PETERS, Robert L(ouis)

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Nationality: American. Born: Eagle River, Wisconsin, 20 October 1924. Education: University of Wisconsin, Madison, B.A. 1948,M.A. 1949, Ph.D. 1952. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1943–46: technical sergeant. Family: Married Jean Louise Powell in 1950 (divorced 1972); three sons (one deceased) and one daughter. Career: Instructor in English, University of Idaho, Moscow, 1951–52; assistant professor of humanities, Boston University, 1952–54; assistant professor of English, Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, 1954–57; associate professor of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, 1957–63; associate professor, 1963–66, and professor of Victorian literature, 1966–68, University of California, Riverside. Professor of English and comparative literature, 1968–92, and since 1993 emeritus professor, University of California, Irvine. Visiting professor, University of California, Los Angeles, summer 1965, and University of Utah, Salt Lake City, summer 1967. Bibliographer, 1958–68, and member of the editorial board, 1962–68, English Literature in Translation; member of the board, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1959–62; associate editor, Criticism: A Quarterly of Literature and the Arts, 1961–63; assistant editor and bibliographer, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 1963–65; contributing editor, American Book Review, New York, since 1978, and Poetry Australia, Berrima, New South Wales, since 1989; editor, Poetry Now Series, 1982–87; since 1985 contributing editor, Little Magazine Review and Small Press Review.Awards: American Council of Learned Societies grant, 1963; Guggenheim fellowship, 1966–67; Borestone Mountain award, 1967; Yaddo Colony fellow-ship; MacDowell Colony fellowship, 1973–74; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1974; Di Castagnola prize, 1984; Larry P. Fine Criticism award, 1985, for Black and Blue Guide #2.Address: 9431 Krepp Drive, Huntington Beach, California 92646, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Songs for a Son. New York, Norton, 1967.

The Sow's Head and Other Poems. Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State University Press, 1968.

Connections in the English Lake District. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1972.

Eighteen Poems. Privately printed, 1973.

Red Midnight Moon. San Francisco, Empty Elevator Shaft Press, 1973.

Byron Exhumed. Fort Wayne, Indiana, Windless Orchard Press, 1973.

Cool Zebras of Light. Santa Barbara, California, Christopher Press, 1974.

Holy Cow: Parable Poems. Los Angeles, Red Hill Press, 1974.

Bronchial Tangle, Heart System. Hanover, New Hampshire, Granite, 1974.

The Gift to Be Simple: A Garland for Ann Lee. New York, Liveright, 1975.

Shaker Light. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Pentagram Press, 1975.

The Poet as Ice-Skater. San Francisco, Manroot, 1975.

Hawthorne: Poems Adapted from The American Notebooks. Fairfax, California, Red Hill Press, 1977.

Gauguin's Chair: Selected Poems, 1967–1974. Trumansburg, New York, Crossing Press, 1977.

The Drowned Man to the Fish. St. Paul, Minnesota, New Rivers Press, 1978.

Ikagnak, the North Wind: With Dr. Kane in the Arctic, A Verse Sequence. Pasadena, California, Kenmore Press, 1978.

Love Poems for Robert Mitchum. Huntington Beach, California, Poet-Skin Press, 1981.

Celebrities: In Memory of Margaret Dumont, Dowager of the Marx Brothers Movies (1890–1965). Berkeley, California, Sombre Reptiles, 1981.

The Picnic in the Snow. St. Paul, Minnesota, New Rivers Press, 1982.

What Dillinger Meant to Me. New York, Seahorse Press, 1983.

Hawker. Greensboro, North Carolina, Unicorn Press, 1984.

Kane. Greensboro, North Carolina, Unicorn Press, 1985.

Crunching Gravel. San Francisco, Mercury House, 1988.

Haydon. Greensboro, North Carolina, Unicorn Press, 1989.

Breughel's Pig. Los Angeles, Illuminati, 1989.

Good Night, Paul. N.p., GLB Publishers, 1992.

Love Poems for Robert Mitchum: Poems. Saint John, Kansas, Chiron Review Press, 1992.

Poems: Selected and New (1967–1991). Santa Maria, California, Asylum Arts, 1992.

"Twin Peaks" Cherry Pie: New Poems. Pocatello, Idaho, The Rednec Press, 1995.

Feather, A Child's Death and Life. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.

Plays

Fuck Mother (produced New York, 1970).

Ludwig of Bavaria. Cherry Valley, New York, Cherry Valley, 1986.

The Blood Countess. Cherry Valley, New York, Cherry Valley, 1987.

Novels

Snapshots for A Serial Killer: A Fiction and a Play. N.p., GLB Publishers, 1991.

Zapped: Two Novellas. N.p., GLB Publishers, 1993.

Other

The Crowns of Apollo: Swinburne's Principles of Criticism and Art: A Study in Victorian Criticism and Aesthetics. Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State University Press, 1965.

The Great American Poetry Bake-Off (essays). Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 3 vols., 1979–87.

The Peters Black and Blue Guide to Literary Journals. Silver Spring, Maryland, Cherry Valley, vols. 1 and 2, 1983–85; Paradise, California, Dust, vol. 3, 1986.

Crunching Gravel: On Growing Up in the Thirties. N.p., Mercury House, 1988.

Hunting the Snark: A Compendium of New Poetic Terminology. New York, Paragon House, 1989; revised edition, as Hunting the Snark: American Poetry at Century's End: Classifications and Commentary, Greenboro, North Carolina, Avisson Press, 1997.

Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones, and Queens of Contemporary American Poetry. Santa Maria, California, Asylum Arts, 1994.

For You Lili Marlene: A Memoir of World War II. Madison, University of Wisconsin, 1995.

Editor, Victorians on Literature and Art. New York, Appleton Crofts, 1961; London, Owen, 1964.

