robert

150 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of 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. He served as the Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities at State University of New York at Buffalo, and 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, and was much beloved as a generous presence in many poets' lives.

Reviews

[Vicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I didn't, as one says, know what I wanted to do, despite the hope to be a writer. . ."

"All that would matter to me, finally, as a writer, is that the scale and the place of our common living be recognized, than the mundane in that simple emphasis be acknowledged."

3/4 stars

[Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was just thinking of this book again today, how Creeley manages at once to have the world (and prose) be simple and utterly complex at once. It begins: "I've spent all my life with a nagging sense I had somehow the responsibility of that curious fact, that is, a substantial life, like a dog, but hardly as pleasant, to be dealt with no matter one could or couldn't, wanted to or not." Now that's how to start a book -- sort of like Kerouac's Subterraneans.

[Mills College Library]

P Hanuman