[Wgcp-whc] WGCP--Creeley meeting Fri 1.45

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

Dear Friends of Poetry,

The minutes from last Friday’s special session, a conversation with 
poet/translator Cole Swensen, are forthcoming.  In the meantime I 
wanted to remind everyone of this Friday’s regularly scheduled session 
of the Working Group in Poetics at 1.45.  This will be the last time 
the group meets this semester.

On March 30, the world lost one the great poets of our time, Robert 
Creeley.  Creeley was a direct link to the Modernists as he was, by 
way of his voluminous correspondence, a protégé of Ezra Pound and 
William Carlos Williams. First beginning to publish in the late 1940s, 
Creeley would go on to have a place in and/or relationship within such 
important movements and “schools” as the Beat Movement, Black 
Mountain, New American Poetry, the New York School, and provided a 
crucial importance to even the poetics of the Language poets.  Few 
figures play as crucial a role in post-War American poetry as Creeley 
has.  Moreover, Creeley would work in collaboration with a staggering 
number of the great visual artists of the world as well. 

In light of this and as a way of marking his passing, the group will 
look at a selection of Creeley’s work.  A reading packet is now 
available at the Whitney Humanities Center.  The packet includes some 
of Creeley’s most famous poems (“I Know a Man,” for instance, excerpts 
of critical responses to which can be found at 
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/creeley/man.htm) and 
progresses through his middle and later period, including a long 
sequence called “Numbers” (from the book Pieces) that was written 
originally written as a collaboration with paintings of numbers by 
artist Robert Indiana. Also included in the packet is Creeley’s essay 
on poetics, “Is that a Real Poem or Did You Just Make It Up?”

Additional poems, interviews, reviews, articles, and so forth can 
easily be found on the web (a google search for “Robert Creeley” 
yields 90,000 hits).  Perhaps the best place to begin looking is his 
page at the Electronic Poetry Center.  There one can also find various 
sound files allowing one to listen to Creeley’s reading his work.  
Many have said that in order to have any sense of his work it is 
necessary to hear Creeley read his poetry aloud.  At Friday’s session 
we will listen to excerpts of his reading at the Beinecke in November 
of 2003.

Also, it would be useful if on Friday members could bring ideas of 
work that they would be interested in having the group engage next 
year and also any suggestion for vistors to come and join our group 
for discussions.

The group will meet at its usual time of 1.45 in Rm 116 of the Whitney 
Humanities Center. Again, the Creeley reading packet is now available.