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How much did "making it new" have to do with "making it"? For the four "outsider poets" considered in this book—Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukofsky, and Ted Berrigan—the connection was everything. At once a social history of literary ambition in America in the fifties and sixties and a uniquely collective form of literary biography, Career Moves offers an intimate account of the postwar poetry underground.
Making the controversial claim that anti-Establishment poets were at least as "careerist" as their mainstream peers, Libbie Rifkin shows how the nature of these poets’ ambition actually defined postwar avant-garde identity. In doing so, she clarifies the complicated link between the crafting of a literary career and the defining of a literary canon.

By any measure—international reputation, influence upon fellow writers and later generations, number of books published, scholarly and critical attention—Robert Creeley (1926–2005) is a literary giant, an outstanding, irreplaceable poet. For many decades readers have remarked upon the almost harrowing emotional nakedness of Creeley’s writing. In the years since his death, it may be that the disappearance of the writer allows that nakedness to be observed more readily and without embarrassment.

       Written by the foremost critics of his poetry, Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work is the first book to treat Creeley’s career as a whole. Masterfully edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, the essays in this collection have been gathered into three parts. Those in “Form” consider a variety of characteristic formal qualities that differentiate Creeley from his contemporaries. In “Power,” writers reflect on the pressure exerted by emotions, gender issues, and politics in Creeley’s life and work. In “Person,” Creeley’s unique artistic and psychological project of constructing a person—reflected in his correspondence, teaching, interviews, collaborations, and meditations on the concept of experience—is excavated. While engaging these three major topics, the authors remain, as Creeley does, intent upon the ways such issues appear in language, for Creeley’s nakedness is most conspicuously displayed in his intimate relationship with words.

Contributors

Charles Altieri

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Stephen Fredman

Benjamin Friedlander

Alan Golding

Michael Davidson

Steve McCaffery

Peter Middleton

Marjorie Perloff

Peter Quartermain

Libbie Rifkin

Since the publication of Robert Creeley’s first book of poems, Le Fou, more than forty years ago, he has emerged as one of the most important and original voices in contemporary poetry. Tales Out of School selects five extended interviews that point to Creeley’s artistic influences and reveal the subjects that have preoccupied the poet’s imagination. The interviews cover a range of themes, including Creeley’s childhood and early writing, the influence of jazz on his work, the history of the Black Mountain School, the relationship of geography to the creative process, and the influences and friendship of other poets, including Pound, Williams, Ginsberg, Levertov, Duncan, and Olson. Taken together, the interviews provide an active context for and complement an understanding of this significant and prolific poet’s achievement.