by Nils Peterson At my senior center we have a Shakespeare class led by marvelous young woman, actor, playwright, professional clown. Her main method is to assign us parts and have us read the text out loud. I taught Shakespeare for a bunch of years and did some of this. But this class makes me…

by Nils Peterson Reading into and about Wallace Stevens this morning I find this quotation, “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings…loving them and feeling them, makes us search for the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration….” I’m an endless rewriter and surely this is part…

by Nils Peterson I thought to myself that one day I’ll have to write an essay entitled “Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest.” It would have as its epigraph a quotation from Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, “But wit is of little use in the arts. To inhibit enthusiasm and to discredit genius,…

by Nils Peterson Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one of…

by Nils Peterson Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom! 1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do with Shakespeare or something to do with drama. So,…

by Nils Peterson I A friend sent me a day or two ago a poem that contained this story: The Buddha tells a story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below. And two mice—one…

by Nils Peterson “…another kind of net, that language, the one the world gives us to cast so that we might catch in it a little of what it is and what we are, and we are, among other things, the poverties of the language we inherit.”  Robert Hass, “Families and Prisons,” What Light Can…

by Nils Peterson Today (June 13) is W.B. Yeats’s birthday. He would have been 157. I am compelled to remark upon the similarities between Yeats, the Nobel prize winner, and Peterson, the scribbler in the corner. I quote from a short Yeats biography, “he was lackluster at school,” an elementary report card said he was “Very…

by Nils Peterson A Memorable Fancy I On the last day of the year, I think about the very first day. One early morning a Minnesota friend turned his iPhone towards his Minnesota window and we saw snow and a grove of slim, bare trees. He’d been singing, so music was in the air and…

by Nils Peterson I. The Best Meal Ever My mother’s father died during, but not because of, WWII and so she went back to Sweden on the first possible boat – 1946 – September leaving my father, brother, and me to get along. I, soon to be 13, had just started high school. We’d always…

by Nils Peterson Santa, A Better Understanding The Christmas song we all know has got it all wrong. “Better watch out, Better not cry, Better not pout, I’m telling you why, Santa Claus is coming to town.” This turns his gifts into a payoff. You do this and you’ll get that. It’s salary. But a…

by Nils Peterson A pen between God-fingers, a walking stick dragon, my blind mind taps along its cane of thought. Rumi (trans. Barks) Saturday morning. Not quite ready for coffee from the espresso machine. Eyes closed. Brooding over the thises and thats. Remembering the start of a thread of thought that wove forward and backwards…

by Nils Peterson There’s that list of religions from which we’re offered a choice. If none of them quite fit, at the bottom there’s None. Well that’s not for me either so I’ve taken to calling myself a Non-None. My religious feeling is not defined by any of the above, but it certainly is not defined…

by Nils Peterson Galway Kinnell said all good writing has a certain quality in common, “a tenderness toward existence.” I agree and feel that one of the great maladies of our age is the communal loss of this feeling. Wendell Berry says “people exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they…

by Nils Peterson I used to tell my creative writing classes the artistic form that came the closest to depicting the lives we lead was the soap opera – because, as in the soap opera, we all have many stories going on at the same time. Some are short, some are like lyrics in tone…

by Nils Peterson I have finally come to understand that I cannot read everything. There aren’t enough years left. So, what should I read? The question is complicated by the fact that I have a taste for not very good literature. I like John Buchan despite his racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, and his foolish sense of…

by Nils Peterson I I was telling a joke the other day on Zoom before a fairly large audience and I was telling it pretty well, Swedish accent and all. It’s a joke I have told before and it’s usually well received. However, it requires the word tailgate for the punchline, and that word never came. I…

by Nils Peterson Charles Simic says, “[I] suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.” I was reading an…

by Nils Peterson I This is how it felt.  Yankee Stadium Gone – Impossible. It’s like going to your old hometown and finding your house – No! the neighborhood tarmacked over. Yes, we live in the world of Heraclitus, “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”  Flux is all. The first…

by Nils Peterson Years ago I was listening to Robert Bly talk about poetry. It was at a conference on form and he was in the process of leaving Whitman and going on to Yeats as part of his own conscious public wrestling, not so much with the Muse as which Muse and where the…