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.
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.
New poetry from the winner of the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Fdtn., and a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award.
"I have assumed a great deal in the selection of the poems from such a large and various number, making them a discourse unavoidably my own as well as any Olson himself might have chosen to offer. I had finally no advice but the long held habit of our using one another, during his life, to act as a measure, a bearing, an unabashed response to what either might write or say."—Robert Creeley A seminal figure in post-World War II literature, Charles Olson has helped define the postmodern sensibility. His poetry embraces themes of empowering love, political responsibility, the wisdom of dreams, the intellect as a unit of energy, the restoration of the archaic, and the transformation of consciousness—all carried in a voice both intimate and grand, American and timeless, impassioned and coolly demanding. In this selection of some 70 poems, Robert Creeley has sought to present a personal reading of Charles Olson's decisive and inimitable work—"unequivocal instances of his genius"—over the many years of their friendship.
"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
Robin Blaser, one of the key North American poets of the postwar period, emerged from the "Berkeley Renaissance" of the 1940s and 1950s as a central figure in that burgeoning literary scene. The Holy Forest, now spanning five decades, is Blaser's highly acclaimed lifelong serial poem. This long-awaited revised and expanded edition includes numerous published volumes of verse, the ongoing "Image-Nation" and "Truth Is Laughter" series, and new work from 1994 to 2004. Blaser's passion for world making draws inspiration from the major poets and philosophers of our time—from friends and peers such as Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery to virtual companions in thought such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, among others. This comprehensive compilation of Blaser's prophetic meditations on the histories, theories, emotions, experiments, and countermemories of the late twentieth century will stand as the definitive collection of his unique and luminous poetic oeuvre.
Letters written during the spring and summer of 1951 convey the artistic concerns of the two writers and share commentary on their poems and essays in progress.
