Robert Louis Peters is a poet, critic, scholar, playwright, editor, and actor born in an impoverished rural area of northern Wisconsin in 1924. He holds a Ph.D in Victorian literature. His poetry career began in 1967 when his young son Richard died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis. The book commemorating this loss, Songs for a Son, was selected by poet Denise Levertov to be published by W.W. Norton in 1967, and it still remains in print. Songs for a Son began a flood of poetry.
After army service during World War II, he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, majoring in English. He received his B.A., in 1948, his M.A. in 1949, and his doctorate in 1952. His teaching career took him to Wayne State University, Boston University, Ohio Wesleyan, University of Idaho in the city of Moscow, University of California at Riverside, and then the University of California at Irvine, where he first taught in 1967. His field of study was Victorian literature, and in addition to publishing numerous articles and monographs, he edited, with Herbert Schueller, the letters of John Addington Symonds. Peters did receive a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, England in the 60's to work on these Symonds' letters. In 1965 He got published his The Crowns of Apollo, scholarly study on Algernon Charles Swinburne. After Peters' Songs for a Son was published, he devoted more time to writing and study of contemporary poetry. Fellow poets Charles Wright and James McMichael and novelist Oakley Hall taught poetry at UC Irvine during this time and shared directorship of the university's well known Master of Fine Arts program.
Peters is a prolific poet, having published some thirty books of poems, and he is an important critic of contemporary American poetry. In his controversial books of criticism...The Great American Poetry Bake-Off series, the Peters Black and Blue Guides to Current Literary Magazines, and Hunting the Snark: A Compendium of New Literary Terminology...he has assessed over 400 contemporary poets and critics. He also wrote poetry reviews for the Los Angeles Times.
A former student of Robert Peters and now a noted poet Billy Collins once described Robert Peters' poetry "[] 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, [] he has provided a fresh code for the expression of feeling..."
Poet Robert Bly and author of Iron John had written on Peters' American Poetry Bakeoff book of criticism as"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 deserves numerous readers, particularly among young poets dissatisfied with the celebrities who keep writing the same poem over and over again..[His] essay on Robert Creeley is superb; the best essay on his work I know.
He has been published by both large and small presses, including W.W. Norton, Wayne State University Press, Crossing Press, New Rivers, Cherry Valley Editions, Unicorn Press, GLB Publishing, Paragon House, and University of Wisconsin Press. In the fall of 2001, the 40th volume of his Familial Love and Other Misfortunes was published by Red Hen Press. Peters has served as a contributing editor for The American Book Review, Contact II, and Paintbrush.
Style of poetry
His poetry covers a wide range of themes and forms, from intensely personal volumes of private celebrations and losses...the death 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 Hungarian countess (and mass murderer), and a British romantic painter. The root of his interest in personae poetry goes back to his studies of Victorian poet Robert Browning. He adapted both King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Elizabeth Báthory the Hungarian Countess for theatrical presentation, performing them around the country. His Poems: Selected & New includes a rich sampling of work written over the past thirty years, while collecting in a single volume many of Peters' best poems.
Poet Diane Wakoski best describes his 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 and the underground, taboo, death-related experience...this is what all of Peters' poetry is about [] which gives it great originality and power."
Performances
His acting career developed after countless poetry readings. Peters wanted to reach a larger audience with his poetry by transforming his personae poetry into theatrical monologues replete with memorized scripts, lighting, settings and sound tracks. He performed at Barnsdall Art Park in Los Angeles, at the Carpet Company Theatre in Los Angeles, Fine Art Theatre at UCI, Provincetown’s Summer Theatre, St Matthews Church near Broadway, NY and many college campuses' venues. He took acting lessons from his colleague Fine Arts Professor Robert Cohen at the University of California, Irvine. These performances are all well documented in Peters’ journals. video recordings, flyers, playbills, posters and scrapbooks replete with reviews and photos which are all housed and catalogued at UCSD Mandeville Collection.
Peters had written four memoirs of his woebegone days during the thirties in the North Woods of Wisconsin. His last memoir was on the death of his third son which took place in the fifties. Thomas Keneally, author of Shindler's List, summarized Peters' second memoir, Nell's Story, by saying, "As a fascinating exercise in obscure lives retrieved, as a joint effort in painful and exultant memory, this rich memoir has the playful seriousness and inventive charm which characterizes the work of Robert Peters...""
