A collection of Creeley's work gathered from obsolesced collections, small press booklets and little mags. Here one can trace the development of his poetry from its early break with the Eliot/Auden tradition to the development of his own distinct voice in the middle poems, such as Words and Pieces, known for their precise, terse and almost minimalist language, as well as his return to the more direct concern for love and humanity. Restores to print--For Love, The Charm, In London, His Idea, Thirty Things, Backwards, Away and previously uncollected poems.

"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."—William Carlos Williams "It is a study, how Creeley lands syntax down the alley, and his vocabulary-pure English-to hit meters and rhymes all of which are spares and strikes."—Charles Olson "Robert Creeley has created a noble body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson, and provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."—Allen Ginsberg "His succinctness is like the unfettered flashing of a diamond." —John Ashbery "Robert Creeley was one of the great giants of 20th Century American poetry. This collection is his monument." —Paul Auster "American poetry is unimaginable and, happily, unknowable without Creeley."—Andrei Codrescu, author of it was today: new poems "Creeley is a touchstone for me-a measure of what poetry is. He is a genius of the sensorium as Kerouac was and a master of the ear as is Miles Davis. He is a carver in space like Van Gogh."—Michael McClure "There is no poetry more vivid, immediate, or telling than Robert Creeley's. His Collected Poems extends the achievement of Dickinson, Whitman, and Williams into postwar America. Creeley's excavation of particular words, images, and sentiments resonate beyond the pages of this book into the fabric of everyday life. This is American invention at its best, as necessary as the air we breathe and the ground we walk on."—Charles Bernstein "'It isn't what a poet says that counts as a work of art,' William Carlos Williams once wrote, 'it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.' I can't think of another contemporary poet whose acute sensitivity to the particular event of making (and in poetry making includes breaking) each written line is as consummately fine-tuned as Robert Creeley's."—Susan Howe "He was the main support in the old house of poetry—the main beam."—C.D. Wright, Brown University alumni newsletter "There is no poet like Creeley. His multiple subjectivities and magic syllables have kept us curious and honest. Never a false step, never a less than tender heart for the sound, and the brilliant cognitive, often fierce power therein. What a glorious long life in writing. These late poems keep the brilliant tempo. We are very lucky he is still so much among us."—Anne Waldman "Robert Creeley transformed the momentary, spontaneous music of being alive into a profoundly enduring American art: brilliant, necessary, impeccably scored. He made it new for always."—Peter Gizzi

"Here is Creeley at his skillfully selected best: full of the melodies of plain speech, concise yet resonant with emotion."—Juliana Spahr, author of This Connection of Everyone with Lungs "So fantastically simple and so satisfyingly complicated, these poems band together like the days in 'One Day': 'One day after another-/ perfect./ They all fit.'"—John Ashbery "Beautifully edited by Ben Friedlander with tenderness, intelligence, and care. A superb selection, well-introduced. Selected Poems provides a great sense of the range of Creeley's accomplishment—these poems among the most important of our time—a way of writing with the hesitations and grace of a new-found line, thinking informed by sources from Emily Dickinson to Charlie Parker. Selected Poems is at once a tribute to Creeley, a perfect introduction for new readers, and a valuable distillation for those who have already acquired a taste for Creeley's poetry. The perfect assembly to and for one so fond of saying 'onward.' We can now go onward with these selected poems, onward with these well-chosen words, with thanks to Robert Creeley and to Ben Friedlander."—Hank Lazer, author of The New Spirit "Benjamin Friedlander, himself a fine poet-critic and a great connoisseur of Creeley's poetry, has put together a superb selection."—Marjorie Perloff "An excellent selection and introduction. It is an edition that acknowledges work that has defined the poet's career while offering a new narrative for the entire oeuvre. It will join UC Press's distinguished and definitive editionsof postwar poetry and will provide us all with a summary guide to Creeley's best work."—Michael Davidson "In a quiet moment I hear Bob pause where I never would have expected it. Such resolve. Such heart. And an ear to reckon with. No truly further American poem without his."—Clark Coolidge, author of Counting on Planet Zero

"Robert Creeley is one of the most celebrated and influential of the postwar American poets. His Selected Letters, covering the years 1945-2005 are a foundational document in the recent history of North American letters. Through his engagements with mentors such as William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound; peers such as Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouacl and mentees such as Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Ed Dorn, Susan Howe, and Tom Raworth, Creeley helped forge a new poetry that re-imagined writing for his and subsequent generations. A stylist of the highest order, Creeley's letters carry the clear mark of consummate literary artistry and document the life, work, and times of one of our greatest writers"--

A critical retrospective of Creeley's work from 1952 to 1982

Not only do drama and poetry about the past and historical novels reveal a shared understanding of pivotal moments, historical figures, and every life of earlier times, say Middleton (English, U. of Southampton) and Woods (English, U. of Wales-Aberystwyth), they also outline more general beliefs about the past and its relation to the present. It is.

Science has transformed understandings of the mind, supplying physiological explanations for what once seemed transcendental. Nikki Skillman shows how lyric poets—caught between a reductive scientific view and naïve literary metaphors—struggled to articulate a vision of consciousness that was both scientifically informed and poetically truthful.

Poetry has often been defined by its closure, its condensation of meaning and value into discrete, self-referential textual objects. Affect, Psychoanalysis and American Poetry challenges the dominant metaphor of poetic containers by turning to recent poetic texts that represent the contagious and uncontainable feelings of anxiety, grief, shame, and rage. From modernists Wallace Stevens to mid-century poets Randall Jarrell, Robert Creeley and Ted Berrigan, and finally to contemporary practitioners Aaron Kunin and Claudia Rankine, John Steen argues that new poetic techniques arise from the poetic productivity of negative affects, and that a new model of poetic value can be found in poems that are-instead of containers-permeable, social spaces of intimacy, attachment, and withdrawal. Drawing from object relations, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and affect theory, Affect, Psychoanalysis, and American Poetry finds poetry's singularity in its unique capacity to represent anew the transmissible, relational, and uncontainable valences of feeling that structure and destabilize social life.

Stubborn Poetries is a study of poets whose work, because of its difficulty or simple resistance to conventional explication, remains more or less firmly outside the canon. Book jacket.

In 1950 the poet Charles Olson published his influential essay "Projective Verse" in which he proposed a poetry of "open field" composition-to replace traditional closed poetic forms with improvised forms that would reflect exactly the content of the poem. The poets and poetry that have followed in the wake of the "projectivist" movement-the Black Mountain group, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, and the Language poets-have since been studied at length. But more often than not they have been studied through the lens of continental theory with the effect that these high.