One of the most revered voices of contemporary American poetry, Robert Creeley has attained legendary status based on his leading role in several avant-garde movements, such as Black Mountain, Tish, and the Beats.
Cloth (0773521739) 9780773521735
Release date: 2001-07-09
CA $70.00
Robert Creeley focuses on the first forty years of the poet's life B years of rebellion, restless travel, tumultuous liaisons, and anger and violence that gave his writing an idiosyncratic new voice of razor-sharp precision and vehemence. With his unfailing flair for recognizing talent, as a small press publisher and editor he promoted the likes of Layton, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Olson, and Burroughs. Their stars rose while he scraped by, until his poetry collection For Love and a novel, The Island, earned him fame and a critical acclaim largely denied the Beats. Since then his poetry has become increasingly autobiographical and nostalgic, dwelling on the deliberately commonplace, on decrepitude, and finally on death.
In this biography Ekbert Faas pioneers a new kind of "life-writing." It tells its stories through the emotions, thoughts, and, above all, language of the dramatis personae, exchanging the authorial omniscience of traditional biography for an utter fidelity to sources. Allowing for contradictory viewpoints, anecdotes are told and re-told, letting Creeley reveal himself beneath the myths created by self-invention, wishful thinking, and, sometimes, distortion. Excerpts from autobiographical writings by the poet's first wife, Ann McKinnon, complete this intriguingly colourful and complex picture.
Review quotes
"Robert Creeley is a major contribution to the understanding of Creeley's writing, and to an understanding of the important scene of the New American Poetry, especially in the years of its founding ... Faas's biography of the man is brutally honest (as is Creeley in his own writing) in its portrait of a driven, often violent and alienated consciousness who just happened to turn his demons into some of the most powerful poetry of our time." Douglas Barbour, Department of English, University of Alberta
Ekbert Faas is one of the foremost scholars and critics of contemporary American poetry. His books include Towards a New American Poetics, Young Robert Duncan, and Irving Layton & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspondence 1953-1978, co-edited with Sabrina Reed. He also edited Kenneth Rexroth's Excerpts from a Life. He is professor of humanities and graduate English at York University.
