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Robert White Creeley, winner of the 1999 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and a longtime professor of English at the University of Buffalo and Brown University, has died of pneumonia at age 78. Two poems, quite apt today, with links below:
Morning
dam’s broke,
head’s a
waterfall.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Goodbye
(From “Life and Death”
by Robert White Creeley)
Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose
itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run
or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head
of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.
It was Zukofsky’s
Born very young into a world
already very old …
The century was well along
when I came in
and now that it’s ending,
I realize it won’t
be long.
But couldn’t it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother’d say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,
did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.
I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.