This is the final story in a series on the late Robert Creeley, an eminent poet who taught at UB from 1964 to 2002.
A moment of beauty, writes scholar Elaine Scarry, picks you up in the air and moves the ground beneath you, so when you land, you see the world in a different way, revealing an essence of life.
For decades, millions of readers have found such epiphanies in Robert Creeley's elegant, spare and emotionally direct verse.
But Creeley is remembered with a unique affection in Buffalo, the city that became his home. For the many people who were his friends, those moments came not just by reading his poems, but in person - in class, at poetry readings, through e-mails, or sitting and talking over coffee or dinner.
Such a moment came a few years ago for Bruce Jackson, an English professor who had a long and close friendship with Creeley, in a conversation that Jackson said he will never forget.
"We got to talking about friends who had died. I don't remember if it was right before or right after Allen Ginsberg had died," Jackson said. "At this age - I was 65, Robert was 75 - you have dear friends who are falling off the planet.
"We got to talking about how the two of us were workaholics, and we were probably going to work right up until the end. Bob says to me, 'You know, you're not going to finish, anyhow.'
"'You know, you're not going to finish, anyhow.' In a way, it's a line that, for me, is the essence."
Jackson said that short line liberated him - he was struck with the notion that it's not about finishing; that people who worry too much about finishing are already finished.
"It's the doing that's the joy, and the talking about it that's the joy, doing and having enough pals and family accessible by phone or email or close by so that you can do the talking that has to be done until the breath is no longer there to do the talking with," Jackson said.
Creeley's friends say that it is also a spirit Creeley lived until the end - not just as a poet, but as a teacher, colleague, community leader, and friend.
Company of thought
To take a class with Creeley was to enter into his peculiar and fascinating world of thought, former students remember.
Creeley had a low, pensive, sometimes intense voice, and he spoke in terse, philosophical phrases. But sitting in Creeley's class was intimate and friendly, said former student Ben Friedlander, because his classes were informal and conversational.
"He was a gifted talker and he had this ability to move freely from storytelling to conversation to lecture," Friedlander, who took a graduate seminar with Creeley and now teaches American poetry at the University of Maine. "It was not that different from sitting and having coffee with him."
Students remember that Creeley loved for the idea of poetry - what he saw as all enduring language, whether metered verse, free verse, song lyrics, or famous sayings - rather than preaching any particular kind of poetry.
"It wasn't like training. You got the sense that there were things that mattered to him, like lines of poetry and poets, and it inspired me to find out what those things were for myself," Friedlander said. "It wasn't proselytizing. And it was often things that were surprising."
When he would read his poems, in classes or frequent readings around Buffalo and around the country, Creeley used a distinctive style that, scholars say, forever changed the way poets read their work.
Creeley's poems were short and packed an emotional punch. When reading them, he would modulate his voice, stutter, take breaths and move in ways that could turn ten lines of text into a meteor hitting the Earth.
"You know how those lines broke so suddenly," said Susan Howe, Samuel P. Capen chair for Poetry and Humanities at UB and a former colleague of Creeley's. "His voice, the sound of his own voice, is actually the sound of those words on the page. He let breath enter the lines as he read. You hear readers try to imitate Creeley, but they can't do it. That sort of reading is original to him."
Creeley's style of reading, writing and teaching was a big influence on the students he had who grew up to be well-known poets and writers.
But more importantly, students remember, you didn't have to be a prodigy of arts and letters to be a part of Creeley's world - he was generous, open-minded, and always there to talk to everyone.
Creeley's colleagues in the English department remember that he would talk about his students all the time. He was fascinated by their personalities, ideas and insights and would often quote them in discussions or academic debates with other professors.
Creeley also brought many of his students into the Buffalo poetry community. In addition to building UB's poetics program and the Buffalo Electronic Poetry Center, he would often help students with projects of their own.
Among those projects was Cornershop, a cultural gathering place in a storefront on Buffalo's West Side founded by UB poetry students in 1997.
"I wrote him this very professional e-mail, and he immediately said yes, in his very generous way," said Anya Lewin, the poetics student who founded Cornershop. "Then I started the space, and it started to get support. He came to events, and he was incredibly encouraging."
Cornershop was, in the words of its founders, a "mom and pop grocery store gone cultural oasis." In four years of operation, it hosted film and video screenings, poetry readings, fashion shows, lectures, visual art and live music. It was, for Creeley, an example of how poets and artists can form a company of thought.
"He (Creeley) would help fund a lot of the things that happened through the Samuel P. Capen chair," said Lewin, who now teaches in the art school of the University of Plymouth, in England. "It was casual and serious at the same time, just like he was."
'Hospitality and fun'
A big group of people who knew Creeley gathered in the Poetry and Rare Books room in Capen Hall Thursday to read poems and share stories. Many of the stories they told took place in Creeley's famous home, a converted firehouse on Amherst Street, steps from the Niagara River, in a run-down Buffalo neighborhood called Black Rock.
For Creeley's many friends, 'the firehouse' was the one place, more than any other, where Creeley found the company, and friendship, that kindled his life and work.
They remember Creeley's family, including his wife, Penelope, and his children Will and Hannah; long, fun dinners; fall and spring evenings in Penelope's garden; climbing up in the firehouse tower to see the city and the river; and most of all, the family's warmth and generosity.
"I house-sat for them once, and took care of Sophie, their dog," remembers Lewin. "I mentioned to them that it was going to be my birthday while they were gone, and they said, 'Oh, then you should have a party!' That's such a good example of how they were, so friendly."
Much of Creeley's early poems were about emotional trauma, heartbreak, and alienation. But in Buffalo, he found a strong and centering community. He was, many scholars say, a "poet of place" - and more and more, that place was Buffalo, home to his family and many of his friends.
The firehouse was, for Susan Howe, the place where it all came together.
"I remember May and October evenings there," Howe said. "Meals set out for gatherings that included students, visiting writers, and other faculty and friends. Their big dog Sophie lumbering around. The wonderful meals prepared by Penny in the open kitchen area. Will and Hannah coming in and out with their friends, all ages, all types. There wasn't any other place in Buffalo with that sense of warm hospitality and fun."
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Web-Only Feature |
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Listen to a selection of Robert Creeley readings and interviews from the past several years.
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