For Love: A Centenary Symposium for Robert Creeley
May 21-22, 2026
Supplementary Program Information
Thursday, May 21, 2026
Burchfield Penney Art Center
Creeley’s Arts: talks ~ moderated by Stephen Fredman
Jason Camlot, “Robert Creeley’s Intimate Poetics of Performance”
This talk will engage with sound recordings documenting two readings Robert Creeley delivered in Montréal in 1967 and 1970 to explore and show how he developed an intimate poetics of relationality in his public performances at a transitional moment in his career as a poet.
Alexandra Gold, “Seeing Eye / Saying I: Creeley and the Visual Arts”
Creeley’s work has long been shaped by the visual arts. This talk examines how some of those influences emerge in his body of work, from his collaborations with other artists to his tendency toward self-portraiture in his own verse, and how they inform his evolving approach to poetic lyricism.
Benjamin Friedlander, “Two Lost Poems from the 1950s”
This talk will share the texts of two Creeley poems of the 1950s that appeared in an Italian art journal and were promptly forgotten. Apart from their own inherent interest, the poems are intriguing on account of their translator, Beppe Fenoglio, an important figure in postwar Italian literature. Taken together, the poems and their translation tell the story of a fleeting conjunction of two writers and their very different projects.
Presenter bios
Jason Camlot’s critical works include Phonopoetics (Stanford 2019) and recent co-edited special issues, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies” (ESC 2023) and “Affective Signals” (Amodern, 2026). He directs SpokenWeb and is Professor at Concordia in Montréal. Jason was a grad student when he first heard Robert Creeley read (at Stanford in 1998) and he has been fascinated with Creeley’s approach to performance ever since.
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.
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.
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.
Creeley on Film: screenings ~ curated by Black Rock Arts
Film notes
Grayson Goga & Grace Stalley, For Will (2016) [digital, color, sound, 13 min] | Ten years after Robert Creeley’s death, his son Will reflects on the poet’s life and legacy.
Bruce Jackson & Diane Christian, Willy’s Reading (1982) [digital (16mm transfer), color, sound, 16 min] | “Filled with the levity and sweetness of new life, this family picture invites us into a sun-dappled afternoon of poetry and stories as Creeley shares anecdotes from his life interspersed with readings to his newborn son.” – Anthology Film Archives
Stan Brakhage, Two: Creeley/McClure (1965) [16mm, color, silent, 5 min] | “Two portraits in relation to each other, the first of Robert Creeley, the second of Micheal McClure.” – S.B.
Robert Haller, Notes on the Buffalo Conference: Autobiography in American Cinema (1973) [16mm, b&w, silent, 7.5 min] | A record of a conference held at the State University of New York at Buffalo on March 22-25, 1973. Among the participants filmed were Gerald O’Grady (who organized the conference), Will Hindle, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Robert Creeley, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Ed Pincus, Stan Vanderbeek, Ed Emshwiller, Sally Dixon and James Cox.
Gary Doberman, Nimbus (1978) 16mm, color, silent, 4.5 min | “Nimbus was Robert Creeley’s first choice to show in conjunction with a lecture at Rocky Mountain Film Center in 1978. This film owes much to Creeley’s poetry and Edward Hopper’s paintings, although no conscious consideration structured the working process—Hopper in the sense that Brian O’Doherty writes of the paintings as displaying ‘an observed, an observer and a witness.’” – G.D.
Jason Duval, Time Passes (2026) [16mm, color & b&w, silent, 8 min], with Steve Baczkowski in performance, saxophone & winds | Time Passes is an ongoing film diary begun in 2023 and continuing in the present day. The excerpt presented was composed under the influence of poems from Creeley’s middle period, specifically the collections Later, Windows and Mirrors. This premier screening is accompanied by a live performance from Steve Baczkowski, improvised in response to the film and his own readings of Creeley.
In-house presenter bios
Jason Duval works in painting and 16mm film. He is co-founder, with Dorota Kolodziejczyk, of Black Rock Arts, a local venue for art exhibitions and film screenings.
Steve Baczkowski is a renowned multi-instrumentalist focused on improvised music. He has performed widely in Buffalo and beyond, and since 1999 has served as music director for Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center.
Creeley Listening Station 