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If I were writing this, by Robert Creeley

"Robert Creeley has created a noble life body of poetry that extends the work of 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

If I were writing this was the last book of poems completed by Robert Creeley and published during his lifetime (New Directions, 2005). The words he wrote to describe this book are oddly prophetic: "Age brings experience, not wisdom; age makes time actual - each day another - until there is no more. These poems have been my company, my solace, my feelings, my heart. When they cannot speak it will all be silence." Though Creeley died in 2005, his poems are not silent - they vibrantly continue to embrace life while acknowledging, with no self-pity, the inevitability of death. The message (as he always ended his letters) is "Onward!"

"Here Creeley's riffs reach the formal height and emotional depth of his old work." --Poetry

"A moving engagement with friends, family...and fragments of literature.... Creeley... is one of the most distinguished living American poets." --Tom Devaney, Philadelphia Inquirer

"Creeley's poetry is now at a tremendous peak." --Richard Hell, Bookforum, Spring 2004

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) was one of America's most acclaimed and respected poets. Receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 2000 as well as a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001 simply confirmed the words of the citation for his 1999 Bollingen Prize in Poetry: "As editor, publisher, traveler, teacher, writer; as mind-worker Robert Creeley has been a seminal figure of the second half of the 20th century."

Date of publication: August 2008