Hello is a verse journal recording the poet's 1976 whirlwind tour of Southeast Asia. He began in Fiji, he then spent a month in New Zealand followed by stays in Australia, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand and Korea.
He remarked in a postscript that he went “because I wanted to––to look, to see, even if briefly, how people in those parts of the world made a reality, to talk of being American, of the past war, of power, of usual life in this country, of my fellow and sister poets, of my neighbors on Fargo Street in Buffalo, New York."
The experience had an effect on his later work, according to critical reception and came at a time of much change in his personal life.
About the Author :
Robert White Creeley (1926–2005), poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, editor, and teacher was born in Arlington, Massachusetts. He drove an ambulance in south East Asia (India-Burma) in 1944 returning to Harvard where he helped launch the magazine, Origin which promoted his poetry during the 1950s. Having dropped out of Harvard he eventually completed his undergraduate degree at Black Mountain College where he was an editor of its literary journal, The Black Mountain Review. The magazine lent its name to a school of poetry whose exemplars included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov as well as Creeley. His breakthrough happened in 1962 with the publication of For Love: Poems 1950-1960. For much of his life thereafter he was affiliated with universities and was the recipient of numerous awards including the Levinson Prize in 1960, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Robert Frost Medal, both from the Poetry Society of America, and The American Awards for Echoes, 1994. He was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987 and received a Distinguished Fulbright Fellowship to serve as the Bicentennial Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland, 1988–89, and another Fulbright for the University of Auckland, New Zealand in 1995. He served as New York State Poet from 1989–1991. In 1995 he was a winner of the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. He is the 1999 winner of the biennial Bollingen Prize in Poetry, in June 2000, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Awards, and he was the 2003 winner of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation.
