member spotlight: robert peake

by Dana Guthrie Martin

How long have you been writing poetry?

I dictated my first poem — an epic — to my mother when I was 5. To survive adolescence, I wrote strange short narrative pieces. I also collected snippets of thought, often humorous or surreal, into a document I called “The Mind Dump.” A printed version made its way around my high school one day, prompting sudden and unwanted acclaim. In college, I mostly read poetry as part of my major subject, though I dabbled in sonnets. I returned to poetry again in earnest while in seminary, and after I left the seminary and got married, I completed an MFA through Pacific University.

Do you schedule time for writing or do you write when inspiration strikes?

Somerset Maugham is often quoted as having said, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” For me, it is around 6:30 a.m. My favorite professor, Robert Hass, said, “You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.” Sometimes, that’s all I have.

Do you have any writing rituals?

I get up before dawn to carve out my half-hour-or-so of writing time. I make coffee and fire up a single plain-text document on my MacBook Pro, appropriately named “dump.” Often I will scroll up to review previous work. Sometimes I will read a little of someone else’s work or follow a writing prompt. (I swap these regularly with poet-friends.) Then I type in the date and start to write, spelunking through my consciousness until it’s time for the next part of the day.

What is your process for revising a poem?

I keep all my drafts in one document, so to revise I will often copy a poem, type in the date, paste it down and start tweaking. I’m looking and listening for many things — mostly, for a bell to go off in some way telling me that past this point I’m likely to do more harm than good. I listen for places where the music gets clunky, and sometimes experiment wildly re-casting a poem in tight couplets into a prose poem, messing around with the flow on the page. Normally, though, I find a poem just needs some tightening to realize what it is there to realize. Then the question becomes: Is it worth being read by anyone else? If the answer is “No,” I move on. I may loop back on the subject in a different poem, find a new way in, and make a success of it. But past a certain point, the poem is “done,” for better or worse.

Has blogging changed your writing or the way that you write?

Blogging operates on a different, but complementary, level than writing poems. It is my means of reflection and a point of engagement with the conversation *about* poetry. The real conversation *of* poetry happens in poetry. But blogging has been a great outlet to meet other lovers of poetry, to share my process and to develop further self-awareness. In this way, I can see how it has influenced my poem-writing greatly. In as much as poetry is a means to explore the inner caverns of consciousness, blogging is a way to debrief the trip and plan new journeys. The point, though, is to get back down in the caves as soon as possible.

Have you ever collaborated with another poet or artist? What did you think of that experience?

I had a wonderful experience collaborating with a visual artist named Mary Zawacki on a small letterpress chapbook. She was learning to hand-set letterpress type and wanted some short pieces. So, I gave her three short “party pieces,” and she brought them to life with beautiful type and layout, line-art illustrations and hand-bound rough-edged paper. To have someone spend so much time with my work, laboring to bring it into a new incarnation as a book-arts piece, was just delightful.

What line of poetry do you love the most?

At the end of one of his poems, the Scottish poet Andrew Philip describes a “difficult, unasked-for joy.” The phrase sketches out a picture I recognize, of life’s vast emotional landscape, in four quick strokes.

What line of your own poetry do you love the most?

One of my poems ends with a request, that the speaker might somehow contain more of the “gentle / indifference of rain.” It remains one of my prayers.

Name your three favorite poets.

Three favorites of the moment, anyway, are:

• William Blake, for his unrelenting imagination and keen ear
• Mark Doty, for his unflinching gaze
• Marvin Bell, for his unmistakable voice

What’s the most important thing a poem does?

In “Ars Poetica?” Czeslaw Milosz tells us, “The purpose of poetry is to remind us / how difficult it is to remain just one person.” I think this is one of the most important things a poem can do — to give us an experience of our own multidimensional nature and thereby remind us of our interconnectedness.

What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever written a poem?

I tend to write in pretty mundane places, to escape them.

What interests you about participating in Read Write Poem?

I am excited, apprehensive and fascinated to see what publishing will come to mean in the 21st century. Sites like Read Write Poem, which connect poets as never before, are on the forefront of an evolving paradigm. More people have the opportunity to discover poetry as a life-enriching process, and to connect with other poets, without having to give up “regular” lives. And so, the conversation can widen past academia, into a virtual community that is every bit as “real,” and in some ways more capable of meaningfulness, than the physical circumstances of our lives.

Can poetry save the world?

We are, each one of us, a world unto ourselves. I can say with confidence that poetry has saved me in my world.

Note: Stay tuned for Robert’s first Poetry Advice Column, which runs tomorrow.

Dana Guthrie Martin is the founder of Read Write Poem. She writes texts. Most of the time, her texts have line breaks. Sometimes they don’t. She owns a robot named Feldman, as much as anyone can own a robot.