By Mark Scott
Buffalo, NY – Legendary poet Robert Creeley died Wednesday. He was 78. Creeley spent 37 years at the University at Buffalo where he was a Distinguished Professor of English and Samuel P. Capen Professor of Poetics. He left UB in 2003 for Brown University.
Robert Creeley was considered to be one of the most influential poets of his time. In an interview for the public radio program "Linebreak," which aired on WBFO in the mid-1990s, Creeley talked about what he enjoyed most about writing poetry.
"I like the sense of -- not so much poem, poem, poem -- but of having these reflections, all of which could be started over and over," Creeley said. "The poet gets to start his line new every time."
Creeley wrote more than 60 books of poetry. He earned many honors, including the Bollingen Prize, whose winners include e-e cummings and Robert Frost. Creeley was named New York State's poet laureate in 1989.
The Massachusetts native was friends with several leading figures of the Beat generation, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
His friend and colleague at UB, Bruce Jackson, says Creeley's poetry was enjoyed by casual readers and serious poets alike.
"I think part of his greatness is that his accessibility is coupled with a very deceptive complexity about language, which he loved, and about affairs of the human heart, which he knew," Jackson said.
When he left UB and Buffalo two years ago, Creeley acknowledged it would be difficult. But Jackson said it was something Creeley felt he had to do.
"One of the reasons he went to Brown was to prove to himself that he could still have new life," Jackson said.
Creeley died in Texas Thursday where he was participating in a writers' residency.
Creeley will be laid to rest in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts where fellow poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are buried.
A memorial gathering and reading of his work will be held at the Poetry Collection Library at 420 Capen Hall on UB's North Campus on April 7th from 3:30 to 5pm.