Peters has also judged competitions for fellowships and prizes for an assortment of small presses and for the Poetry Society of America and PEN International. He has enjoyed Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America.
Note: All of Robert Peters' papers from 1950—1990, including letters, manuscripts (both published and unpublished), and journals containing his poetry and prose, are on deposit in the Kenneth Spencer Research Library, the University of Kansas, Lawrence. His working library of contemporary poetry, with related papers, is now in the Rare Book Collection, Bowling Green State University. Recently his remaining archives have been obtained by the Weisel Library Special Collections, University of San Diego.
The Drowned Man to the Fish, New Rivers Press 1978
Ikagnak: The North Wind, Kenmore Press, 1978
Celebrities: In Memory of Margaret Dumont, Sombre Reptiles, 1981
The Picnic in the Snow: Ludwig of Bavaria, New Rivers Press, 1982
What John Dillinger Meant to Me, Sea Horse Press, 1983
Love Poems For Robert Mitchum, Chiron Review Press, 1983
Hawker, Unicorn Press, 1984
Kane, Unicorn Press, 1985
Shaker Light, Unicorn Press, 1986
Ludwig of Bavaria: Poems and a Play, Revised edition, Cherry Valley Edition, 1986
The Blood Countess: Poems and a Play, Cherry Valley Edition, 1987
Haydon, Unicorn Press, 1988
Breughel's Pig, Illuminati Press, Los Angeles, 1990
Good Night, Paul, GLB Publishers, 1992
Snapshots For a Serial Killer, GLB Publishers, 1992
Robert Peters: Poems: Selected & New, 1967-1991, Asylum Arts, 1992
Familial Love and Other Misfortunes, Red Hen Press, Los Angeles, 2002
Makars' Dozens, Pearl Edition, Long Beach, California 2006
Criticism, scholarship, and other publications
Victorians on Literature and Art, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1961
America: The Diary of a Visit, By Edmund Gosse, edited by Robert Peters Purdue University 1966
The Crowns of Apollo: Swinburne's Principles of Literature and Art, Wayne State University
The Letters of John Addington Symonds, Ed. with H.Schueller, 3 vols, Wayne State University Press, 1967—1969
Pioneers of Modern Poetry, with George Hitchcock, Kayak Press, 1967
Gabriel: A Poem by John Addington Symonds, Edited by Robert Peters & Timothy D'Arch Smith, London: Harrington 1974
The Great American Poetry Bakee-Off I, II, III, IV Series, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, New Jersey 1979, 1982, 1987, & 1991
The Peters' Black and Blue Guide to Current Literary Journals, first and second series, Cherry Valley Editions, New York, 1983 and 1985
The Peters' Black and Blue Guide to Current Literary Journals, third series, Dustbooks, 1987
Hunting the Snark: American Poetry at Century End: Classifications and Commentary, Paragon House, New York 1989
Letters to a Tutor: The Tennyson Family Letters to Henry Graham Dakyns, Scarecrow Press, 1989
Where the Bee Sucks: Workers, Drones & Queens of Contemporary American Poetry, Asylum Arts, 1994
SLIME The Secret Sex-Life of J. Edgar Hoover, Artist Eric Reynolds Eros Comix 1995
Revised Edition of Hunting The Snark: American Poetry at Century End: Classifications and Commentary, Avisson Press, 1997
Ludwig of Bavaria & Other Short Plays, Asylum Arts, 2001
Memoirs
Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties, University of Wisconsin Press, 1993
Nell: A Woman From Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
For You, Lili Marlene" A Memoir of WW II, University of Wisconsin Press, 1995
Feather: A Child's Life and Death, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Interviews
With Billy Collins, in Gauguin's Chair: Selected Poems, Crossing Press, 1977
With William Matthews, "The Shaker Poems", in The Great American Poetry Bake-off: Second Series, Ibid., 141-150.
Featured in the Writer's Autobiography Series, Vol. VIII, Gale Research Co., December 1989
Essays on Robert Peters
Diane Wakoski, in American Poetry, Winter 1985, 71-78
Billy Collins, "Literary Reputation and the Thrown Voice", in A Gift of Tongues: Critical Challenges in Contemporary American Poetry, eds. Marie Harris and Kathleen Augero, University of Georgia Press, 1987, 295-306.
Charles Hood, "Robert Peters", for the Dictionary of Literary Biography.
