Robert Peters

Robert and I met our producer & the composer of the  musical score Harlan Steinberger and our associate producer Michael C. Ford of RP’s latest CD Going Down The River In A Hayloft Coffin at Mimi’s Café.

This kaffeeklatsch gathering between us four is the fun part.   It is always a  pleasure to break bread amongst birds of a feather before getting back to hardcore business.   Layers of our past become thinner as we find more about each other.   When friends & business associates allow themselves such encounters there are elements of risks.   Did I reveal too much?   Did I bore my fellow kaffeeklatsch gatherers with too much details of my past?   I say to these rhetorical questions is to learn balance of reciprocation so what you bring to the table will soften the blow of our hardcore endeavors.

So after the scintillating kaffeeklatsch, we went home to my place where Harlan gave us “Art for Art’s sake” lessons on  cyberspace of how to promote RP’s cd.   Harlan was lenient on us by being cognitive of how much we can take in before our brains began to fry.  Therefore the anticipated hardcore business aspects of promoting art was reduced to softcore business.     So seriousness and pleasure can definitely produce potentially great art.

Poet Robert Peters came out with What Dillinger Meant to Me published by Seahorse Press in 1983.  These poems truly captured the time in the 1930s when John Dillinger was caught in a shootout with FBI agent Melvin Purvis who tracked down Dillinger in small North wood resort town in Wisconsin called Manitowish Waters at the Little Bohemia Lodge .    This place was very near Peters small home town Eagle River. Robert Peters evokes such keen flavor of these rustic areas and the rural folks who inhabited the areas with all salacious hanky-panky and other idiosyncratic attitributes amongst them.  Peters also calls up the ways of survival of picking wild berries, deer hunting, sawmills,  ice-fishing, & building one’s home with the natives trees.   Outhouses were as ubiquitous as the trees and the numerous lakes.  Sears Roebuck catalogue’s pages were used for wipes.  Peters filled in his poetic lines with such clarity and detail of  the indigenous flora and fauna of that area.    He captured the  fears & myths of the wilderness be it “Swamp man” or prowling wolves & lurking bears.   Peters’ parents had seen John Dillinger as latter day Robin Hood.   They were dirt poor like so many of these north wood Wisconsin kinfolks and they were glad to see their sense of  justice done when it came down to proper distribution of wealth during the Depression.

Anyone interested can now read this whole book  Dillinger on line for no cost.   Anyone can print it out and read it leisurely.  Peters does have limited signed author’s copies for anyone who would like purchase them by Check for twenty dollars to 9431 Krepp Drive, Huntington Beach, CA 92646.

I so impressed with Karen Neurohr in how she conducted the interview with Bob. She came replete with state-of-the-art video & mike & whatnots. Her line of questions to Bob brought out the vintage performer he once was. She would request him to read some of the daughter of a dust bowl sharecropper poems. Karen did her homework. She found so much stuff on Bob’s relationship with this daughter Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Karen would ask Bob to interpet the poems he would read in the mike. Lo and behold! Right off the cuff, Bob, in a professorial and folksy vein, would extrapolate the poems with zest and insightfulness. He topped off this inteview reading his own poem to Wilma:

“Wilma, We Might Have Been

Sweeties.

In overalls and straw hat,

chewing timothy, I’d amble

over. You’d fetch a jar of

frosty artesian well water

and draw me to the parlor

to hear new poems from your

five cent tablet, poems about

lovable (and not so lovable)

kith and kin. You were setting

up shooting gallery ducks–No,

that’s too facile: you embedded

folks in amber. Did you know

back then that poems were so

durable? Or that I loved you?”

After the interview ends, Karen begins to pack up her stuff and I offer her a slice of carrot cake.  Bob gets up from his seat, the warm blanket with two prideful lions printed on it that I covered his legs before the interview  falls on the floor, exposing his large catheter bag as he picks it up to go to the bathroom. It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s dog Toto knocks down the Wizard’s facade and his warts and all were revealed.   Karen never batted an eye. This morning inteview was an utter delight for me to witness the finesse between poet and journalist. This conducted oral history will be integrated on Wilma’s Web.

Robert’s is going to be interviewed this morning, He doesn’t know it yet but he will when Karen Neurohr arrives here at ten o’clock. Karen is a Oklahoma State University Librarian who is coordinating a project over “Okie” poet Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel. Karen is going around conducting oral history interviews with folks who knew Wilma. Wilma and Robert had a great mash. Wilma especially would call Robert from time to time and rap about poetry or anything.

Wilma would send original poetry to him on gum wrappers, ripped brown paper bags or anything she could to write on. Most of these archives are housed away in Lawrence Kansas University unopened to the public scrutiny. There are some of these items at the Dr Seusss Library at the University of San Diego. Here is the website for Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel: Wilma’s web.  In one of Robert’s poetry books The Faimial Love and Other Misfortunes, he dedicates this book in the Prologue to Wilma. He’ll probably read that on tape today with the interview with Karen. I better get Robert all gussied up for the forthcoming event. I got to make sure he has his small catheter bag attached instead of his large one that drags on the floor. We must keep up appearances.

