Bobbie Louise Hawkins (Mrs. Robert Creeley)

Bobbie Louise Hawkins was raised in West Texas, studied art in London, taught in missionary schools in British Honduras, attended Sophia University. Her first one-woman show of paintings and collages was at the Gotham Book Mart in 1974.  In 1979 she was one of 100 poets from eleven countries attending the "One World Poetry" festival in Amsterdam. She was married to Robert Creeley, the distinguished American poet, and was part of the "COOL SCHOOL" of writers who were the original hipsters. They worked at the margins and were the subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century America—the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of those alienated by racial and sexual exclusion, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled as Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices ignored or suppressed by the mainstream were to merge and recombine in unpredictable ways, and change American culture forever. 

Warhol's Factory embraced these writers and musicians: Henry Miller, Miles Davis, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Bob Dylan, Annie Ross, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol, Lester Bangs, and of course Bobbie Louise Hawkins (Mrs. Robert Creeley.)

Hawkins wrote a one-hour play for PBS called "Talk" in 1980. She has two CD’s, Live at the Great American Music Hall and Jaded Love. In 2001, Life As We Know It, a one-woman show, was performed in Boulder and New York City. She taught fiction writing workshops and courses in literary studies at Naropa University until her retirement in 2010. She continues to offer readings and to teach for Naropa's Summer Writing Program.

Awards

• National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship

Works

• "life in Bolinas: Bobbie Louise Hawkins, laborin'", article
• "Panna: 1. Cyril in Texas", Big Bridge #11
• "In the Colony", Ploughshares, Spring 1974
• "I Owe You One", Ploughshares, Spring 1974 (also recorded on "Live at the Great American Music Hall, 1981 w/Terry Garthwaite and Rosalie Sorrels)
• "Bathroom/Animal/Castration Story ", Ploughshares, Spring 1974
• Absolutely Eden. United Artists Books. 2008. ISBN 978-0-935992-35-9.
• Bijou. Farfalla/ McMillan & Parrish. 2005. ISBN 978-0-9766341-8-8.
• Anne Waldman, Lisa Birman, eds. (2004). "Panel on Personal Geography". Civil disobediences: poetics and politics in action. Coffee House Press. ISBN 978-1-56689-158-5.
• My Own Alphabet. Coffee House Press. 1989. ISBN 978-0-918273-52-9.
• One Small Saga. Coffee House Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-918273-05-5.
• Almost everything. Coach House Press. 1982. ISBN 978-0-88910-238-5.
• Frenchy and Cuban Pete. Tombouctou. 1977. ISBN 978-0-939180-05-9.
• Back to Texas (Bearhug) 1977
• 15 Poems. Arif Press. 1974. ISBN 978-0-913537-04-6. External link in |title= (help); republished by Belladonna (New York, 2010) ISBN 978-0-9823387-6-6.
• Own Your Body, Black Sparrow Press, 1973

Anthologies

• James Laughlin, ed. (1977). "Depths and Heights and Sweet Red Melons; What is That Gesture...; It's Like...; Endlessly...". New directions in prose and poetry, Issue 35. New Directions Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8112-0672-3.
• Janet Zandy, ed. (1990). "My Daddy was a Good-Looking Woman Chaser". Calling home: working-class women's writings : an anthology. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-1528-1.

Interview

• "George Oppen, Mary Oppen and a Poem", Jacket 36, 2008

Reviews[edit]

Bobbie Louise Hawkins' Almost Everything is just that. It leaves out her scattered poems and any direct reference to her two unhappy marriages and the children they produced. What remains, two collections of short prose pieces and nine new stories, run a mere 172 pages -- the condensed version of a life punctuated, as Tillie Olsen might put it, by "silences." So when Hawkins speaks, it's that much more pungent.[3]

References

1. Jump up ^ Lewis Ellingham, Kevin Killian (1998). Poet be like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco renaissance. Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0-8195-5308-9.
2. Jump up ^ http://www.naropa.edu/distancelearning/faculty/hawkins.cfm
3. Jump up ^ "BOBBIE LOUISE HAWKINS: Almost Everything", don shewey

External links

• "Music: Garthwaite, Hawkins and Sorrels weave folklore" New York Times, by Stephen Holden, September 26, 1983
• "Monologue, "Take Love, For Instance" ", Naropa's Summer Writing Program, 2004
• "1990 Bobbie Louise Hawkins - First Story", PRX