Bookplanet: Poet Robert Creeley dies at 78

He wrote

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, - John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

and now he's dead. 'Robert Creeley, who helped transform postwar American poetry by making it more conversational and emotionally direct, died on Wednesday in Odessa, Tex. The cause was complications from lung disease, his wife, Penelope, said. "Visible truth," Mr. Creeley once wrote, quoting Melville, is "the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things." That was the goal of his own work - emotion compressed in short, sparse sentences and an emphasis on feeling.' Obits in Boston Globe and NY Times.