Robert Peters - Poet and Critic

Poet and Critic

Peters is a prolific poet, having published some 30 books of poems, and he is an important critic of contemporary American poetry. In his controversial books of criticism — The Great American Poetry Bake-Off series, Peters Black and Blue Guides to Current Literary Magazines and Hunting the Snark: A Compendium of New Literary Terminology — he has assessed more than 400 contemporary poets and critics. He also wrote poetry reviews for the Los Angeles Times.

His Workers, Drones & Queens of Contemporary American Poetry offers readers the best of these writings collected in a single volume. Included are some 35 essays on and reviews of such major figures as Robert Bly, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Diane Wakoski, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Tess Gallagher and W. S. Merwin, as well as commentaries on the work of many lesser-known poets.

Billy Collins, a former student of Peters and now a noted poet in his own right, once described Peters' poetry: " modifies poetic language and breaks new artistic ground. By combining playful rhymes with painfully serious matter, he has returned new tonal possibilities to poetry. By fully exploiting the metaphor of the body, he has provided a fresh code for the expression of feeling ..."

Poet and author of Iron John, Robert Bly, wrote about Peters' American Poetry Bakeoff book of criticism as "not maternal ... insights are set down simply, unornamented, as if intended to glance off, and yet I think they are important, and belong to the center ... He deserves numerous readers, particularly among young poets dissatisfied with the celebrities who keep writing the same poem over and over again ... essay on Robert Creeley is superb; the best essay on his work I know."

He has been published by both large and small presses, including W.W. Norton, Wayne State University Press, Crossing Press, New Rivers Press, Cherry Valley Editions, Unicorn Press, GLB Publishing, Paragon House, Chiron Review Press and University of Wisconsin Press. In the fall of 2001, the 40th volume of his Familial Love and Other Misfortunes was published by Red Hen Press. Peters has served as a contributing editor for The American Book Review, Contact II and Paintbrush.