cover image ROBERT CREELEY: A Biography

ROBERT CREELEY: A Biography

Ekbert Faas, , with Maria Trombacco. . Univ. Press of New England, $35 (513pp) ISBN 978-1-58465-170-3

Drawing on dozens of anecdotes and memoirs of Robert Creeley's contemporaries, as well as Creeley's own letters and papers, literary editor and scholar Faas (Young Robert Duncan; etc.) presents a largely unflattering portrait of the acclaimed poet's first 50 years. Having lost both his father and his left eye by age four, Creeley (b. 1926), in Faas's portrait, is on a perennial quest to heal his fractured ego. Growing up in a household dominated by women—his mother and four sisters—Creeley appeared to avenge himself on the women he seduced. Throughout his travels and marriages, he casually ensnared and then disposed of wives of close friends. Treating rivals with unbridled scorn, Creeley intermittently battled with the angels of creativity and the demons of conceit. He reacted to failure with impotence and then rage, resulting in violence—imaginary or real—and drinking bouts. When critic M.L. Rosenthal wrote not quite flatteringly about Creeley's poems, for example, Creeley concluded that Rosenthal had "something against him." Creeley's contemporaries, under Faas's gaze, don't fare much better: Kenneth Rexroth emerges as a jealous, deceitful, unstable cuckold amidst a circle of amoral, self-absorbed writers that included Denise Levertov, Jack Kerouac and Charles Olson. Despite numerous excerpts from his poetry and references to his considerable literary successes, there is little here to enlighten readers about Creeley's contributions to contemporary American poetry or about the regard accorded him by many in the world of poetry. To that end, the memoirs of Creeley's first wife, Ann MacKinnon, which are excerpted at length, are far more useful. (Oct. 26)