Meeting Creeley

I saw Robert Creeley at the U of C. Was pretty amazing, as his work seems to improve with his age. Did phenomenal pieces from his new book and made veiled asides assailing the pretention of the very halls of erudition welcoming him ("I don't even know what these poems mean ... I just write them"). At times he seemed to ramble, but it was a good, grandfatherly kind of rambling. At the ensuing reception, I waited out several undergrads asking the man what the poems were about (see prior parenthetic aside) or plugging their own agendas just to say hello ("you dropping out of that Bowling Green writing program was probably a very smart move," he told me -- a long story involving Carl Thayler and trite institutional political correctness in the early '90s). Was like talking to Moses, only much more cool.