Robert Creeley was an American poet known for his loose, discursive style of writing. His poems tend to be informal and conversational, but they often have an intrinsic structure that binds the words into a cohesive whole.
He was the kind of poet who wrote a lot, didn’t much revise, and tended to publish most of what flowed from pen to paper. This means that some of his work is a slog, although not a slog in the “extremely difficult and gnomic” sense of, say, John Ashbery. Reading his work can feel like listening to a friend natter on about nothing in particular – except that on occasion, this friend expresses herself in a way so lovely and transcendent that you want her to keep talking forever in hopes that it will happen again.
Posts
