Robert Creeley A Biography Hardcover - 2001

From the publisher

Robert Creeley, one of the most revered voices of contemporary American poetry, has attained an almost legendary status, based on his role in such avant-garde movements of the fifties as Black Mountain, Tish, and the Beats. Ekbert Faas focuses on the first fifty years of Creeley's life -- years of rebellion, restless travel, tumultuous liaisons, and anger and violence, that gave his writing a raw candor. Along the way he developed a flair for noticing the talent of others, and as a small press publisher and editor he promoted the likes of Layton, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Olson, and Burroughs. Their stars rose while he scraped by, until finally, suddenly, fame arrived. His poetry collection For Love and novel The Island earned him critical acclaim that has outlasted that of his contemporaries. Since then his poetry has become increasingly autobiographical and nostalgic, and now he contemplates the commonplace for inspiration.
In this tour-de-force biography, Faas, a major scholar and critic of contemporary American poetry, pioneers a new kind of life-writing, one that tells its stories through the emotions, thoughts, and, above all, language of the dramatis personae. He exchanges the authorial omniscience of the traditional biography for an utter fidelity to his sources: anecdotes and stories are told, re-told, and told again, always through the words of those who lived them, allowing Creeley to reveal himself beneath the myths created by reinvention, imagination, and wishful thinking.