WILD, Peter

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Nationality: American. Born: Northampton, Massachusetts, 25 April 1940. Education: University of Arizona, Tucson, 1958–62, 1965–67, B.A. 1962, M.A. 1967; University of California, Irvine, 1967–69, M.F.A. 1969. Family: Married 1) Sylvia Ortiz in 1966; 2) Rosemary Harrold in 1981. Career: Assistant professor of English, Sul Ross State University, Alpine, Texas, 1969–71; assistant professor, 1971–73, associate professor, 1973–79, and since 1979 professor of English, University of Arizona. Since 1974 contributing editor, High Country News, Lander, Wyoming; since 1983 consulting editor, Diversions.Awards: Writer's Digest prize, 1964; Hart Crane and Alice Crane Williams Memorial Fund grant, 1969; Ark River Review prize, 1972; Ohio State University President's prize, 1982. Address: 1547 East Lester, Tucson, Arizona 85719, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Good Fox. Glassboro, New Jersey, Goodly, 1967.

Sonnets. San Francisco, Cranium Press, 1967.

The Afternoon in Dismay. Cincinnati, Art Association of Cincinnati, 1968.

Mica Mountain Poems. Ithaca, New York, Lillabulero Press, 1968.

Joining Up and Other Poems. Sacramento, California, Runcible Spoon, 1968.

Mad Night with Sunflowers. Sacramento, California, Runcible Spoon, 1968.

Love Poems. Northwood Narrows, New Hampshire, Lillabulero Press, 1969.

Three Nights in the Chiricahuas. Madison, Wisconsin, Abraxas Press, 1969.

Poems. Portland, Oregon, Prensa de Lagar, 1969.

Fat Man Poems. Belmont, Massachusetts, Hellric, 1970.

Terms and Renewals. San Francisco, Two Windows Press, 1970.

Grace. Pennington, New Jersey, Stone Press, 1971.

Dilemma. Poquoson, Virginia, Back Door Press, 1971.

Wild's Magical Book of Cranial Effusions. New York, New Rivers Press, 1971.

Peligros. Ithaca, New York, Ithaca House, 1972.

New and Selected Poems. New York, New Rivers Press, 1973.

Cochise. New York, Doubleday, 1973.

The Cloning. New York, Doubleday, 1974.

Tumacacori. Berkeley, California, Two Windows Press, 1974.

Health. Berkeley, California, Two Windows Press, 1974.

Chihuahua. New York, Doubleday, 1976.

The Island Hunter. Tannersville, New York, Tideline Press, 1976.

Pioneers. Tannersville, New York, Tideline Press, 1976.

The Cavalryman. Tannersville, New York, Tideline Press, 1976.

House Fires. Santa Cruz, California, Greenhouse Review Press, 1977

Gold Mines. Iola, Wisconsin, Wolfsong Press, 1978.

Barn Fires. Point Reyes, California, Floating Island, 1978.

Zuni Butte. Bisbee, Arizona, San Pedro Press, 1978.

The Lost Tribe. Iola, Wisconsin, Wolfsong Press, 1979.

Jeanne d'Arc: A Collection of New Poems. Memphis, St. Luke's Press, 1980.

Rainbow. Des Moines, Iowa, Blue Buildings Press, 1980.

Wilderness. St. Paul, Minnesota, New Rivers Press, 1980.

Heretics. Madison, Wisconsin, Ghost Pony Press, 1981.

Bitterroots. Tucson, Blue Moon Press, 1982.

The Peaceable Kingdom. Rochester, New York, Adler Press, 1983.

Getting Ready for a Date. Madison, Wisconsin, Ghost Pony Press, 1984.

The Light on Little Mormon Lake. Point Reyes, California, Floating Island, 1984.

The Brides of Christ. Vienna, Austria, Mosaic, 1991.

Easy Victory. Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1994.

Other

Pioneer Conservationists of Western [and Eastern] America. Missoula, Montana, Mountain Press, 2 vols., 1979–83.

Enos Mills. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1979.

Clarence King. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1981.

James Welch. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1983.

Barry Lopez. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1984.

John Haines. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1985.

John Nicholas. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1986.

The Saguaro Forest. Flagstaff, Arizona, Northland Press, 1986.

John C. Van Dyke: The Desert. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1988.

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1991.

Ann Zwinger. Boise, Idaho, Boise State University, 1993.

The Opal Desert: Explorations of Fantasy and Reality in the American Southwest. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999.

Editor, with Frank Graziano, New Poetry of the American West. Durango, Colorado, Logbridge Rhodes, 1982.

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Manuscript Collection: University of Arizona, Tucson.

Critical Studies: "Eight Chapbooks," in The Dragonfly (Pocatello, Idaho), fall and winter 1970; "Keeping Us Mad" by B. Salchert, in Wisconsin Review (Oshkosh), spring 1972; "Lillabulero's Pamphlets," in Greenfield Review (Greenfield Center, New York), June 1972; "Mud Men, Mud Women" by Robert Peters, in Margins (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), October-November 1974; "Peter Wild: Ways of Promise" by Philip Allan Friedman, in Gramercy Review (Los Angeles), summer 1978; interview, in Blue Moon News (Tucson), 1980; "Going Wild: Poems of the Idaho-Montana Border," in Redneck Review of Literature, 15, fall 1988, and "Discovering Peter Wild: Contemporary Poet of the Southwest," in New Mexico Humanities Review (Socorro, New Mexico), 32, 1989, both by James Maguire; Peter Wild by Edward Butscher, Boise, Boise State University, 1992; "Pressed in the Spirit: Recent Poetry by Peter Cooley and Peter Wild" by Mark Dawson, in Black Warrior Review (Tuscaloosa, Alabama), 19(2), spring-summer 1993.

