Robert Peters

MAKARS' DOZENS stands for a baker's dozen meaning sandwiched between the covers of this book you get the verses of three distinctive voices: poet Robert Peters(the best known among three), Paul Trachtenberg, and Barbara Hauk. Peters' voice represents modifying poetic language and breaking new artistic grounds by combining playful rhymes with painfully serious matter. Trachtenberg's attracts readership with quippiness jangling and contracting with all sorts of musical possibility. Hauk's poems are marked by an intense awareness of 'propriety' and all its nonsensical hypocrisy.

Robert Peters takes you on excursions into the psyches of a vast gallery of historical eccentrics, numbering among them, a Bavarian king, a Hungarian countess (and mass murderer) Elizabeth Bathory, a British romantic painter Robert Hayden, the conjoined twins Hilton sisters, Robert Stephen Hawker 19th century Cornish Vicar, and Randy Kraft, the Orange County Serial killer. The root of his interest in personae poetry goes back to his studies of Victorian poet Robert Browning.

Down in Louisiana, family comes first. In the delta town of Turn-Coupe, that's the rule the Benedicts live by. So when a beautiful redhead starts paying a little too much attention to Kane Benedict's grandfather, Kane decides to find out what the woman really wants.Kane's sure Regina Dalton's up to no good. She's either out to grab his grandfather's money or a spy for the company that's trying to put him out of business. Kane—who everyone calls Sugar Kane, 'cause he's sweet as sin...with all the consequences—figures he'll have no trouble getting answers from Regina. But he's wrong.She's not about to tell him the truth. Because her own family's in trouble and she'll do anything—and everything—to save it.

Drafted into the U.S. army in 1943, Robert Peters was a shy and devout eighteen-year-old from a remote and impoverished Wisconsin farm. Now one of our leading poets, he has written a lyrical memoir of a young man coming of age in the middle of World War II, making his way through personal land mines of morality and sexuality. In this sequel to Crunching Gravel, his celebrated account of a rural boyhood, Peters writes with humor and honesty of his self-revelations. After a moving leave-taking from his family and the wilderness farm he loves, he is thrust into army life. The close quarters of the barracks, the horseplay among the men, the bravado regarding war and women, and the unshakable military taboo against "perverts" throw him into confusion. Troubled by homosexual feelings, he struggles to get through basic training in South Carolina without earning the label "sissy." Inspired by patriotism and Hollywood war movies, he carefully practices his salute. Disillusioned by a cynical post chaplain, he abandons his plans to become a Lutheran minister. . As awkward with his M1 rifle as he had been at home with a deer rifle, Peters is classified as a clerk and shipped to England. He hangs back in turmoil as London streetwalkers proposition him and older soldiers flirt with him. On leave in Paris, where he finally shares a prostitute with a friend he silently loves, he visits the Louvre and waits for hours in line to see the glamorous Marlene Dietrich. Through the war and the post-war occupation of Germany, as Peters's diligence and growing confidence result in promotion to battalion sergeant-major, the voice of Dietrich singing "Lili Marlene" stays with him, evoking love and beauty in the midst of destruction and deprivation.

“Peters’ criticism is not maternal. . . insights are set down simply, unornamented, as if intended to glance off, and yet I think they are important, and belong to the center. . . The book deserves numerous readers, particularly among young poets dissatisfied with the celebrities who keep writing the same poem over and over again. . . [His] essay on Creeley is superb; the best essay on his work I know.” — Robert Bly on the first Great American Poetry Bakeoff in American Book Review “ Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly "It's hard to dislike a poetry critic who chooses to discuss John Ashbery in the form of a mock-colloquy between two overeducated characters named Dick and Jane ("Reaming eucalyptus roots from sewer lines is simpler than deciphering Ashbery," Dick asserts). Peters ( Poems, Selected and New ) takes a refreshingly unacademic approach to the assessment of contemporary American poetry; these essays, representing his work of the last quarter century, try to cut a path through the "safe forms, safe language, safe themes" that in his opinion have clogged the scene. His correctives--positive proselytizing, witty naysaying, and the mixed review--are imaginative. Interspersed with pieces addressing a broad range of writers--Tess Gallagher, Allen Ginsberg--are more thematic chapters that inspect and assail opening lines in poems and (in "Biopsies") question the hows and whys of Language Poetry. Peters is openly impatient with failure and pretension, and he makes no effort to sound a representative note. In his view of criticism, consensus seems not to be the point. That's partly why his views are both arguable and bracing." Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. Product Description This book collects, in a single volume, the best of Robert Peters' fearless, impassioned, and often hilarious assessments of contemporary American poetry. Included are some thirty-five essays and reviews on such major figures as Robert Bly, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Diane Wakowski, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Tess Gallager, Gary Snyder, Jack Spicer, and W. S. Merwin, as well as commentaries on many lesser-known poets.