Robert had to get a biopsy from his urinary bladder. This was called minor surgery. The surgery went well but Robert had to go home with a catheter. Yes! It took him awhile to get used to it. To pee at anytime without going to the toilet was too liberating for Robert to assume. He was given two pairs of pee bags. One pair was one that would be suitable at night because it could carry more pee. The other pair were more portable. One can latch the bag on one’s thigh and meet your public. The problem with this portable bag is because it’s smaller, that one will have to subtly slide away into a public stall and furtively empty the bag. Robert and I have not gone out in public to give this a a twist in the wind. Perhaps we will before the end of the week before he goes back to Kaiser and gets the catheter removed. Now why did Kaiser give Robert two sets of bags? Courtesy my friends-courtesy. It never hurts to have a backup bag in case something botchy happens.

I am Bob’s spouse and his caretaker. He has a form of dementia and he’s had for some time. He takes two memory pills a day. What do these pills do? In lay-person’s terms, they stop bad protein molecules from progressively destroying neurons. In Bob’s case these pills seem to do the job. Like most folks who are caretakers do more and more research so they can do what they can to help their beloveds with their type of dementia. I have a detached fascination of learning from Alzheimer’s literature that there are seventy definable forms of dementia. Alzheimer seems to be the most prevalent form of dementia. I will not use this forum to even name a few other forms because of the tagentry that might derive by doing so. I will say this much that many of the seventy definable forms of dementia deals with different locations of the brain and different types of bad protein molecules. Some forms of dementia may not deal with bad protein molecules because a person can get brain damage by so many other ways such as near drowning, auto accident, lack of oxygen to the brain etc. Bob’s form of dementia hasn’t really been definitively diagnosed by Kaiser Permanente. Our family members and friends too seem not to make of it of Bob’s short term memory deficit. It’s not completely shot.

Bob has the good fortune not to be bummed out by his short term memory lost. Occasionally he brings it up to me in a concerning manner but doesn’t dwell on it for long. He’s going on eighty-five so he does have aging syndromes such as stiff hips, very hard of hearing and other expected creaks. Some folks who have dementia, their personality turns to worse but Bob’s good natured personality has not done that. Believe me I’m not looking for the other shoe to drop. Meanwhile I try to relish every nanosecond I have with Bob. You see he’s still an extremely creative man. His editorial part of his brain in totally intact. He does spend many hours doing New York crosswords. We go to our local Scrabble clubs at least twice a week. His new CD Going Down the River in a Hayloft Coffin deals at the end of journey about his frailties. One of his poems Memory Loss In A Parking Lot speaks volumes of his poignant vulnerabilities.

Exciting news!    First time ever lovers of the Spoken Words accompanied by grand musical score will be able hear Poet Robert Peters read his latest works.   This piece of work is a sequential autobiography from early childhood to celebrating his eighty-fifth birthday.    Poet’s intonations comport true-blue bucolic and rustic rap.  This cd will be out in ten days.

Preview one of the tracks from the CD -  Cousin Albert

I’m now entering the world of Robert Peters’ psyche where its roots ascend from the creative world of a Northwoods wilderness. As Frank Sinatra once sang  “I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king”, well this exemplifies of Peters’ life.      Readers can now press the links on the lower right column and enter some of the places where Peters has been and the places that house his past.

One might say if  a psychiatrist ever diagnosed Peters properly, he or she would have found him with a mulit-personality disorder based on all the voices embodied through his persona poetry.    During his long  literary career he became  mad king Ludwig of Bavaria,  the nortorious Hungarian Blood Countess Elizabeth Bathory, The eccentric Cornish Vicar Robert Stephen Hawker,  the Orange County Serial Killer Randy Kraft,  the Second Coming Christ Ann Lee, the founder of the Shaker Religion,   the legendary Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane,  the forgotten British Romantic Artist Robert Benjamin Haydon and the unforgettable FBI chief J.  Edgar Hoover.    Robert Peters became so well known for his voice books and carrying on the tradition of  Persona poetry from poet English Robert Browning et al

After his life time poetry career embodying other voices, he’s always retrieved to his own  voice.   He’s now an octogenarian and is coming out this year with a cd from the Hen House Studio called Going Down The River in a Hayloft Coffin. This cd with an exquisite music score is  interspersed with Peters’ spoken words.   The music is composed by Los Angles composer Harlan Steinberger.   Steinberger is also the founder of the Hen House studio and  majorly instrumental of the production of Peters’ new cd.

2009 is  going to be a breakneck and bonanza year for the revival of Robert Peters’ illustrious literary career.