Robert White Creeley has been named the winner of the 1999 Bollingen Prize in Poetry, called "America's top poetry award" by the New York Times.

The Bollingen Prize, established by the late Paul Mellon in 1949, is awarded biennially by the Yale University Library to an American poet for the best book of poetry published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry.

Citing a half-century of work "on the path of epistemological inquiry and poetic experiment," the three-judge panel praised Creeley as "editor, publisher, traveler, teacher [and] writer," calling him "a seminal figure of the second half of the 20th century."

The winning books, both published last year by New Directions Publishing Corp., are "So There," a collection that includes poems set in East Asia, the Pacific and New Mexico; and "Life & Death," poems that examine aging and impermanence.

This year's judges were poets Gary Snyder, winner of the prize in 1997; Carolyn Kizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1985; and Langdon Hammer, professor of English at Yale.

Creeley is one of the originators of the Black Mountain School of Poetry. He was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, in 1926. He attended Harvard University, graduated from Black Mountain College, and received a master's degree from the University of New Mexico. He has taught at Black Mountain College, the University of New Mexico and the University of British Columbia. Since 1965 he has been professor of poetry at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

The author of more than 20 books of poetry, fiction, plays, history and literary criticism, Creeley's poetry collections include "For Love: Poems, 1950-1960," "Words," "Pieces," "Presences," "Selected Poems," "Memory Gardens," "Windows" and "Echoes." He is the recipient of numerous awards, among them the Levinson Prize, granted by Poetry Magazine, two Guggenheim fellowships in poetry, the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry, the Frost Medal, a Fulbright award and the America Award for Poetry. Creeley was New York State Poet 1989-91.

Previous winners of the Bollingen Prize include such poets as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Conrad Aiken, e.e. cummings, Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur.

Goodbye

(From "Life and Death"
by Robert White Creeley)

Now I recognize
it was always me
like a camera
set to expose

itself to a picture
or a pipe
through which the water
might run

or a chicken
dead for dinner
or a plan
inside the head

of a dead man.
Nothing so wrong
when one considered
how it all began.

It was Zukofsky's
Born very young into a world
already very old ...
The century was well along

when I came in
and now that it's ending,
I realize it won't
be long.

But couldn't it all have been
a little nicer,
as my mother'd say. Did it
have to kill everything in sight,

did right always have to be so wrong?
I know this body is impatient.
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind.
Yet I loved, I love.

I want no sentimentality.
I want no more than home.

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