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

Fredman makes the original argument that some of the most innovative works of poetry and art in the postwar period (1945–1970) engaged in a "contextual practice," a term that refers both to a way of making art characterized by assemblage and to a new relationship between art and life, an "erotic poetics."

"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 Kerouac 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"--

A beautiful and moving collection of poetry by a new author.

"Donald Allen's prophetic anthology had an electrifying effect on two generations, at least, of American poets and readers. More than the repetition of familiar names and ideas that most anthologies seem to be about, here was the declaration of a collective, intelligent, and thoroughly visionary work-in-progress: the primary example for its time of the anthology-as-manifesto. Its republication today--complete with poems, statements on poetics, and autobiographical projections--provides us, again, with a model of how a contemporary anthology can and should be shaped. In these essentials it remains as fresh and useful a guide as it was in 1960."--Jerome Rothenberg, editor of Poems for the Millennium "The New American Poetry is a crucial cultural document, central to defining the poetics and the broader cultural dynamics of a particular historical moment."--Alan Golding, author of From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry

Basil Bunting did not 'believe in biography'. He used to assert that his great poem Briggflatts was his autobiography, and that nothing else was worth saying. He had scant respect for critics, and gave little away about his life - or misled his would-be biographers, whose accounts of him were often semi-mythical. But Bunting's real life does read like an adventure story. Born in Northumberland in 1900, he lived in Paris in the twenties, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. In 1923 he followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingway - where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next thirty years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life, in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia, as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Teheran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts in 1966 that his genius was finally recognised.He was in his seventies when he first met the American critic Sister Victoria Forde, who was working on a study of music and meaning in his poetry. They continued to meet and correspond, and his comments and answers to her letters now form an integral part of the book which grew out of her academic research. This is the first critical study of Bunting's poetry. It is a brilliantly researched book drawing upon the work and letters of Bunting and his contemporaries, as well as interviews and correspondence with his family, and includes over thirty previously unpublished photographs of and by Bunting taken throughout his life.