Роберт Крили: Жизнь и творчество американского поэта

American poet

Robert White Creeley (May 21, 1926 – March 30, 2005) 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. 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. 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, Buffalo, and Providence, where he taught at Brown University. He was a recipient of the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.

Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, and grew up in Acton. He and his sister, Helen, were raised by their mother. At the age of two, he lost his left eye. He attended the Holderness School in New Hampshire. In 1943, he entered Harvard University, but left to serve in the American Field Service in Burma and India in 1944–1945. He returned to Harvard in 1946, but eventually earned his BA from Black Mountain College in 1955, teaching some courses there as well. After teaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Creeley visited San Francisco for two months in the spring of 1956, having heard from Kenneth Rexroth about a local poetic "renaissance" underway. There he met Allen Ginsberg, who had recently completed Howl, and befriended Jack Kerouac. Creeley later met and befriended Jackson Pollock at the Cedar Tavern in New York City. He was a chicken farmer briefly in Littleton, New Hampshire, before becoming a teacher in 1949. The story goes that he wrote to Cid Corman, whose radio show he heard on the farm, and Corman had him read on the show, which is how Charles Olson first heard of Creeley.

From 1951 to 1955, Creeley and his wife, Ann, lived with their three children on the Spanish island of Mallorca. They went there at the encouragement of their friends, British writer Martin and his partner, Janet Seymour Smith. There they started Divers Press and published works by Paul Blackburn, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and others. Creeley wrote about half of his published prose while living on the island, including a short story collection, The Gold Diggers, and a novel, The Island. He said that Martin and Janet Seymour Smith are represented by Artie and Marge in the novel. During 1954 and 1955, Creeley traveled back and forth between Mallorca and his teaching position at Black Mountain College. He also saw to the printing of some issues of Origin and Black Mountain Review on Mallorca, because the printing costs were significantly lower there. In 1960, Creeley earned an MA from the University of New Mexico. He began his academic career by teaching at the prestigious Albuquerque Academy starting in 1958 until about 1960 or 1961. In 1957, he met Bobbie Louise Hawkins; they lived together in a common law marriage until 1975 and had two children, Sarah and Katherine. He dedicated his book For Love to Bobbie. Creeley read at the 1963 Vancouver Poetry Festival and at the 1965 Berkeley Poetry Conference. Afterward, he wandered about a bit before settling into the English faculty of "Black Mountain II" at the University at Buffalo in 1967. He would stay at this post until 2003, when he received a post at Brown University. From 1990 to 2003, he lived with his family in Black Rock neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, in a converted firehouse at the corner of Amherst and East Streets. At the time of his death, he was in residence with the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, Texas. Creeley first received fame in 1962 from his poetry collection For Love. He would go on to win the Bollingen Prize, among others, and to hold the position of New York State Poet laureate from 1989 until 1991. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. In his later years he was an advocate of, and a mentor to, many younger poets, as well as to others outside of the poetry world. He went to great lengths to be supportive to many people regardless of any poetic affiliation. Being responsive appeared to be essential to his personal ethics, and he seemed to take this responsibility extremely seriously, in both his life and his craft. In his later years, when he became well known, he would go to lengths to make strangers, who approached him as a well known author, feel comfortable. In his last years, he used the Internet to keep in touch with many younger poets and friends.

Robert Creeley died in the morning of March 30, 2005, in Odessa, Texas of complications from pneumonia. He is buried in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2016, a short documentary was made about Robert Creeley's son, Will Creeley, in which Will shared stories of his father's legacy and their relationship. The film was entitled, "For Will".