Thanks, Mark, for the lovely account.

Most poets have at least one or two Creeley stories.
There is the person. There is person at what age you first heard him read.
First encountered him socially or not. And, maybe, most importantly read his
work; then there is the question of what work was important to you, most
influential.

And we will - fortunately - hear much of this in the days and weeks to come.
It will be good to see the ways in which the person and the work finds
itself refracted through out the world. In the light of his generosity to so
many, one hopes that no one or group(s) try to lay one or other obnoxious
claim on either the person or the work. Or, as I remember him once say of
language, "no one owns it" - which made him a champion of others in
practice, as well as leery of those invested in hierarchical claims. His
loyalty was to art of words, the art of their use.. And those spaces
in-between. Perhaps similar to Giacometti's sculptures, we are always aware
of the negative, perhaps anxious, space that surrounds the work, the poem's
material - that something is being made (constructed), hard and not
gratuitous.
And yet there is the loving 'charm' - where 'charm' means song - and the
devotion is constant - yet the outcome may - as with, say, Miles Davis - not
resemble song in any, familiar or predictable sense. His awareness and use
of he evidence, the things seen and heard in the world assure a breach, one
that brings the ear and eye up short, mesmerized. And the love of delivering
it, making it public, "a gift", "for love."

And beyond or with the work who can ever forget his social presence - a
magnetism that brought people up to their best, everyone, in my experience,
immediate and alert to each word in the air. A place honored where the poem
became as valid as any door through which one may enter to receive a
particular gift, where no place else could be more interesting to live and
abide.

I - as I am sure of many of us - will miss him dearly. I want to share what