Literary Birthday – 21 May – Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was born 21 May 1926, and died 30 March 2005.
Nine Quotes
- Hopefully, I write what I don’t know.
- Writing is the same as music. It’s in how you phrase it, how you hold back the note, bend it, shape it, then release it. And what you don’t play is as important as what you do say.
- I don’t think any man writing can worry about what the act of writing costs him, even though at times he is very aware of it.
- Still, no one finally knows what a poet is supposed either to be or to do. Especially in this country, one takes on the job—because all that one does in America is considered a ‘job’—with no clear sense as to what is required or where one will ultimately be led.
- The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it.
- I must say that as soon as I plan to do more prose, I do absolutely nothing.
- Imitation is a way of gaining articulation. It is the way one learns, by having the intimate possibility of some master like Williams or Pound. Writing poems in those modes was a great instruction to me when I began to ‘feel’ what Williams was doing as well as ‘understand’ it. This imitative phase is a natural thing in artists. I feel it should be encouraged.
- For myself, writing has always been the way of finding what I was feeling about, what so engaged me as ‘subject’, and particularly to find the articulation of emotions in the actual writing.
- What a great thing! To be a writer! Words are something you can carry in your head. You can really ‘travel light’.
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author. He wrote more than sixty books. His poems are available in Selected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945–2005.
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