Robert Peake

Last night, I was ego surfing, and decided to check my Google rank for the keyword “Robert.” That’s right, just “Robert.” I have been in the top ten off and on, but last night this site actually came up higher than the blog of Robert Scoble.


I think this means I was momentarily famous. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel any different than before. By this morning, the effect wore off. I am now back under Scoble. Such are my thrills of late.

I also started up a stub page on Wikipedia for my googleganger, Robert Peake the Elder. Some art historian with a lot of spare time later went to town. Unfortunately, the Peake side of my family tree ends with my love-em-and-leave-em great-grandfather Peake. So, short of DNA testing (or some evidence that this painter had a double-jointed thumb), I’ll never know if we are related.

If he had lived, our son would be two years old today.

Several close friends have had children in the past year. I have been too afraid of breaking down in front of the parents to accept invitations to meet them. Just the other day, however, we were at a restaurant and some friends came in with their nine-month-old twins. I decided I was feeling strong enough to finally meet them.

Before approaching them, I washed my hands in the bathroom, since I have been fighting off a cold. I pumped soap from the dispenser, and ran my hands under the tap. Absentmindedly, I began lathering up my wrists and rubbing furiously. I was back in the hospital, scrubbing up at the sink inside the entrance to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Back then, I washed my hands vigorously, thoroughly, twice in a row — up to the elbows and underneath each fingernail. I shuttled over colostrum and came back with empty bottles, stole away in the night while Val was sleeping off the anesthetic, aware each visit could be the last. Every time, I scrubbed down furiously, as though some miracle of cleanliness could restore the electricity to our son’s brain.

It has not been an easy two years. But James’s death caused me to reevaluate what matters. I rediscovered the young idealist, who left the engineering department at Berkeley during the height of the dot-com era to study poetry instead. I recommitted to my writing, and signed up for an MFA. With such loss has come not only grief, but great compassion. I want to write about what makes us human, because never has it impressed upon me more that this is precious in its entirety — from my flashback in the bathroom to the radiant abandon with which infants squirm in their highchairs. There is so much to life. Sometimes it overwhelms.

I say once again: Godspeed, little James. There is so much more to love than could ever be comprehended.

I stuffed some peppermint tea bags into the percolator, along with a single-pot coffee pouch, and stirred chocolate instant breakfast into the result. Armed with this variant of mint mocha, and the esoteric knowledge passed on by a friendly maintenance guy, I have bypassed the timer on the fireplace, and am watching the waves from my window, slowly imbibing the choco-minty warmth. Fine sand is still whispering over the dunes, despite some drizzle. The soundtrack to the film “Once” is playing through my laptop speakers, extolling transitory love. Soon I will be navigating security checkpoints, on my way back to the hustle of a high-tech job. What I have experienced at this residency seems all the more profound for its fleeting nature. Like poetry, it is a place I can not fully inhabit, but still am loathe to leave.

After his craft talk this morning, I am convinced that, if he wanted to, Marvin Bell could levitate a space ship with his mind. He used the alphabet (why not?) as a framework for rattling off his abecedarian thoughts on poetry, nugget after nugget of invigorating advice interspersed with his own quirky humor. He read two poems that had nothing to do with the basics of successful lyric poetry — image, language, attention to specific detail and scene — and everything to do with transmitting poignant sentiment through casual tone and nuanced observation. He described them as “poems which don’t care if you think that they are poems.” By that time, we had reached the letter “B.” What followed were twenty-four equally subversive, insightful forays — all told with a twinkle in the eye. Having him act as my faculty advisor in the coming semester is nothing short of a privilege.

“You just go on your nerve.”

-Frank O’Hara, “Personism”

Dorianne Laux took a pin to our significant, pastoral, first-person confessional, lyrical, serious, West-coast bubble with a great talk on Frank O’Hara. She read several of his poems and traced the influence of finding universality in absurdity through to such contemporary poets as Tony Hoagland and Charles Simic. The progression from the whimsical to the profound, through a conversational, person-to-person address, has had a significant influence on contemporary poetry. More importantly, it refreshes the language and encourages us writers to begin with a vital aspect of the creative process: not taking ourselves so seriously. It reminds me of the liberated-yet-practical turn of mind expressed by Marvin Bell, that, “on the one hand, it’s poetry! On the other, it’s just poetry.” Thanks heavens for the iconoclast.

