Two Poems:
"Talking"
"Valentine for You"
from Robert Creeley's
On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay

Robert Creeley:

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) published more than sixty books of poetry, prose, essays, and interviews in the United States and abroad, including If I were writing this; Selected Poems; The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975; and The Island. His many honors included the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he was Distinguished Professor in the Graduate Program in Literary Arts at Brown University. (Photo by Penelope Creeley)

About On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay:

Robert Creeley, one of the most significant American poets of the twentieth century, helped define an emerging countertradition to the prevailing literary establishment – a postwar poetry originating with Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky and expanding through the lives and works of Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, and others. When Robert Creeley died in March 2005, he was working on what was to be his final book of poetry. In addition to more than thirty new poems, many touching on the twin themes of memory and presence, this moving collection includes Creeley's last essay, an exploration of the late verse of Walt Whitman. Together, the essay and the poems are a retrospective on aging and the resilience of memory that includes tender elegies to old friends, the settling of old scores, and reflective poems on mortality and its influence on his craft. On Earth reminds us of what has made Robert Creeley one of the most important and affectionately regarded poets of our time.

"On Earth provides a kind of closure on a rich poetic life and brings us intimately in contact with the poet's final thoughts on the great themes of time and memory. Those of us who know Creeley may well repeat Whitman's lines in reading this volume: 'Good-bye my Fancy! / Farewell dear mate, dear love!'"
— Michael Davidson

Praise for Robert Creeley

"The subtlest feeling for the measure that I encounter anywhere except in the verses of Ezra Pound."
— William Carlos Williams

"Robert Creeley's poetry is as basic and necessary as the air we breathe; as hospitable, plain, and open as our continent itself. He is about the best we have."
— John Ashbery

"Robert Creeley has created a noble life body of poetry that extends the work of his predecessors Pound, Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson and that provides like them a method for his successors in exploring our new American poetic consciousness."
— Allen Ginsberg

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