Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm.

I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today I'm honored to have as my guest, Robert Creely, who has

recently won the Lennon Lifetime Achievement Award.

We are going to be speaking to Robert Creely at his home in Buffalo, a snowy buffalo, where

the telephone lines are sagging with snow, and so the sound is not as good as it usually is,

but it is a pleasure at all times to talk to Robert Creely, whose most recent books include

Just in Time, poems 1984 to 1994 from New Directions Press.

He has recently published a collaboration called Enfamil published by granary books,

and his collected and selected poems come from the University of California Press.

I thought it would be good to talk about my background that led me to meet and know the work and

context of Robert Creely. So when I began to speak to him, I sketched the story of Buffalo

in 1969.

I have a rather unusual relation to Robert Creeley.

We have never spoken before, but I was a student at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

I came there in 1969.

I remained there through 1975. And when I arrived, I was 16 years old. I want to sketch some of the world around me then that included Robert Creely not as a primary fact of my

consciousness, but part of the air there. I came to what could be

...