Last year, during the Winter residency, we had snow on the beach. This year, the wind is driving fine sand over the dunes in silky rivulets. Apologies for the shaky camera work. It is really blowing out there.

An MFA is also not about impressing one’s fellow students, or even the faculty.

Cut off from daily life, thrust into long hours in close quarters with other artists, many of them strangers, others new acquaintances — the temptation to impress, or at least win acceptance, is all too human. The same insecurities of grade-school children searching for a seat in the cafeteria also manifests, in only slightly more rarified ways, come lunchtime during residency.

In the end, however, there is a single thought which I use to steady myself in this tide: I am not here to impress any of these people; I am here to become a better writer. Because in becoming a better writer, I will be more likely to impress some people who do matter — editors. That process, however, has nothing to do with lunchtime chat, and everything to do with what comes across on the page.

I do my best to adhere to this thought, even if it is wrong — even if it is, in fact, a brutal, careerist world out there, where attending the right parties is everything. I want to inhabit a world where good writing is paramount, even if that world represents a small, undervalued subsection of contemporary poetry. I have seen the power and significance of a receptive audience of one.

It is important to be generous, kind, and respectful in life — because human beings are precious, no matter how well they write. But whenever I have faced a decision to try to further my career or follow my heart, the latter has always propelled me further faster than any of my petty scheming would allow. So, whatever ambition I have, I try to direct it inward — toward writing rather than networking, toward equanimity rather than allegiances, toward actually getting better rather than simply looking good.

It is about as easy as anything else that involves cutting against the grain of cultural conditioning. But my commitment to getting better is ultimately what got me here, to Oregon, to freeze my butt off and learn.

Ellen Bass gave an excellent talk today on the importance of discovery in both the creation and development of narrative poetry. She pointed out that as much as detail matters on the tactical level, strategically, it is discovery that can answer the “so what?” of a narrative poem. She offered a number of useful, practical suggestions on how to move a poem from simple recount into the realm of discovery, including:

• Shift the time frame, vantage point, or speaker.
• Explore the opposite of the “expected” viewpoint or tone.
• Take wild associative leaps.
• Link the story to other stories, or a “story behind the story.”
• Ask why this is being told now; why it is necessary?

During the question and answer portion, she admitted that, in her own process, she will often not resist the temptation to become heavy-handed or draw too-neat conclusions in her poems; instead, she writes them down as a kind of platform on which to rest momentarily, knowing that in the final version the line must go. I found her candor, practicality, and commitment to craft both refreshing and inspirational.

“You must be careful not to deprive the poem of its wild origin.”

-Stanley Kunitz

Peter Sears gave a dense and compelling talk today on the larger aim of revision — which is not only to add and subtract from a work, but to also to re-envision. Drawing on numerous specific examples from talented poets, including himself, he held up a litany of mediocre poems made great through craft — from minor tinkering to dramatic shifts in perspective and tone.

The most striking example to me was one of Peter’s own poems, which he expanded by pushing it out beyond the bounds of the natural ending of a decent poem, into far more personal territory. Then, he pared down again, and those newfound details caused the poem to fuse into something at once both more specific and universal than before. It galvanized the poem.

It occurs to me, fresh from workshop, that one of the inherent perils of taking feedback about one’s own work from a group, is that the primary instrument at the group’s disposal is subtractive. That is, they can cut — but it would be presumptuous to actually add lines to someone else’s poem. Also, as Marvin Bell points out, groups often naturally tend toward compromise, the stuff of mediocrity.

Fortunately, at the Pacific residency workshops, the faculty encourage us to look at the work more holistically, and often use certain elements of a poem to address larger themes in the group’s work, or poetry in general. In the end, it is on us authors to discover the ultimate destination behind every wild impulse that starts a poem. But having, rather than a trail guide to follow through specific terrain, instead tips from experienced travelers who have walked many trails — is what makes this process invaluable.

I leave tomorrow for the third residency of the Pacific Unviversity MFA in writing. Despite a brief reprieve from lashing rain here in Southern California, I am doubtless now heading straight into the source of the wet. No matter. I have been longing to reconnect with friends and teachers up North, and look forward to kicking off my essay semester with full days of workshops, lectures, readings, and other events. As usual, I will do my best (depending on my stamina and the hotel WiFi situation this year) to post the occasional tidbit from this immersive experience in craft.

Related Topics:

• MFA Residency One
• MFA Residency Two