About Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley, born May 21, 1926 in Arlington, Massachusetts (United States) and died of pneumonia on March 30, 2005, in Odessa, Texas, was an American poet, essayist and academic. He was considered one of the greatest poets of postmodern lyric poetry. He was the founder of the literary movement known as the Black Mountain or Projectivist movement and along with Robert Duncan, he was a major editor of the Black Mountain Review, which during its existence was a medium for the dissemination of experimental poetry in the United States. He was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999 and held this office until 2002. He published his first poems in Wake magazine at Harvard and in 1949 began a close correspondence with William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. The following year, the poet met Charles Olson with whom he formed a strong friendship. Admired and praised by Allen Ginsberg for his avant-garde linguistic experiments, he published about sixty books in a tense and rigorous language attentive to the themes of daily human tensions. The reputation he had, especially overseas, was that of a postmodern poet who had helped to renew American poetry in the post-World War II world. Loved for his linguistic experiments, he was considered a great figure of the fifties at the time of the greatest culture in the USA and his poetry was listened to and received with immense enthusiasm.He taught for many years at the University of Buffalo. He resides successively in Waldoboro, Buffalo, and Providence (Rhode Island). Creeley's poetry is that of intimate relationships, with their emotions, their sensuality. His style moves away from all lyricism to be minimalist, allusive, made of subtle nuances.
He is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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