Nils Peterson is Professor Emeritus at San Jose State University where he taught in the English and Humanities Departments. He has published poetry, science fiction, and articles on subjects as varied as golf and Shakespeare, several chapbooks, and three collections of poems, a memoir, and a book about working with the poet Robert Bly. In 2009, he was chosen to be the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. In 2019, he was honored by SVCreates for his work as poet and teacher as the OnPage Laureate of the Year. To Three Quark Daily Readers: I write to you as an ambassador from the Kingdom of Old Age. It a country near to some of you and far, far away for others. It is a good country to be able to visit. I hope you can come, but don’t hurry. It will be there when you have time. Email: nissepete [at] icloud.com
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…
by Nils Peterson This is what Abraham Lincoln said. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or…
by Nils Peterson I End of a strange day. Sitting with a drink, listening to jazz vocals, old songs, talking slow, the way one does at such an hour. Particularly if one’s companion is one’s self. Melancholic but mellow. Sipping a vintage of old age at l’heure bleue. And from Tony Bennett Someday, when I’m…
A Remembering by Nils Peterson Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was…
by Nils Peterson I went to graduate school at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers had a fine University Chorus that sang one concert a year with a New York Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and one concert a year with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Though my scholarly friends scoffed at such a waste of time, I…
by Nils Peterson Love Poems, Why? Auden says somewhere that a woman should be wary if her sweetheart starts sending her love poems because, for the duration of the writing, she wasn’t being thought of, the poem was. Auden is being sly-spirited here, though there is truth in what he’s saying. The love poet is…
by Nils Peterson My First Opera My first opera was at the old Met, Cav. and Pag, Cavalliera Rusticana and Pagliacci, cheapest seat in the house, last row, last seat, highest balcony in a corner, view of the opposite wing almost as large as my view of the stage which, in truth, was interesting – watching the…
by Nils Peterson On a small paper bag maybe from a bookstore, one side Romeo’s soliloquy, “But soft! What light from yonder window breaks?” On the other side, these words: “Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife.…
by Nils Peterson One of the easy metaphors, easy because it just feels true, is that life is like a river in its flowing from then to whenever. We are both a leaf floating on it, and the river itself. Boat maybe. Raft more likely. But those who know such things say there is a…
by Nils Peterson To 3 Quark Daily Readers: I write to you as an ambassador from the Kingdom of Old Age. It a country near to some of you and far, far away for others. It is a good country to be able to visit. I hope you can come, but don’t hurry. It will…