In September 2002 I had the pleasure of spending a week with Robert Creeley and his wife Penelope at their home in Waldoboro, Maine. I'd gone there to make sound recordings of Bob reading his work - to be released the following year as the Rockdrill CDs 'I Know A Man' and 'Just In Time' - and to film video interviews with him for a still unfinished documentary.

My enduring impression is of Creeley's good humour and his unflagging energy. Each morning we would record (and film) as many as 30 or 40 poems - over 100 of which were to find their way on to the CDs - delivered in his very distinctive manner, soft-voiced and with broad Irish 'r's, at times on the verge of cracking with emotion, and with his characteristic rest at the end of each line: 'As I said to my - pause - friend, because I am - pause - always talking...'

In the afternoons, after lunch and a cold beer, we would repair to his study, and over the course of the week film what was, at twelve hours or more, probably the longest interview he had ever given, a leisurely account of his life and loves, his writing, his travels, and his many friendships (Levertov, Olson, Duncan, Brakhage, McClure, Kerouac, Ginsberg, de Kooning, Kline), sessions which were memorable for the patience, candour and warmth of the interviewee.

At the end of what we'd planned to make the final session, Bob unearthed a cassette of his early role model William Carlos Williams reading 'To Elsie'. As the old recording hissed to its end, he fixed me with a playful stare, observing wryly that where he himself would rigorously have observed the poem's line endings, his mentor completely ignored them: 'I managed in effect to invent a prosody or a way of dealing with line that my master had in no wise either practised or seemingly intended.'

Robert Creeley died in Odessa, Texas on 30th March 2005. Creeley's Rodkdrill CDs are available to purchase from the Carcanet website.