Peter Waldor is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Who Touches Everything, which won the National Jewish Book Award. He was the Poet Laureate of San Miguel County, Colorado for 2014-2015. His poetry has appeared widely in magazines, including the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Fungi Magazine and Mothering Magazine. He lives in Ophir, Colorado.
PRAISE FOR PETER WALDOR’S PREVIOUS BOOKS
It’s such a delight when something catches you by surprise and makes you read on – and on. So it is with Waldor, a superb lyric, gnomic and gnostic poet. – Gerald Stern
What strange rooms and quirky music Waldor’s poems open onto. His vision proves to us that the imaginal and the rational share equal claims on perception. The heart/mind of this work spiritualizes the material and materializes the soul. –Li-Young Lee
Peter Waldor’s new book combines the unaffected, wise, intimate tone of the old Asian masters, sometimes joyful, sometimes heartbroken, often affectionate, with a tone of his own, a 21st century, ‘first world’ voice, more jaunty and optimistic-seeming, yet sometimes struggling for breath. – Jean Valentine
These poems have wit, depth, clarity and intelligence. Congratulations on the work. – Alan Dugan
Peter Waldor’s spare irony, sometimes tender, sometimes bawdy, deals in dichotomies: love and hate, frailty and strength, fear and faith. These elliptical and colloquial lyrics draw equally from parable, prayer, and elegy. Hesitating on the threshold between isolation and community, the poet focuses a distortingly accurate microscope on what matters in our lives. – Publishers Weekly
FROM MIDWIFE VS. OBSTETRICIAN (order here)
GIRL PUKE ‘12
At the Claremont Graduate
University Arts Center
the heavily tinted lobby glass
could be the very glass Saint Paul
considered when he realized
how we see the world darkly.
Stenciled on the glass, as is common
with universities, are the names
of benefactors and their various
class years, whose generous gifts
enabled both the construction
of the structure and the maintenance
and curation of exhibits.
Though no one reads these names,
other than perhaps their owners,
I read all of them, and
dearest to me is the seventh
down, Girl Puke ’12.
Brief research revealed nothing
further in the philanthropy lexicon,
but the name leads to questions
about art, what is and isn’t art,
about patronage, about what
is and isn’t funny, and about
names writ in water or on glass.
One must also ask what was
the weather like in the year 2012,
the year Girl Puke got degreed.
The name forces us to think about
attention, that is deep attention
and the rare ability to achieve it.
It is a shame that by definition
the name Girl Puke graduate
of the class of 2012, towering
in its achievement of truth and beauty,
must diminish and negate
the works in the spaces within,
which the artists struggled
to achieve with earnest aspirations;
in one space the walls were
covered with colored spackling tape
and in another crumpled paper
was formed into a staircase,
both better than journeyman efforts.
It’s amazing to think how many
people pass every day by the
shimmering letters and numbers
of the benefactors’ names and not
notice any of them, let alone
Girl Puke ’12’S, even though
they dazzle: slender, white,
modern, but not self-consciously so.
They are the perfect height,
as tall as a loaf of bread standing
upright on a table, a loaf that
has been left behind in haste
by people who were fleeing
and didn’t have time to grab it.
Girl Puke ’12: the delicate
apostrophe could almost be
a mistake left by the artist that
turned out to be something
more important than the rest
of the work, if one can agree
that these stenciled letters
are indeed part of the artfulness
and the installer is at
the very least an artisan.
Nose to glass reveals
delightful blotching where
the stencil was overcome.
Just think of all the girls
puking in the giant cauldrons
stirred by witches that could
be sisters of the witches
of Macbeth, they patiently
stir the hot stuff,
for the girls are trying to
lose weight, and what a
wonderful method to eat
and vomit and eat, it is
classical even, and no
surprise that our patriarchy’s
politburos have decreed
an injunction against Botticelli’s
zaftig maidens and called on
all fee mails of the many genders
to aspire to the lithe forms
of concentration campers.
The girls return every day.
The cauldrons are lined up
in the campus quadrangle,
below the eucalyptus trees,
glowing frisbees saucer by,
knapsacks of books everywhere.
There is a row of stations,
each has a table with mugs
and each cauldron has a self-
service ladle for the witches
merely stir, they don’t serve,
and a volunteer from Admissions
carries packets of salt pepper
and parsley to add to the puke,
but I am sure the puke should be
taken straight, without additives,
especially on a cool day when
sipping makes it stick to the bones,
and the lucky eaters gasp with pleasure.