Peter Wild comments:

Both figuratively and in reality, I have always felt a necessity to spend a great deal of time in the open, in the outdoors. Hence, the deterioration of the natural environment, overpopulation, and the erosion of man's cultural diversity are conditions of great concern to me. Furthermore, due to a strong sense of place, as a resident of the American Southwest, a region of the Anglo, Mexican, and American Indian, I often hold conflicting sympathies and allegiances. This is not to imply that I consider myself either a nature poet or a regional poet—a poet must write for all men—but in general it may be of help for a reader to remember that the above connects and circumstances of my life undoubtedly underlie and temper much of my writing.

*  *  *

In 1973, at the age of thirty-three, Peter Wild published a new and selected poems. It appeared only six years after he had first published his poetry. Why this premature act? Of course, it was partly because of a strong interest in Wild's poetry and a highly successful debut in the world of writing. As William Matthews wrote in the introduction, "The effect is of a baroque telegram, or the wildest photo caption you'll ever read." Wild's poems were realistic enough to use vivid details, as in the short poem "Talking with the Cook When the First Man Comes to Coffee":

In the sky
gauze patches
soak over our wounds
that drip sparks,
flying in a second to the horizon.
 
we dig our needle
heels in against it, our spurs
founder in the dust
up to our knees, the calf
gone mad on his white
intestine of a rope.
 
until the first hand
closes around the cup,
a scar covered with hair
and the light shines out
	from the tips of our boots.

But each poem also revealed a sense of the inner world of magic, the unconscious, a dreamworld. It was a kind of surrealism very attractive to readers and critics from many different backgrounds. In a poem called "Last Night Emily Dickinson," Wild fuses our dreamworld, a kind of comic book image of a literary figure, and the natural world. Goats are watching the phenomena:

Last night Emily Dickinson
	flew over my house
on a fried chicken liver,
	mushy grass hair
		unloosed
and her apron tucked up
	under her white knees.

...
she shot
	over the dark margin of the trees
like a comet
	bound to explode:
and in the pale light of it
	I saw their bloodless faces
white like the heads of tapeworms
turn in a even sweep
	to watch her go

we set our teeth
	but the explosion
	 never came
so we went back to bed;
there were only grease spots
on the window panes
in the imminent darkness
	like a butterfly
	 my heart tore
	  in two.

I quote portions of this poem at length because it shows the Wild who is a magic realist, a poet writing in and out of the real world, with a normal, expected psychological dimension juxtaposed against the distortion of both reality and fantasy.

Since that time, however, Wild has been evolving into a very different poet. He has become a genuine surrealist, working beyond the attractive vision of snakes as dragons, then dragon kites, men whose sense of the real world is so strong that their boots glow in the morning air, or a fast-food Emily Dickinson, leaving more grease than good taste in the pop consumer's life. This turning away from easy, though brilliant and attractive, writing has lost Wild many of his earlier readers. His poems now demand a quite different facility from readers and never grant the jigsaw puzzle satisfaction of his earlier work. In a later book, The Peaceable Kingdom, there is a poem that seems to address this very issue, for surely Wild, like many poets whose work has grown and changed so that it is scarcely recognizable to his early readers, must be plagued with people wanting him to remain the same. In "Favors" he begins, "The moon wants to talk to me / but I have nothing to say to him. / Is he a bill collector scratching at the door, / telephoning late at night?" The poem goes on to describe the pesky bill collector following him, and he begins to see the man in different disguises and other identities. He concludes the poem with

			Or at last
recognize him, the scrannel St. Bernard
who lives in the basement of the abandoned Mormon
   church
coming out to tip over our garbage cans, feed there.
"Ethel," I shout from the back porch, "get me
my shotgun, the one with birdshot in it,"
	and blast him away
a balloon losing its air with first and final voice,
doing the whole neighborhood a favor.

I think that what has happened to Wild over the years is that his political sense of conscience (he is a member of the Sierra Club and closely involved with environmental issues) has invaded his more orderly and aesthetic surrealism from the past, giving his vision a new complexity, one that brooks nothing simple and easy. He begins a poem called "Babylon" with the lines "The poor would love to live here / in this garage of sparkling whitewash, / your storage room." It is one of many poems that do not make easy constructs or present witty comments on life. These poems, even more than John Ashbery's, often seem to start in one place and end without any logical connections. But perhaps the greatest change to be seen in Wild's work is that he no longer makes an attempt to gratify the reader psychologically. This is a risky step for the poet to take, but one the reader who wants more than delightful images must be very gratified to observe. Perhaps publishing a premature New and Selected Poems at such an early age, then, was a gesture of commitment on his part to leave behind an old vision, not one he would renounce but one he wished to move forward from. It may be one he wishes his readers also to leave behind as pleasant history, while we look at the new and dangerous future ahead of us.

—Diane Wakoski