Yesterday I wanted to
			speak of it, that sense above
			the others to me
			important because all

			that I know derives
			from what it teaches me.
			Today, what is it that
			is finally so helpless,

			different, despairs of its own
			statement, wants to
			turn away, endlessly
			to turn away.

			--from "For Love" 

Born in Arlington, Massachusetts, Robert Creeley attended Harvard but dropped out before taking his degree. After living in the south of France in Aix-en-Provence and in majorca, Spain, where he founded the Divers Press, he joined teh faculty of Black Mountain College in 1954 at the invitation of Charles Olson. There he founded the Black Mountain Review. While Creeley left the college itself in 1955, his influence on Black Mountain poetics has been significant. Associated with the State University of New York at Buffalo since 1966, he was named poet laureat of the state of New York in 1992.

Quoted at length from Postmodern American Poetry, A Norton Anthology. Copyright © 1994 by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Ed. Paul Hoover.

   "Oh yes, the sentence," Creeley once told the critic Burton Hatlen,
   "that's what we call it when we put someone in jail."

• CREELEY: A PRIMARY BIBLIOGRAPHY (In Progress)
• Four Days in Vermont
• Nothing New
• Robert Creeley in Conversation with Alan Riach
• Goodbye

• Ballad of the Despairing Husband
• I Know a Man
• Sound recordings from the Berkeley Language Center's Speech Archive
• Poetry in Motion II (with Introduction by Robert Creeley)

• Language Experiments
• Visionaries & Rebels