Existing comment:
For Love
Robert Creeley, 1926-2005
Born Arlington, Massachusetts
Robert Creeley was a transformative figure in postwar American poetry. His affiliation with the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina placed him at the center of a group of progressive poets who originated "projective verse" -- a mode of composition that abandoned the structured rhyme and metric schemes of traditional poetry in favor of a more improvisational, free-form approach that Creeley likened to jazz and Abstract Expressionism. He explored such synergies through frequent collaboration with prominent visual artists. This portrait by R. B. Kitaj was inspired by Creeley's first major collection, For Love: Poems 1950–1960 (1962), which examines the collapse of the author's first marriage and the beginning of his second. The book hallmarked Creeley's radically concise, minimalist style and his focus on private, everyday emotions and experiences rather than epic themes. The author of several dozen volumes of verse, Creeley received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 1999.
R.B. Kataj, 1966 |