Robert Creeley, a Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities and one of the world's most renowned poets for over four decades, is leaving SUNY Buffalo to take up a position in the creative writing department at Brown University.
"There's nobody else like Creeley," said Capen Professor of American Culture Bruce Jackson. "He has been, for years, a vital presence in both the world of UB and the whole Buffalo region."
Creeley's exit, along with the departure this year of Charles Bernstein, the David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters, to the University of Pennsylvania, leaves the Poetics Program without its two co-founders.
But Creeley said he sees the end of his 37 years at UB as an opportunity for poetics at UB to embark on a new beginning.
"This is a chance to feel a kind of freshening, a happily new situation," Creeley said. "(Poetics) is having to reinvent itself ... its primacies and its persons. At my age it seemed a kind of appropriate time to slip out the back door."
At Brown, Creeley will teach two seminars in the creative writing program. In the fall, his seminar will explore Black Mountain College's influence on the world of poetry. His spring course will examine the correspondence between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, two central figures of the Black Mountain movement.
New England is also home to friends, family and memories of his youth, Creeley said. He grew up in West Acton, Mass., and attended Harvard University from 1943 to 1946, dropping out during the last semester of his senior year. He described Boston as "the first real city of my life."
"At my age it feels frankly good to be headed home," Creeley said.
Already an accomplished poet when he came to UB in 1966, having published the nationally recognized "For Love: Poems 1950-1960" in 1962, Creeley became a local institution even as his fame grew worldwide.
His poetry covers "the great ones," - love, loneliness and death - said Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Diane Christian.
But what also distinguishes Creeley's work from other poets is his willingness to collaborate with other artists in other mediums, Christian said. Several prominent jazz musicians have set his poetry to music. Niagara University's Castellani Art Museum recently organized an exhibition of Creeley's collaborations with sculptors, modern artists and musicians, and the collection eventually became a traveling exhibition and book.
Creeley has published over 80 books of poems and won numerous awards, including the Levinson Prize in 1960, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Robert Frost Medal. He was New York's state poet from 1989 to 1991 and in 1999 won the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. In June 2000, he was awarded the Lifteime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards. He also received a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. Yet I loved, I love. I want no sentimentality. I want no more than home. - from Goodbye (1996) |