Editor, with David Halliburton, Edmund Gosse's Journal of His Visit to America. West Lafayette, Indiana, Purdue University Press, 1966.

Editor, with George Hitchcock, Pioneers of Modern Poetry. SanFrancisco, Kayak, 1967.

Editor, with Herbert M. Schueller, The Letters of John Addington Symonds. Detroit, Michigan, Wayne State University Press, 3 vols., 1967–69.

Editor, with Timothy D'Arch Smith, Gabriel: A Poem, by John Addington Symonds. London, Michael de Hartington, 1974.

Editor, Letters to a Tutor: The Tennyson Family Letters to Henry Graham Dakyns (1861–1911), with The Audrey Tennyson Death-Bed Diary. Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow Press, 1988.

Editor, Nell's Story: A Woman from Eagle River, by Nell Peters. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

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Manuscript Collection: Spencer Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence.

Critical Studies: "Literary Reputation and the Thrown Voice" by Billy Collins, in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1987; interview with Paul Trachtenberg, in Paintbrush (Kirksville, Missouri), 14(28), autumn 1987; "The Poetry's the Thing: An Interview with Robert Peters" by Jim Cory, in James White Review, 13(1), winter 1996.

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Most of Robert L. Peters's work operates through a close attention to the concrete; for him most ideas (and emotions) are, indeed, "in things." This remains true, though less absolutely so in some of his later publications, in both major areas of his work—his "personal" poems (e.g., Songs for a Son, The Drowned Man to the Fish, Holy Cow) and what one might call his poems of historical ventriloquism (e.g., Hawthorne, The Gift to Be Simple).

One pole of Peters's somewhat Manichaean vision of humanity is the product of a kind of disgust. His volume The Sow's Head and Other Poems, for example, includes "Campanella 65: A Set of Explosions." In this group of poems Peters takes as his starting point Italian sonnets by the Dominican Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639); the resulting poems are, says Peters, "free improvisations … and should not be regarded as translations." The most powerful is "De Dignitate Hominis":

This beautiful world is truly God's creature,
God's image, praising God whose type it is.
 
And we are this creature's worms;
vile families of us sink mouths
into the pink lining of its guts,
sate ourselves, flex elastic tails,
quiver. Why should we know its
intellect or its love?

The tone is reminiscent of the medieval De Contemptu Mundi, and it is a tone that, in even more violently expressive manner, is frequently found in Peters's work. The tone is related to recurrent images of dismemberment and torn flesh. The quintessential poem in this line is "The Butchering: Eagle River, Wisconsin," a narrative of an apparently youthful experience that for Peters has an archetypal status, a disturbing, and quasi-religious, revelation of horror and beauty. In The Sow's Head and The Drowned Man to the Fish there are many poems of separation and lust, estrangement and pain, yet there is at times a kind of invocation of beauty, curiously echoic of Christopher Smart. The following is from "Christmas Poem 1966; Lines on an English Butcher-Shop Window":

O beautiful severed head of hog
O skewered lamb-throat, marble eye of duck, O
  meadow-freshened hare suspended ...
O livers tumbling, O clattering jewel of
  pancreas and ligaments of stomach wall...
I see you all!

An intense experience of loss is approached very differently in the moving poems of Songs for a Son, occasioned by the death of Peters's young son. The thirty-eight poems of this sequence have an admirable control and honest exactitude of language. What is perhaps most poignant of all is the poet's realization that "my son's image / was painted on sand," that there are very real limits to his capacity to restore the image mentally:

But I am blind!
Unable to create a brow,
a lash, the hollow down
the back of the neck,
the throat!

Of Peters's less explicitly personal work, the best is perhaps found in the eighty-five poems of his sequence The Gift to Be Simple: A Garland for Ann Lee. Its subject is Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, and the poems provide an imaginative account of her childhood in England, her marriage, and her arrival in America, where she was ultimately beaten to death. Her bearing of witness, her imprisonment, her perception of all evil as sexual in origin, her self-mortification, her moments of vision—all are powerfully conveyed in language of deceptive simplicity. The energy of Peters's writing is self-evident, but what is perhaps not so readily appreciated is the careful craftsmanship of his best work. Consider, for example, the effective use of internal rhyme and the counterpointing of line ending and syntax in the first of the Ann Lee poems:

Ann at twilight,
Ann at dawn, Ann with her
 
meager playthings on
the lawn, a stick doll
 
tucked into her pocket
a polished hen bone for
 
a locket, and on another
string a miniature tin dog
 
with a tin ball in his mouth.

Peters's attitude toward language and his reverence for the exactly observed presented without rhetoric are well evidenced in the poems he mined from Hawthorne's The American Notebooks. Consider, for example, this passage from Hawthorne: "Remarkable characters:—a disagreeable figure, waning from middle-age, clad in a pair of tow homespun pantaloons and very dirty shirt, bare-foot, and with one of his feet maimed by an axe; also, an arm amputated two or three inches below the elbow, his beard of a week's growth, grim and grisly, with a general effect of black;—altogether a filthy and disgusting object." Here is Peters's adaptation:

Dirty shirt, bare-foot
one of his feet maimed
by an axe. An arm
amputated below the elbow,
Grim and grisly, a
general effect of black.

Elsewhere Hawthorne emerges as the author of a kind of Americanized haiku, as in "Moonlight":

I bathed in the river
which was as calm as death.
 
I plunged down into the sky.

My own preference is for this "quieter" end of Peters's range rather than for the poetry of angst and despair. Still, that both should be on offer, so to speak, is a measure of the interest to be found in his work. Although Peters is not a major poet (he is more influenced than influencing), there is much genuine poetry to be found in his work, and he deserves to be read.

—Glyn Pursglove