[Poetry reading for Just Buffalo Literary Center at the Hilton Hotel, Buffalo, N.Y., November 22, 1980] / Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan.

Recorded at the Buffalo Hilton hotel in Buffalo, New York on November 22, 1980 by Allen De Loach on a 120 minute Memorex sound cassette. Recording acquired by the Poetry Collection from De Loach.

This joint poetry reading by Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan was sponsored by Just Buffalo Literary Center. Creeley and Duncan were introduced by Harvey Brown and John Clarke, respectively. In addition, John Daly read a poem beginning "Sit down / Listen to the sound a poet makes " as a prologue and homage to Duncan. "Characteristically, when I'm reading in this kind of situation," Creeley said, "I tend not to make a particular selection and sort of, quote, 'play it by ear,' but for this evening and the interests here collected, I thought more appropriate indeed to read poems that seem to have part of this common responsibility as to how imaginations of the world and our understandings of them and how imaginations of being human have contexts, continuity, information beyond our own presumptions." Creeley also mentioned that Tom Clark was being paid fifteen dollars per blurb by John Martin of Black Sparrow Press and that the poem "Kore" came from a reading of Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion by Jane Harrison. Robert Duncan said: "Ground work is literally going back to the ground work, and ground in the sense of ground and figure, too, preparatory to the poetry of my senility" He continued: "The volume that follows Ground work I and volume II I can now announce is called 'Early senilities' and after that it's called 'Later senilities,' and if I really do it, like it was announced--you heard it there--I still want to get up and give you the works when I am a hundred, and I hope you're all still with me. It'll be wonderful. I'll have a totally senile audience, and it will be called 'Still later senilities.' That 'Still' is so marvelous. You know, I mean, boy, 'Barely moving later senilities.'" Before reading "A lammas tiding" and "My mother would be a falconress," Duncan said "This is my entire homage to reading in a psychoanalytic setting, and you'll see how straightline Freudian I am."

Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan.

The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries. Digital conversion was made possible through a 2009 National Endowment for the Humanities grant.

1980

Sound recording

INT022

Disc 1.Robert Creeley reading:The lion and the dog --The door --Kore --The rain --Listless --first line of poem:[There was no one there] --Ice cream --Surgeons --first lines of poem:[What / do you think it is] --first lines of poem:[Sweet, sad / nostalgia] --first line of poem:[Looking for a way] --An illness --Rain --Rain (2) --For my mother: Genevieve Jules Creeley --Time --Backwards --The plan is the body. --In memoriam Wallace Stevens, structure of rime XXVIII /Jack Clarke --first line of poem:[Sit down / Listen to the sound a poet makes] /John Daly --Robert Duncan reading:The structure of rime II --A storm of white --Golden Lines (from Duncan's translation of The chimeras of G??rard de Nerval) --from Circulations of the song:[How I long for the presence of your eyes]. --Disc 2.Structure of rime XXVII --The museum --A Lammas tiding --My mother would be a falconress --Stimmung, passages --The cherubim --Styx --Enthralld, passages --The sentinels --In waking.

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lib-pc002-INT022.mp3