3 precious critters under
the plum tree bewitching me.
As I picked-up one of the darlings,
it hissed fiercely less than a kitten.
After my photo-shots, I went in,
the 3 gone forever. Occurring
belatedly, “where was the ma?”
Is she road-kill or
targeted as varmint?
Bliss to my dumbness!
I was spared from her
rabid leap to my jugular.

He vaguely reads the news.
He knows Barrack is President,
otherwise the day is filled
with his quirky cheeriness.
His thin hairless legs elevate
in his cherished
dirty leather recliner.
He opens his wallet,
riffles his dollars,
doses, hands fold,
then gazes
at his bandaged baby toe.
What’s wrong with it?
Sweetie, it’s a “booboo pad”.
The private life without impiety
is now a bit public.

When my first book was coming out in 1996, my then-editor Bill Truesdale suggested we get a blurb from Peters. Though I admired Peters’ work, I thought this was a bad idea. His Black and Blue Guide to Poetry Journals, and the even harsher (yet far more-often-than-not truth-telling) series on individual poets, The Great American Poetry Bake-Off, could, for all their humor and generosity, be scathing. Though I thought these books were enormously helpful to me as a young poet—and I still highly recommend them to my students—I didn’t think my fragile fledgling poet-ego would hold up if he hated my debut. In 1982 Peters states straight out, “My pleasure in any good poet transcends conflict: I don’t see poets as enemies. But, for better or for worse, the critic must play wolf-roles, especially when poems generate in him little else than a tedious conjugality.” He goes on to say of one of the leading poets of the day that he wishes he could make him “feel less lost, elegiac, submissive, self-pitying.” Another poet’s new book convinces Peters that, “a writer by becoming a celebrity can get work published and sold, and earn a rather large reputation.” Ouch. Of the late ‘80s he declares, “The ‘ego’ poem, or ‘I’ poem, is the genre favored by most poets….”

For whatever reason, I lucked out. Peters liked the galley proofs of my book, and even invited me when I was coming to L.A. to visit him at the house he has shared for decades with fellow-poet Paul Trachtenberg. I’d like to believe that I would admire his work and like him even if he hated my work.

What makes Peters’ criticism so incisive, and his poetry so utterly contemporary, is his thoroughgoing knowledge of the history of poetry. He knows what made the new truly new in every period. His stance is related to Eliot’s in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” but he calls for a more radical departure from the tradition. Here’s the beginning of his 1974 poem “the word yes”:

slowly a great rain of piss
begins (god beats on
the galvanized lid of heaven
the stars piss, Danae yells
for a sponge, Castor and Pollux. . .)
the rain is orange, the skies
are hepatitis colored, word
balloons are full of
comicbook doomwisdom. yes.

Today, Ron Silliman has taken Peters’ Poetry-Critic Crown and removed it into the blogosphere. Although Silliman’s views are always interesting and insightful, he is less focused on poetry criticism than Peters was, not to mention kinder and gentler.

Hunting the Snark is a compendium of poetic terminology that mirrored American contemporary poetry of nineteen seventies and eighties written by Robert Peters. The book sorts through contemporary American poems, separating them into nearly a hundred categories. The book’s foreword is written by founder of the New York Quarterly, William M. Packard. He says, “Hunting the Snark is an extraordinarily well-informed, joyous encomium to poetry itself. It displays the variety and diversity of our contemporary American scene.”[1]
1 Classifications and Terminology
2 The Title
3 Passel of Poets
4 Sources
5 References

Classifications and Terminology

His classifications are concepts like: “Sylvia Plath Poems”, “Wise Child poems”, “Snapshot Poems”, “Academic Sleaze”, “Fruits-and-Flower-Poems”, “Ezra Pound poems”, “Jazz Poems”, “Self-Pity Poems”, “West Coast Poems”.
The Title

The title is a reference to Lewis Caroll’s poem Hunting of the Snark.
Passel of Poets

Peters anthologizes in Hunting the Snark a comprehensive amount of poets and their poems including widely noted poets such as Robert Hass, Billy Collins, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery to obscure noted poets Wilma McDaniel, Paul Vangelisti, David Ray and Alfred Starr Hamilton.
Sources

On the Trico libraries news and notes web,[2] library associate Evelyn Khoo chose the Hunting of the Snark as “Curious, Useful, Edifying, Inspiring: The Reference Books of McCabe Library”. Khoo assesses the book as a book that replaces the standard poetry anthologies with the usual geographic or chronological format for most reference works, with classifications like “academic sleaze”, “poultry poems”, “bent genes poems”, and “Disney poems”.

Each category has a selection of classic and contemporary poets, which embody the spirit of each genre, tied together with Peters’ critical analysis.

Poet and noted biographer of Sylvia Plath, Edward Butcher, wrote an essay on Peters, stating that he “fairly categorized terminologically American poems and poets with his original poetic terminology”.[3]
References

^ “Review”. Powell’s Books. Retrieved 23 April 2010.
^ Reference Books of McCabe Library
^ Great American Poetry Bake-Off-4th series

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.