All of which is prelude to The News in Poetry 1999, category: a cause for great celebration, winner of the Bollingen Prize this annum being Robert Creeley, essence of American poetry. Creeley, at age 73, is a primo levitator, not so much behind the scenes as simply beyond them, seeing through scenes into acts into plays folding into life, curtains -- short lines, hard nouns, pure emotion. At Harvard with Ashbery, O’Hara, Bly, Hall, Koch, Rich, Wilbur, Creeley moved on to Black Mountain where he was a kind of right hand to Olson, spurring, dropping hints, more river than rudder. On the periphery of everything, central to all, Creeley’s shadow drapes the Beats, the Deep Imagists, Bolinas/San Francisco, and now, every nonschool of poetics from Language to Performance.

Let us pause to praise and then let us party. At a time when poetry be sparking fires all over, the tender ember that’s Creeley’s is what’s kept the invention alive. When I suggested “Drive He Said” as his poem for The United States of Poetry, he cringed at this most-anthologized number, saying he’d prefer something newer, settling on “The Long Road,” part of his sequence to/for/of Francesco Clemente’s “The Black Paintings” called “Life & Death” (Grenfell Press, 116 W. 29th Street, NY, NY, 10001), not to be confused with his recent opus, Life & Death (New Directions, 1998). A lesson many young poets should learn during the fifth retelling of their Greatest Hit this week.

His lines etched in air “place” the voice as heart. Seemingly “blank” words on plain paper become emotion-charged bolts placed in air in performance, launched into feathered flight. This is epiphany Bob-style, first poet to crack the sound barrier for me.

“There was a Millionaire-quality to the phone call,” from the blue, he said, referring to the old TV show. “The next phone call they asked for my Social Security number.” The Prize is worth $50,000. What some may see as radical, the approach of the Laurels to this perennial outsider, true avant-gardista, he sees as a “comfortable, good-natured drift” since the turn of the decade, the Bollingen having most recently been visited upon Kenneth Koch and Gary Snyder.

Somehow so fitting, major prize to poet of shortest line and fullest lineage, at this moment, closing gyre of the Millennium, he waves.

Bob Holman

From Life & Death:

Goodbye

Now I realize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky’s
Born very young into a world
already very old...
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.

But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say, Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.

(reprinted with permission of the author from Life & Death)

From Creeley’s “Linebreak” radio broadcast, grilled by Charles Bernstein:

Charles: Bob, two of the poets that you’ve often invoked, Pound and Olson, wrote epic poems, poems encompassing history, poems incorporating political or cultural documents. But your own poems seem very much the opposite of that...

Bob: Remember, I have one called “Epic” -- “leave some room for my epic.”

Best place to begin reading Creeley: Life & Death (New Directions, 1998).

Another new book, So There: Poems 1976-1983, combines three earlier collections of his work published by New Directions: Hello: A Journal, February 29 - May 3, 1976 (published 1978); Later (1979); and Mirrors (1983).

Also see his new Daybook of a Virtual Poet, a collection of pieces written for the online community in Buffalo, New York.