Robert Peters

Meryl Streep nails Maggie’s dementia

peters — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 14:50:45 +0000

I saw Meryl Streep’s portrayal of the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in movie THE IRON LADY. It’s not surprising to me that her portrayal is causing a great stir. Ms Thatcher presently has dementia and Streep tackles getting inside the mind of Thatcher utterly flawlessly. There’s not one nuance out of place of Streep’s enactment of a person with dementia along with a person who once was so powerful and visible on the global stage of history.

I have read where Ronald Reagan’s son Ronald Reagan Jr disapproved of Thatcher’s daughter Carol’s biography on her Mother with very candid details on her dementia. Well I disapprove of Reagan Jr disapproval because he thinks Carol exploits her mother’s private matter of dementia. Having dementia is not a disgrace; it’s a brain disease, which needs to be explored in order to develop knowledge to see if any remedy is at hand. Sugarcoating dementia by keeping it closeted leads nowhere of dealing with its insidious reality.

Reagan Jr’s dad former President Reagan made his own public announcement of his dementia, which his brain disease was commonly labeled as Alzheimer. As American aging population lives longer the percentage of dementia is forever on the increase.

I too, live with a person with dementia. He is the well-known poet and critic and former Victorian Scholar Robert Peters. He’s been my beloved companion for almost forty years. He developed signs of dementia for at least ten years. He’s been taking namenda and aricept drugs for his dementia for some time now. I believe these drugs have kept the progression of Robert’s dementia at bay where he still can be a jolly fellow without any concern of his plight. It’s my job to protect him from harm’s way. Comparing notes with other caretakers of how to deal with dementia is definitely therapeutic.

Meryl Streep, Carol Thatcher or I owe no apologies for sharing the world of dementia because it is here with us with a vengeance.

And the blogs floweth

peters — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:22:04 +0000

I find it arduous at times to unblock the flow of blogs and keep a steady currency but I insist on trying. In the relative news of poetry I received word from Lawrence R. Smith, editor of Caliban Online is going to run Robert Peters’ long poem How an Old Man Commemorates Robert Falcon Scott (1868-1912) in #3 issue in mid-April. This forthcoming issue of Caliban will be paying tribute to the deceased Renaissance poet George Hitchcock (1914-2010) It great to see that Lawrence has resurrected his now au courant magazine being online and all. He took a hiatus from his editorship of Caliban by doing his own writings– novels and such. As they say, there’s a season for everything.

