Robert Creeley — USA: Poetry, NET Outtakes Series: 1966

The Poetry Center presents Robert Creeley, reading from his poems and commenting on his poetry and poetics, in response to questions from filmmaker/poet Richard O. Moore. Creeley is accompanied by Bobbie Louise Hawkins (at the time, Bobbie Creeley), and speaks extensively of his poetics and his contemporaries and the sense of a common and complementary undertaking between them. 

About the dating of the footage: The on-screen titling added to this video in the late 1970s, indicating "mid-July 1965," is in error. Creeley here speaks of the Berkeley Poetry Conference in the past tense, referencing critic Donald Wesling's ”Free Speech and Free Verse,” an account of the Berkeley Poetry Conference of Summer of 1965, that was published in The Nation, November 1965. Further, in our NET Outtakes program footage of Allen Ginsberg from December 14, 1965, Ginsberg tells of plans to visit Creeley in Placitas, and filmmaker Richard O. Moore notes they may cross paths, which indicates Moore's travel to Placitas is yet to happen. Moore traveled to New York and New England in March 1966, filming nine poets to continue the USA: Poetry program series. A likely date for the Creeley footage is therefore also in 1966, either before or after Moore and his crew's East Coast trip. Written documentation may yet confirm an exact date for this footage.

Note: Robert Creeley, Part 2, noted here as filmed at the Berkeley Poetry Conference in late July 1965, missed being digitized, and will be added at a later date. 

The "Second Edition" NET Outtakes Series programs were made in 1978 by The Poetry Center's American Poetry Archives staff. Assembled from unused 16-millimeter black and white film footage shot during production of the original 15-minute USA: Poetry television programs (produced in 1965–66 for National Educational Television by Richard O. Moore of the film unit of KQED-TV, San Francisco), the outtakes footage is arranged here in the original shooting sequence. Note, some silent footage appears among the outtakes. Funding for The Poetry Center's NET Outtakes Series was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.