Robert Creeley has died. He lived a long life, including three marriages, eight children, over 60 books, and countless lively connections with a wide population of the leading american practitioners of the art. He stretched, stylistically, from Pound and especially Williams, to the Beats and beyond. His sense of poetry as a function of living breath is elemental and beautifully enacted in his work. He 
had a lot to do with the Beats (Ginsberg, Corso, etc.) but although of an age, he always seemed to me even more modern---or in a way, more timeless. His work reminds me more of fragments we know from Sappho, as opposed to, say, the more self-consciously purposeful Howl. It's not that his poems don't reflect an intimate consciouness, but that as work they are also of an almost porcelain completeness.
You can find audio of him reading (which is very interesting in terms of his breathing practice) on the web, for example at this site. One that I hear often in my head is I Know a Man:
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
