O’Hara’s brand of
outrageous, gimlet-eyed poetry criticism became a cottage industry for one of
the unsung heroes of contemporary poetry, Robert Peters. Peters is the author of the
iconoclastic poetry collections Songs for a Son, Love Poems for Robert Mitchum, and Snapshots for a Serial Killer. He is
also an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. However, he may be best known (though, I think, not
well-known enough) for his criticism of contemporary poetry from the 1970s and
‘80s. In an era immediately prior
to the Internet and blogs, Peters was King Critic of the Poetry Scene.
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.