His poetry covers a wide range of themes and forms, from intensely personal volumes of private celebrations and losses--the the of a son, the break-up of a marriage, and his rural Wisconsin origins--to excursions into the psyches of a vast gallery of historical eccentrics, numbering among them a Bavarian King, a female saint, and founder of the Shaker religion, a Cornish vicar, an Hungarian countess, and mass murderer, a British romantic painter. POEMS: SELECTED & NEW includes a rich sampling of work written over the past thirty years, while collecting in a single volume many of Peters' most important poems. Readers will be struck by the power, emotional depth, and range of this retrospective collection; a book which should help further Peters' reputation as one of the most seminal American poets of recent decades. "The importance of Robert Peters' poetry rests on the fact that it modifies poetic language and breaks new artistic ground. By combining playful rhymes with painfully serious matter, he has returned new tonal possibilities to poetry. By fully exploiting the metaphor of the body, its epidermal shape and vulnerable interior, he has provided a fresh code for the expression of feeling."-- Billy Collins, in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry-- "The fascination with the dead, with the rotting, with pigs rooting into the earth; a poem about a primal scene in a root cellar, discovering sex as the underground, taboo, death-related experience--this is what all of Peters' poetry is about...It is this aspect of Peter's work.....which gives it great originality and power..." --Diane Wakowski, AMERICAN POETRY

The discerning reader will soon be aware of connections between author's fictionalized killer and the notorious serial murderer, Randy Kraft who is currently on Death row, San Quentin, having been convicted of the sex murders of sixteen young men and suspected of killing more than sixty. Author attended numerous sessions of Kraft's lengthy trial in Orange County, California. The author makes a courageous effort of getting in the mind of this killer but finding no easier answers of what makes a psychopath.

''GOOD NIGHT, PAUL [Robert Peters] Poems and verse written by a lover to a lover, for all lovers with memories and those still looking forward to new experiences. Long considered a 'poet's poet', Robert Peters has fashioned a collection likened to those of Walt Whitman: What incense stunned your system? What lost health food nurtured you? In the keystone sequence, English Pulpits, the poet's lover pops-up like a jack-in-the-box in the pulpits of remote English churches." --GLB Publishings--

'''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 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.”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 is a reference to Lewis Caroll’s poem Hunting of the Snark. 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

HAYDON, the fourth of Peters' persona books to be published by Unicorn, is a series of monologues by Benjamin Robert Haydon (1776-1846), the tragic British painter of vast history pictures and friend of Keats, Wordsworth, the Carlyles, and the Brownings. His confidence in his talent and his struggles against the Academicians led to such poverty that Haydon saw his suicide as the only way of keeping his large family from starvation. His death stimulated donations of money for his family. There are signs that Haydon's pictures may at last garner the respect they have long deserved.

"Peters misses nothing, from the details of the town's Fourth of July celebration to the cause and effect of a young cousin's suicide to the calibrations of racism toward Indians that was so acceptable then. It is a fascinating, unsentimental look at a piece of our past."—Margaret E. Guthrie, New York Times Book Review "It's unlikely that any other contemporary poet and scholar as distinguished has risen from quite so humble beginnings as Robert Peters. Born and raised by semiliterate parents on a subsistence farm in northeastern Wisconsin, Peters lived harrowingly close to the eventual stuff of his poetry—the dependency of humans on animal lives, the inexplicable and ordinary heroism and baseness of people facing extreme conditions, the urgency of physical desire. . . . Sterling childhood memoirs."—Booklist "Robert Peters has written a memoir exemplary because he insists on the specific, on the personal and the local. It is also enormously satisfying to read, and it is among the most authentic accounts of childhood and youth I know—a Wisconsin David Copperfield!" —Thom Gunn

The author reenactment of the life and the account of Countess Erzebet Bathory of the Hungarian Bathory monarchy who bathed in the blood of over six-hundred virgin to maintain eternal youth. This case was well-documented. She was sealed away in her own castle's tower until her in 1614 after being convicted of her dastardly crimes.

Robert Peters' highly acclaimed performance version is included with the original poems. These poems themselves have been revised from the earlier edition PICNIC IN THE SNOW(New Rivers, 1982). The Bavarian King was know for his love of the arts, and for being Richard Wagner's patron. Ludwig was an aesthete, a pacifist, and a homosexual.

'Hawker' was awarded the Poetry Society of America's Alice Faye di Castagnola Prize. Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875) was Vicar of Morwenstowe in Cornwall, England. He lived for over forty years in a wild and desolate parish near the high jagged cliffs of north Cornwall, a coast noted for its shipwrecks. Hawker, poet, essayist and author of the song 'Trelawny', the unofficial Cornish national anthem, was obsessed with rescuing drowned sailors. He dressed eccentrically, claimed to believe in mermaids and demons, took opium in later life, and left a body of writing and legend behind him from which Peters has drawn one of his unique "voice portraits." "Eccentric Cornish vicar Hawker has found an ideal biographer in Peters, whose tough-tender 'voice portrait' eloquently captures the eloquent mind of this forgotten poet and essayist" --Library Journal

DILLINGERrecreates Peters' impoverished youth in rural Wisconsin, with its now vanished worlds of fishing, butchering, deer hunting, farming, and immense poverty. Here's a boy first grapples with sex, nature, family, and religion. Above everything looms the menacing, desirable figure of the gangster John Dillinger who was ambushed by the FBI near Peters' home.