Celebration of The Poet's Work Will Bring Stars of Literature, Art And Music to UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The University at Buffalo next month will host a three-day tribute to one of its own on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The celebration also will help mark the university's sesquicentennial and offer an opportunity for audiences to hear and meet several of the finest literary, visual and jazz artists of the past 40 years.

Pioneering American poet Robert Creeley, SUNY Distinguished Professor of English and Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities at UB, will be the subject of the celebration. He will be joined in the program by artists from several fields with whom he has had longtime collaborations.

Creeley is internationally recognized as one of the most prominent poets of his era, having helped establish a poetic tradition that occupies a central place in the 20th-century literary canon. With Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery, he first came to public attention as a leading figure in New American Poetry, the literary efflorescence that helped define the post-World War II American cultural renaissance.

Creeley and his cohort came of age in the 1950s. They did for poetry what jazz artists like Miles Davis did for music and abstract expressionists like Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollack did for painting: They revitalized native American art and placed it at the center of the international artistic scene, thereby helping to define the "American Century."

UB Gray Chair Professor of Poetry Charles Bernstein, himself an influential writer and critic, points out that because of his exceptional and continuing influence on younger poets, Creeley has remained a major figure in the field throughout his 40-year career.

"This has been true in every period," said Bernstein, "because of his importance as an essayist and poet and through his collaborations with visual artists like Jim Dine, Francisco Clemente, Bryce Mardan and Susan Rothenberg.

"Jazz musicians and composers like Steve Swallow and Steve Lacey have set Creeley's work to music over the years," Bernstein points out, "as have younger bands like Mercury Rev, popular new-wave recording artists who incorporated his poetry into one of their recent recordings."

Several of the writers and performers cited above will be in Buffalo to participate in the series of events being held as part of "Creeley at 70."

-- The celebration will open at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 10, in Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 2495 Main St., with a reading by local poet Eileen Myles in tribute to Creeley. The event will be sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center, a community arts group with which Creeley has been associated for many years.

-- Two distinguished and exceptionally creative writers with whom Creeley has had lengthy professional and artistic association are Amiri Baraka and Gil Sorrentino. They will present a joint reading from 3-5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 11, in the Katharine Cornell Theatre in the Ellicott Complex on the UB North (Amherst) Campus. UB President William R. Greiner will open the program with a welcome.

-- At 5 p.m. that day, UB's Poetry/Rare Books Collection will open an exhibition curated by Robert Bertholf, titled "HERE: Fifty Years of Poetry in Buffalo" in the Special Collections Poetry Room, 420 Capen Hall, on the North Campus. The exhibition will feature a broad range of Creeley's work.

-- Creeley's intense interest in relating the language and visual arts will be explored at 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 11 in the Katharine Cornell Theatre when artist Jim Dine presents a talk followed by "Conversation with Robert Creeley" and a program of readings by the poet.

-- On Saturday, Oct. 12, Rochester native, Creeley cohort and Pulitzer Prize-winner John Ashbery will make one of his rare appearances in Western New York at a reading at 4 p.m. in the Katharine Cornell Theatre. Like Creeley, Ashbery is one of the most innovative poets of his generation; the one who has received the greatest critical and international attention for his work. He has been an art critic (Art International, New York, Newsweek) and editor (ArtNews), as well as a poet, and is former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The reading will be followed by a public reception in the Jane Keeler Room, across from the theater.

-- Two of the most exceptional jazz artists working today, pianist Steve Kuhn and jazz vocalist Carol Fredette, will present a performance program at 8:30 p.m. on Oct. 12 at Hallwalls incorporating works by Steve Swallow that employ Creeley's poetry. Popular new-wave group Mercury Rev will perform its "Creeley-works" as well.

Poet, novelist, short-story writer, essayist and editor Robert Creeley was an originator of the "Black Mountain" school of poetry, along with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Black Mountain established a new and anti-academic poetic tradition that has been reflected in the work of many poets who have come to occupy significant places in the 20th-century literary canon.

Citing Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams as their literary forebears, these poets developed the theory of "projective verse" -- poetry designed to transmit the poet's emotional and intellectual energy directly and spontaneously, depending on natural speech rhythms and lines determined by pauses for breathing. Creeley's frequently quoted statement, "Form is never more than an extension of content," expresses an important precept of the Black Mountain poets.

Creeley is a minimalist poet whose work has been said to reflect with contemporary inarticulateness, "a kind of contemporary stammer...a fear of opening up." His often brief, laconic, resonant verses result from his process and his attitude toward poetry. He considers the writing of a poem an effective means of self-discovery and so emphasizes the process or act of writing over the final result.

Contemporary visual art and music were crucial to the formation of his technique. Like abstract expressionism and modern jazz, Creeley's poems are reductive renderings of precise images and emotions, and he employs unusual syntax, punctuation and grammar. He has produced a large body of collaborative works with contemporary artists that include Jim Dine, John Altoon, Robert Indiana, R. B Kitaj and Marisol; musician Irene Aebi, and many others.

Because his work is intensely self-examining, Creeley has been called a solipsistic poet whose references are often too personal and result in obscurity and narrowness of vision. Nevertheless, critics have followed Creeley's career with interest and consider him a significant force in contemporary poetry. His work has generated considerable reaction and debate. Since his days as an instructor at Black Mountain College and a founder of the Black Mountain movement, he has been a major influence on younger writers and an important, often startling voice in American literature.

He co-directs the University at Buffalo Poetics Program, which he and his colleagues Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Leslie Fiedler, Dennis Tedlock and Susan Howe developed to encourage the exploration of language and its capacity to express and represent human experience.

Creeley's collected poems (1945-75) were published by the University of California Press in 1982 and represent the work of 30 years from his first collection "Le Fou" (1952) to "Thirty Things." Since 1975, his poetry publications have included "Hello: A Journal," "Later," "Mirrors," "Memory Gardens" and "Windows." His prose was collected and published in 1984 and his collected prose was published by the University of California Press in 1989.

Creeley has received a number of prestigious fellowships and awards during his career, including the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 1987, the same year he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

In 1988, he received the Distinguished Fulbright Award to hold the Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. That year, he also received the Walt Whitman Citation from the New York State Writers' Institute and, in accordance with the citation, was named New York State Poet Laureate for 1989-91.