For Love: A Centenary Symposium for Robert Creeley
May 21-22, 2026
Supplementary Program Information
Friday, May 22, 2026
UB CFA Gallery
Alexandra Gold, “Creeley and the Art of Collaboration”
Creeley was a prodigious collaborator, completing more than a dozen projects with visual artists over several decades. This talk foregrounds Creeley as a creative partner, situating his work within a longer history of artists’ books and taking a closer look at his 1968 collaboration with the artist Robert Indiana, Numbers.
Presenter bio
Alexandra J. Gold is a Head Preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program and the author of The Collaborative Artist’s Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art (University of Iowa Press, 2003). Her scholarship has focused on the intersections between post-1945 poetry and visual art, frequently positioning Creeley as one of the most central, but lesser examined, figures in this field. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Literature, Genre, Word & Image and more. Her broader research and teaching interests include gender and sexuality studies, popular culture, and critical pedagogy. To learn more, please visit her website at www.alexandrajgold.com.
UB Poetry Collection
Stephen Fredman, “Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan: A Poetic Friendship”
This talk offers a glimpse into the enduring and productive friendship between Creeley and Duncan, who wrote poems to one another, reviews of books, many letters, and referred to one another countless times in essays and interviews. It will focus on a point of connection and divergence by looking at their abiding relationships to Walt Whitman.
Steve Fredman, “Robert Creeley and Marisol, Presences: A Text for Marisol“
Presenter bio
Stephen Fredman taught in the English Department at the University of Notre Dame from 1980-2017. Four of his five monographs on American poetry, Poet’s Prose (1990), The Grounding of American Poetry (1993), Contextual Practice (2010), and American Poetry as Transactional Art (2020), contain chapters devoted to Robert Creeley. He edited a critical edition of Creeley’s Presences: A Text for Marisol and co-edited with Steve McCaffery Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeley’s Life and Work. He is responsible for the acquisition of Creeley’s library by Notre Dame Library in 2010. He was privileged to enjoy a friendship with the poet from 1972 to 2005.
UB Anderson Gallery
Roundtable presenter bios
In 1991, Charles Bernstein co-founded the Poetics Program at UB with Robert Creeley, Susan Howe, Dennis Tedlock, and Raymond Federman. He is a SUNY Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, and served as David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters from 1990 to 2003. Along with Creeley and Howe, he received the Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement. Along with Howe, he is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author, most recently, of The Kinds of Poetry I Want: Essays and Comedies (University of Chicago Press, 2024), Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, 2021), and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). Read more at chbernstein.substack.com.
Joseph Conte is Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. His first book, Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry(Cornell UP, 1991; rev. 2016), included a chapter on seriality in Robert Creeley’s Pieces, “One Thing Finding Its Place with Another.” He first met Robert and Penelope Creeley when he arrived in Buffalo in 1990. After the founding of the Poetics Program in English, he collaborated with Creeley, Susan Howe, and Charles Bernstein in supervising several of its distinguished graduates, including Thomas Fisher, Richard Deming, Eleni Stecopoulos, Kenneth Sherwood, Joel Kuszai, Carla Billitteri, and Juliana Spahr.
Benjamin Friedlander edited Robert Creeley’s Selected Poems 1945-2005(University of California, 2008) and, with Alison Fraser, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman, Nice: The Collected Poems of David Melnick (Nightboat, 2024). His most recent publications are a volume of Paul Celan translations, “English mimics a silence…” (Poltroon, 2026) and a book of poems, Some Cares(Spuyten Duyvil, 2024). A student of Creeley in the 1990s, he now teaches American literature and poetics at the University of Maine, where he edits the scholarly journal Paideuma.
Isaac Jarnot was born in Buffalo, New York and educated at the State
University of New York at Buffalo where he studied with Robert Creeley from 1986-1988. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Other Kind of Mission (Burning Deck, 1996), Ring of Fire (Zoland Books, 2001), Black Dog Songs (Flood Editions, 2003), Night Scenes (Flood Editions, 2008), Joie De Vivre: Selected Poems 1992–2012
(City Lights Publishers, 2013), and A Princess Magic Presto Spell (Flood
Editions, 2019), along with Four Lectures (Wave Books, 2024) from the
Bagley Wright Lecture Series. He co-edited An Anthology of New
(American) Poets (Talisman House, 1998), and is the author of Robert
Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus, a biography (University of California Press, 2012). He lives in Jackson Heights, Queens and is currently completing a PhD in theology at Drew University.
