Robert Creeley – A Day Book | 1971 Scribners Hardcover | Black Mountain Poet

Description

Robert Creeley, a defining voice of postwar American poetry, spent his career balancing intimacy and experimentalism — and A Day Book is a perfect expression of that duality. Designed to look like a single calendar date (November 19, 1968), this compact volume from Scribners defies expectations. It’s not a diary in the traditional sense, but a day’s worth of improvisation — poems, fragments, thoughts — that echo Creeley’s signature style: sparse, precise, and deeply human. A kind of poetic time capsule, it captures a day in the life of a restless, thinking mind.

Born in 1926, Robert Creeley was central to the Black Mountain poets, a group that helped reshape 20th-century American verse. His spare, elliptical poems — often stripped of punctuation and rich with silence — earned him comparisons to Williams and Olson, though Creeley’s voice was always his own: personal, fractured, plainspoken. He taught widely, collaborated with artists and musicians, and left behind a body of work that still feels ahead of its time. For readers who care about form and feeling in equal measure, Creeley is essential.

A really nice first edition of one of Creeley’s most conceptually playful books — in the rarest format he ever tried.