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 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…
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.…