the words are a beautiful music.

Robert Creeley has died. He was a former professor of mine (OK, full disclosure: he guest-taught a few poetry classes of mine; since he'd long since achieved emeritus status, he wasn't actually teaching as much then) in the English department at SUNY-Buffalo. He was one of the big heavyweights they'd had there as long ago as the early '60s: he was colleagues with lit-crit god Leslie Fiedler (also deceased) , po-mo historical novelist par excellence John Barth (now at Johns Hopkins), and break-all-the-rules-with-clam-dip Charles Bernstein (now at Penn). He was at Buffalo for nearly 40 years, having only recently accepted a position at Brown. When he died, he was in mid-stint as a visiting scholar at the Lannan Foundation in Marfa, TX. A native of these parts (Arlington, MA, which I never knew until I read his obit), he's to be buried in Cambridge Cemetery, where other greats are also forever interred (Henrys James and Longfellow, O.W. Holmes, J.R. Lowell, Bernard Malamud).

This makes me want to go home and read Howl with a glass of single-malt.

I'd call Creeley the thinking man's Bukowski (for language, not behavior), or maybe the Beats' Shelley. Yes, he was that big.

You can read some of his work here.