Aaron Lowinger is a writer, poet, and lifelong resident of Buffalo, NY and was an active undergraduate student author and editor at SUNY at Buffalo (’03). He has authored many chapbooks including Open Night (Transmission Press) and Guide to Weeds (House Press) and is the former co-curator of the Just Buffalo Literary Series poetry event Big Night (2009-2013), a cross-genre series which paired food with poetry and other local performing artists. Lowinger was also the co-founder and editor of the alternative weekly newspaper The Public that ran from 2014 through 2019 and was distributed widely throughout Western New York. He currently serves as the director of communications for the nonprofit Say Yes Buffalo that provides a tuition scholarship for every graduate of Buffalo public and charter schools for postsecondary education as well as wraparound services and supports. Lowinger was deeply influenced by the literary culture in Buffalo that Robert Creeley helped create and met Bob coincidentally in 1999. He then transferred from Canisius College to SUNY at Buffalo, took classes with Charles Bernstein and stalked Creeley’s office hours.
Kyle Schlesinger is a poet, printer, and professor. His publications include A New Kind of Country (Chax Press, 2020), Color & Light (Dusie, 2020), None of Us, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald (Kin Press, 2020), and A Poetics of the Press (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021). He resides in Vermont, where he first met Robert Creeley in the ‘90s, and went on to be his final student.
Elizabeth Willis is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Liontaming in America (New Directions, 2024), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her 2015 collection, Alive: New and Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her other books include Address, Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and Second Law, along with the edited volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008). Willis came to Buffalo to study with Robert Creeley in 1983 and completed a Ph.D. in Poetics in 1993. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Community reading presenter bios
Ansie Baird is a Buffalo-based poet with 3 volumes of poetry and many publications in various poetry journals. Ansie met Bob and Pen in 1980, and remained close personal friends of them for the rest of their lives.
Noah Falck is a poet and literary director at Just Buffalo. His first public reading of Creeley poems was to his 4th and 5th grade students while teaching in Dayton, Ohio.
Laura Marris is a poet, essayist, and translator whose first book The Age of Loneliness came out from Graywolf in 2024. When she moved to Buffalo, she had the great luck to count Penelope Creeley as a friend (and landlady!).
Jorge Miguel Guitart
Christina Vega-Westhoff is a poet, translator, dancer, and choreographer. She is the author of Suelo Tide Cement.
Celia White is an award-winning poet, author of 6 chapbooks and two full length poetry collections, including Bar (2021). In 1996, she was the Coordinator of the CHOPS program, which brought Robert Creeley to City Honors School for student writing workshops and the publication of one of the first high school online literary magazines.
Musical interlude: from Steve Lacy, Futurities (1985), a double album comprising song settings of poems by Robert Creeley
Musician bios
Doug Dreishpoon, chief curator emeritus at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, consulting editor at the Brooklyn Rail, and a practicing jazz drummer and percussionist, currently directs the Helen Frankenthaler catalogue raisonné project.
Jonathan Golove performs on cello, electric cello and theremin cello. An associate professor in UB’s music department, he is Artistic Director of UB’s Center for 21st Century Music and June in Buffalo festival (This year, JiB runs June 1-7). He had the pleasure of dining with Steve Lacy in 1999, when both Lacy and Golove were featured composers on a Venice Biennale concert.
Saxophonist, drummer, percussionist, DJ, and Buffalo native Nelson Rivera has been a steady member of the Buffalo music scene over 20 years. He performs in musical settings from jazz to salsa, country, rock, and more. Nelson is currently a proud first grade teacher in the Buffalo Public Schools district.
On Steve Lacy’s Futurities
Composer and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy and poet Robert Creeley first met around 1982. They were introduced by poet Pierre Joris, who put the two of them together for a radio show taped in Paris. Paris had been Lacy’s home since 1970, where he formed his primary working group through the early 90s, the Steve Lacy Sextet. Creeley sent Lacy his Collected Poems, and Lacy rather quickly dove into a project of composing musical settings. 20 of these Creeley/Lacy works, known collectively under the title Futurities,were premiered in Lille in 1984 and later released as a recording. Among them is “Sad Advice,” which Lacy pulled from a postcard and will be performed this evening.
Among the many outstanding features of Lacy’s career and musical output, there are two I’d like to note. First, he is nearly unique among jazz saxophonists for having specialized exclusively in the notoriously recalcitrant soprano member of the sax family (John Coltrane, known primarily as a tenor saxophonist, is said to have taken up the soprano after hearing Lacy). And second, Lacy is the extraordinarily rare example of a composer working in the jazz idiom who sought out existing poetic texts to set to music, be they from his friends and acquaintances among the contemporary poets (Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin and Anne Waldman) or from such historical figures as Anna Akhmatova, Herman Melville and Lao-Tzu.
Finally, Steve Lacy’s life partner and principal collaborator, Irène Aebi must be mentioned. She not only added to Steve’s list of poet friends with many of her own (Jack Spicer, Gregory Corso, and Bob Kaufman, among them, all set to music by Lacy), she was also the singular voice declaiming all these literary texts and clarion instrument of Lacy’s remarkable melodies.
–Jonathan Golove
Steve Lacy Digital Collection at the ARChive of Contemporary Music
Our thanks to ARC for use of scans from Steve Lacy’s composition notebook of Futurities for the symposium program.
Creeley Listening Station 