UB Panel Will Explore Robert Creeley's Collaborations With Visual Artists

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Pioneering American poet Robert Creeley and his collaborative work with major American visual artists will be the focus of a panel discussion, "Walking the Dog: Robert Creeley and the Visual Arts," to be held on April 10 at the University at Buffalo.

Free and open to the public, the program will be at held at 2 p.m. in the Screening Room on the Center for the Arts on the UB North (Amherst ) Campus. It will be sponsored by the dean of the UB College of Arts and Sciences and the Samuel P. Capen Chair in Poetry and the Humanities.

Panel participants will include visual artist Jim Dine, the eminent American painter, sculptor and graphic artist; John Chamberlain, one of America's most distinguished artists, noted for the improvisational air of his colorful welded scrap sculptures; historian and author William Katz, well-known Texas sculptor James Surls, and Jonathan Williams, the idiosyncratic publisher of the idiosyncratic Jargon Press.

The panel will be moderated by curator, writer and critic Kevin Power, chair of American literature at the University of Alicante, Spain, who has written extensively on American poetry and art.

Creeley, Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetry and the Humanities and SUNY Distinguished Professor in the UB Department of English, has received a number of distinguished honors in recent months, among them the Bollingen Prize from the Yale University Libraries, one of the greatest honors that can be bestowed on an American poet. He also recently was named to the Board of Chancellors of the American Academy of Poets, one of several chancellors whose election has drawn national attention because represents a sea change in the direction of that institution.

The UB panel will take place in connection with a several related events in April, including a exhibit of books and manuscripts by Creeley in the UB Poetry/Rare Books Collection that will run from April 12 through June 31.

All of the events will celebrate aspects of the poet's long-time collaborations with important figures in jazz, poetry, painting, sculpture and other plastic media. They are:

o Exhibition: In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations

April 10-June 13 o Castellani Art Museum of Niagara University

Opening reception April 10, 6 to 8 p.m. at the Castellani

Curator: Elizabeth Licata o Hours: Wed.- Sat. 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Sun. 1-5 p.m.

Sponsor: Castellani Art Museum

o Poetry Reading: Bobby Louise Hawkins and Michael Palmer

April 9 o 8 p.m. o Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 2495 Main St, Buffalo

Sponsor: just buffalo literary center with support from the Lannen Foundation

o Concurrent Exhibition: Apropos Robert Creeley

April 12-June 31 o Poetry/Rare Book Room, 420 Capen Hall, U. at Buffalo

Curator: Robert Bertholf o Hours: Monday - Friday, 9 a.m.- 5 p.m.

Sponsor: UB Poetry/Rare Books Collection

* Jazz Performance for Robert Creeley: Assif Tsahar and Susie Ibarra

April 13, 8 p.m. o Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, 2495 Main St., Buffalo

Sponsor: Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center with support from

the New York State Council on the Arts and David Kennedy

Kevin Power is chair of American literature at the University of Alicante, Spain. He is also a curator, writer and critic. He has curated such many distinguished art exhibitions here and abroad and is known for his incisive catalogue essays and writings on American poets including Robert Duncan, Michael McClure and Robert Bly.

He is also the author of the Pessoa Song Cycle with music by Michael Nyman for World Exhibition, Lisbon, 1998, and eight books of poems including Quercy Spine with Canadian cowboy poet and songwriter Ian Tyson, (Tetrad Press, London, 1980); De Morandi, (Circle Press, London, 1979).

Jim Dine, the distinguished American painter, sculptor, and graphic artist whose work began as abstract expressionism and moved toward pop art. In the 1960s he was one of the principal creators of "Happenings" -- "spontaneous," exuberant artistic and cultural events in which participants expressed themselves in many artistic mediums simultaneously. They helped to popularize and democratize public artistic expression. Diverging from the impersonal characteristics of that form, his later and best-known works fuse personal passions and everyday experiences, as does Creeley's poetry. He repeatedly employs and explores in several media, familiar and personally significant objects like a robe, gate, hands, tools, and hearts

Today, Dine focuses on printmaking, drawing, figure drawing, and sculpture and is considered among the most accomplished drafters of his generation. He is also known for his series of self-portraits and portraits of his wife. Creeley has collaborated with Dine in several ventures. Among much else, they are both known for their life-long productiveness, use of personal references and exploration in their art of intimate relationships.

John Chamberlain is one of America's most noted sculptors. A late modernist, he known for welded sculptures made of automobile scraps that capture the color, energy and spontaneity of abstract expressionism. Creeley too, is cited frequently as a poet who shares the abstract expressionists' use of terseness and spontaneity in his art.

He has been widely exhibited here and abroad. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (NYC, 1971); 1986: Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 1986); Staatliche Kunsthalle, Baden-Baden (1991, traveled to Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden).

His work is held in many important collections, including that of Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

William Katz, the best-selling historical author whose dozens of books focus on little-known aspects of the African American in the 19th century and have done much to change American assumptions about black history, He has exploded many myths in his exploration of the black Indian, slave resistance, the lives of black pioneers and black women in the in the American West and has also written of the roles of other minorities in American history, the post-Civil War reconstruction period, African Americans in New York and the American depression. His works have been published in Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Japanese and French. Katz writes: "My novels usually involve events that `can't happen,' according to the presumed experts."

James Surls is one of Texas' most popular and acclaimed contemporary artists. He is noted for the sturdy physicality of his monumental works, which are made from materials literally rooted in his physical world. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and celebrated for its organic vitality. The iconographic vocabulary of Surls' sculptures seems cryptic at times because its symbolism is personal and its meanings layered. basically, the artist expresses the position of man in relation to the cosmos and Surls' own understanding of humanity.

Jonathan Williams is the founder, executive director, editor, publisher, and designer of the influential poetry magazine The Jargon Society, Inc., a landmark "a poet's press." Often associated with the celebrated Black Mountain School (of which Robert Creeley was a founder) and the beat poets, Jonathan Williams is the author of more than fifty books and chapbooks. As editor of the Jargon Society, Williams also published more than twenty volumes, including work by such major poets as Mina Loy and Charles Olson (Maximus Poems 1-10.)

Since 1951, he has been poet-in-residence at Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the University of Kansas, and the University of Delaware. He has also been scholar-in-residence at the Aspen Institute, visiting poet at Wake Forest University, the North Carolina School of the Arts, Salem Academy, and Winston-Salem State University