E-Mail This Article to a Friend Company man Robert Creeley: 1926–2005 BY WILLIAM CORBETT

Poet Robert Creeley died of pneumonia early on the morning of March 30 in Odessa, Texas. Few poets anytime, anywhere, meant so much to so many. To me, Bob was a poetry father and dear friend for nearly 40 years. A host of poets, artists, and readers here in America, in England, and elsewhere had a similar relationship with this remarkable artist and man. They mourn his death as I do, but they also will be inspired by his example, as I am.

From 1947, when he left Harvard short of graduation, until the end of his life — even when he resided in the relative isolation of a New Hampshire farm, a Guatemalan coffee finca, and the village of Placitas, New Mexico — Creeley lived a crowded life. Crowded with friends (in his early years as a writer, the poet Charles Olson first among these), crowded with family (he married three times and leaves eight children), and increasingly crowded with a daunting schedule of readings and other public appearances. In mid January, he gave one of the best readings I ever heard him give — and I must have heard him read 30 times — at the Cue Arts Foundation in New York City. The following night, he MC’d a memorial evening for the soprano-saxophonist Steve Lacy, with whom he had collaborated. Bob was in fine form as he introduced the poets, musicians, dancers, and artists, the sort of company he loved being part of.

Bob’s poetry — he wrote one novel, one book of short stories, and numerous reviews and essays, but poetry is the soul of his work — descended from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, a lineage he celebrated. Unlike so many poets, Bob embraced his teachers and mentors, who included Olson and Robert Duncan, both teachers at the fabled Black Mountain College in the 1950s. He did not claim originality for himself, and that in itself was original. When in 1960 For Love appeared, the same year as Donald Allen’s earthquake anthology The New American Poetry, his peers and my generation recognized Creeley as a major force. His stature grew in part because he was endlessly inventive in his collaborations with artists (the list from John Chamberlain to Susan Rothenberg is long and distinguished), read in all sorts of venues, attended the readings of other poets, wrote letters of recommendation, blurbed new books and prefaced reprints of neglected work, and directed for 25 years the University of Buffalo’s poetics program, but mostly because, whenever you encountered him, by word and deed he made poetry matter.

The same can be said of few American poets. Although not so well known as his friend Allen Ginsberg, Bob stood with him and John Ashbery as the best and most generous poets of their generation. Of course, there is no rule that poets have to make company with other poets or nurture the work and careers of the young. It is hard enough to have an art and practice it. Hard too to rise above rivalry. But when a poet does so conduct himself, the art gains and those of us who benefit from his attitude, if only to the extent of seeing it in action, are given a practical course in how to go about our business as people and poets. In Bob’s case, he leaves not only his work but also a legacy of care for others and of right action.

This makes Bob sound like a paragon. Far from it. He had no airs or pretense about him, no need to have others stroke his ego, and that meant that you could know him in all his human shortcomings. In my experience, he never hid behind his celebrity but set it aside to talk with the rawest college student as easily as the most famous artist in the room. When we first met, my 80-year-old grandmother lived with us. Bob talked with her about subjects of her interest that could hardly have mattered to him except that he had an appetite for human experience in the many forms in which it presents itself, a near-insatiable appetite that expressed itself in his epical talking. He talked the way John Coltrane solo’d, but for all his talking, he was a good listener with a great memory.

His poetry deserves much more than the Boston Globe’s Mark Feeney gave it in his obituary. Bob may have begun as what is called a "minimalist," but his dry, spare, beautifully paced — he is the diamond cutter of line breaks — early poems evolved into the more full-voiced lyricism of his later work with its unlikely but characteristic emphasis on rhyme.

Bob’s wife, Penelope, and their children, Will and Hannah, were with him at the end for what she has described as his "peaceful" death. Odessa, Texas? When his fatal illness struck, he was writer-in-residence at nearby Marfa, the home of sculptor Donald Judd’s museum complex, which is now administered by the Lannan Foundation. He would have laughed at dying in George W. Bush country. There is a family plot — Bob was born in Arlington, reared in West Acton, and Boston was his first city — in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn cemetery. I expect his grave there to become, like his friend Jack Kerouac’s in Lowell and Frank O’Hara’s in the Springs on Long Island, a place of pilgrimage. A memorial reading is planned for Saturday May 7 at 4 p.m. in MIT’s Room 10-250, 77 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.