"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

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.

"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

Albert Gelpi's American Poetry after Modernism is a study of sixteen major American poets of the postwar period, from Robert Lowell to Adrienne Rich. Gelpi argues that a distinctly American poetic tradition was solidified in the later half the twentieth century, thus severing it from British conventions.

"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"--

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.

By any measure—international reputation, influence upon fellow writers and later generations, number of books published, scholarly and critical attention—Robert Creeley (1926–2005) is a literary giant, an outstanding, irreplaceable poet. For many decades readers have remarked upon the almost harrowing emotional nakedness of Creeley’s writing. In the years since his death, it may be that the disappearance of the writer allows that nakedness to be observed more readily and without embarrassment. Written by the foremost critics of his poetry, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work is the first book to treat Creeley’s career as a whole. Masterfully edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, the essays in this collection have been gathered into three parts. Those in “Form” consider a variety of characteristic formal qualities that differentiate Creeley from his contemporaries. In “Power,” writers reflect on the pressure exerted by emotions, gender issues, and politics in Creeley’s life and work. In “Person,” Creeley’s unique artistic and psychological project of constructing a person—reflected in his correspondence, teaching, interviews, collaborations, and meditations on the concept of experience—is excavated. While engaging these three major topics, the authors remain, as Creeley does, intent upon the ways such issues appear in language, for Creeley’s nakedness is most conspicuously displayed in his intimate relationship with words. Contributors Charles Altieri Rachel Blau DuPlessis Stephen Fredman Benjamin Friedlander Alan Golding Michael Davidson Steve McCaffery Peter Middleton Marjorie Perloff Peter Quartermain Libbie Rifkin

This study develops the important work carried out on American literature through the frameworks of transnational, transatlantic, and trans-local studies to ask what happens when these same aspects become intrinsic to the critical narrative. Much cultural criticism since the 1990s has sought to displace perceptions of American exceptionalism with broader notions of Atlanticism, transnationalism, world-system, and trans-localism as each has redefined the US and the world more generally. This collection shows how the remapping of America in terms of global networks, and as a set of particular localities, or even glocalities, now plays out in Americanist scholarship, reflecting on the critical consequences of the spatial turn in American literary and cultural studies. Spanning twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry, fiction, memoir, visual art, publishing, and television, and locating the US in Caribbean, African, Asian, European, and other contexts, this volume argues for a re-modelling of American-ness with the transnational as part of its innate rhetoric. It includes discussions of travel, migration, disease, media, globalization, and countless other examples of inflowing. Essays focus on subjects tracing the contemporary contours of the transnational, such as the role of the US in the rise of the global novel, the impact of Caribbean history on American thought (and vice versa), transatlantic cultural and philosophical genealogies and correspondences, and the exchanges between the poetics of American space and those of other world spaces. Asking questions about the way the American eye has traversed and consumed the objects and cultures of the world, but how that world is resistant, this volume will make an important contribution to American and Transatlantic literary studies.

The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.

In Modernism the Morning After, Bob Perelman scrutinizes a number of long-held modernist dogmas in order to articulate a more capacious model for thinking about modernism-past, present, and future. Throughout his career, Perelman has focused on the persistence of modernist ambition in poetry, with all of its admirable articulations and tragicomic short-circuits. Poetry, it turns out, is not simply "news that stays news," as Ezra Pound postulated. Instead, as Perelman demonstrates, poetry often gropes toward whatever news can be found in the broader contexts of public speech-the cultural commons, the almost-real or much-too-real language of people and our hyperactive media. Book jacket.