Charles Plymell on Robert Peters – What Peters Means To Me

peters — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:30:21 +0000

I’ve never been that big of an advocate of “oral” poetry (in fact it suggested sex to my dirty mind). Nor did I care that much for “voice” or “performance” poetry, which always suggested to me a way to present otherwise dull poetry where everyone bows their head to the grave task of “understanding.” I thought of it as more arts org decoration because no one knew what real poetry was when funding it, so applause would thus take cues from Jerry Springer with all the slam and “stuff.” I am old fashioned enough to know that in black ink the love of poetry still shines bright. So what do I get in the mail but the new wave of the future of publishing: a cd of the recorded voice; a little booklet of poems; the photo of the poet’s life all in one neat little package! i revised my thinking on the topic. Maybe it WAS important to hear the old Celtic tremble of Yeats, or the dramatic sculpted prosody of Pound in recordings. So here is the gift of the voice of Robert Peters, Professor Emeritus who is probably the last academic scholar and real voice in American poetry to be heard.
His accomplishment in critical analysis would awaken a Ford Maddox Ford. For decades he has made the academe tremble with his witty iconoclastic, intense and diverse critical work on American poetry, its poets, its pedagogy, its ultimate aesthetic. He has shown no mercy. I remember the subliminal courage he gave to my colleague, John Norton, a slight man tough as nails, on a cane since birth, who with me went to hear Robert Penn Warren read from his new volume imitating Native Americans to a packed hot house of academic elites. When Josh and I were classmates in Baltimore…I whispered to Josh that it was very stuffy breathing all that dead air and a window should be opened. After the esteemed poet finished one of his heady poems, Josh got up and banged his cane demanding fresh air in the room. Josh had read the Peters’ essay on Penn Warren classifying his new volume as UGH poetry!
Peters’ many books of criticism such as Hunting the Snark, classification and commentary of American Poetry at the century’s end, or Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones and Queens of Contemporary American Poetry were examples of his many books that have been methodically suppressed over the years out of fear of what he might have said about his contemporaries. Just before I picked up his cd book in the mail, I had been visiting college classes and had given a poetry reading. When I walked down the dead halls of the English Department, I saw again, the image I had known through the years when a poet visited and professors peeked from cubicles and offices through trolling doors with oblique glances at the alien among them. I had to laugh to myself thinking of the time Robert came to visit us in the D.C. area when I was teaching part time in the area’s colleges, that semester at the two Georges: Washington and Mason, where he was embarrassed by the pink round wintered co-ed bodies in the first spring sunlight practicing ballet. Instead of dining with the faculty he suggested we stop at an Asian vegetable stand and get some items, He proceeded to eat the raw head of cabbage like one eats an apple.
Still amused at my thoughts of him I visualized his large daunting figure striding through the halls of the English Department in California on his way to class carrying his briefcase and an armload of books while timid professors poached and peeked with averted glance. I laugh and visualize him thusly as the Vikings in the ad on TV “What’s in Your Wallet!”
Also in the mail was my alumni magazine and I thought again of Robert Peters when I read an article about Professor Gildersleeve, John Hopkins first teacher, who had heard in a hotel in Baltimore, Poe recite “The Raven.” He said his voice was pleasant, nothing dramatic about his recitation and was sensitive to the music of his own verses that he emphasized in his delivery. This made me think what a valuable thing to hear the old poets, the masters’ voices in Peters, Yeats and Pound and others that would have been otherwise lost of not available as in Poe. I was reminded of Peter’s scholarly essays examining his subjects prosody calling attention to half rhymes and devices of which I was unaware even in my own work. What a reward to hear the old poet’s voice.
It is also rewarding to hear Peter’s selections from his immense repertoire. His many volumes that always take on something new. His “seance poetry” that Michael McClure calls his brilliant award-winning volumes of the voices of Ann Lee, the Shaker leader, King Ludwig, the Blood Countess of John Dillinger. For this new format he has selections too, from his many volumes. He’s the last scholar I know who is hip to every gimmick in modern poetry and has tried it all and in this set even digs into his biographical works, into the maw that makes the squeamish wring their hands. He knows the found poems, the ego poems, the catatonic Surrealist poems all the ones he has written about, labeled and many times practiced what he preached. He connects it all from the poem of antiquity to found poems of the scraps we pen today. I’m reminded of him again in the words of the first professor Gildersleeve who said: “Scrap knowledge is the band of many scholars. Not to see a thing in its connections is to not see it at all.” Peter’s greatness was not seen for the reasons I have suggested that shape contemporary poetry. In this new format, he throws a lifeline to those who are drowning in the scrap heap of today’s poetry. -Charles Plymell

New CD/Mp3 Release

peters — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:24:16 +0000

Going Down The River In A Hayloft Coffin: the evocative years of Robert Peters (CD/MP3) is a music poetry album featuring the illustrious poet Robert Peters and music composer Harlan Steinberger. The record includes forty nine poems that are strung with a twinge of Gothic & glaciated enchantments sequentially evoking how a poet thaws and carves out his destiny distancing himself from his primordial Wisconsin roots. The poems start off with winning tales of model Ts, berry picking, sexuality among North wood folks and other vivid backwood encounters. There are variances of deer hunting and fishing expeditions fleshed out. The sequence forges to the present covering eulogies to his beloveds and poignant elegies to the folks who were such integral part of the poet’s life. In the midst of these violent, visceral, celebratory, and elegant tales there’s a silver cord that keeps these images astonishingly alive with high voltage and renderable music and lyrics.

Sleeve Notes

Press Reviews

One Sheet

Mp3 Song Samples from the CD:
Cousin Albert
Father, Son, Cousin Country Western Band
Son
Howard Warner (Huntington Beach artist)
I’m Now Eight Four

Purchase the CD/Mp3:

Store

Business Breakfast at Mimi’s

peters — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:40:00 +0000

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.

What Dillinger Meant to Me

peters — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:18:21 +0000

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.

The interview went terrifically

peters — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 13:35:33 +0000

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.

What does he remember about the “Okie” poet?

peters — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:43:25 +0000

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.

The Poet has to use a catheter for a week.

peters — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 12:32:39 +0000

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.

A poet’s genius slowly shaves away

peters — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 23:13:46 +0000

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.