MEINKE, Peter

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Nationality: American. Born: Brooklyn, New York, 29 December 1932. Education: Hamilton College, Clinton, New York, A.B. 1955; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, M.A. 1961; University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Ph.D. in English 1965. Military Service: U.S. Army, 1955–57. Family: Married Jeanne Clark in 1957; two daughters and two sons. Career: English teacher, Mountain Lakes High School, New Jersey, 1958–60; assistant professor of English, 1961–66, and poet-in-residence, 1973, Hamline University, St. Paul, Minnesota; assistant professor, 1966–68, associate professor, 1968–72, and professor of literature and director of the writing workshop, 1972–93, Florida Presbyterian College, later named Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. Visiting professor, University of Sussex, Brighton, summer 1969; director, AMFC French Program, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1971–72; Fulbright lecturer, University of Warsaw, 1978–79; poet-in-residence, Hamilton College, winter 1981; Jenny Moore Lecturer, George Washington University, Washington, D.C., 1981–82; writer-in-residence, Thurber House, Columbus, 1987, Davidson College, North Carolina, 1989, University of Hawaii, 1993, Austin Peay University, Clarksville, Tennessee, 1995, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, 1996, and Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Virginia, 1999. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1974, 1989; Poetry Society of America Gustav Davidson award, 1976, and Lucille Medwick prize, 1984; Emily Clark Balch prize (Virginia Quarterly Review), for fiction, 1982; O. Henry award, for fiction, 1983; P.E.N. award, for fiction, 1984, 1987, 1988; Flannery O'Connor award, for short fiction, 1986; Emily Dickinson award, 1992, Paumanok Poetry award, 1993; Provincetown Master Artist's fellowship, 1995; Chapbook prize, Sow's Ear Press, 1996. Address: 147 Wildwood Lane S.E., St. Petersburg, Florida 33705, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Lines from Neuchâtel. Gulfport, Florida, Konglomerati Press, 1974.

The Night Train, and The Golden Bird. Pittsburgh, University ofPittsburgh Press, 1977.

The Rat Poems; or, Rats Live on No Evil Star. Cleveland, Bits Press, 1978.

Trying to Surprise God. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.

Underneath the Lantern. Meadville, Pennsylvania, Heatherstone Press, 1986.

Night Watch on the Chesapeake. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987.

Far from Home. Meadville, Pennsylvania, Heatherstone Press, 1988.

Liquid Paper: New & Selected Poems. Pittsburgh, University ofPittsburgh Press, 1991.

Campocorto. Abingdon, Virginia, Sow's Ear Press, 1996.

Scars. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996.

Zinc Fingers. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

Short Stories

The Piano Tuner. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1986.

Other

Howard Nemerov. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1968.

The Legend of Larry the Lizard (for children). Richmond, John Knox Press, 1968.

Very Seldom Animals (for children). St. Petersburg, Florida, Possum Press, 1969.

The Shape of Poetry. Boston, The Writer, Inc., 1999.

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Manuscript Collection: University of Florida, Gainesville.

Critical Studies: "Speaking to Us All" by Philip Jason, in Poet Lore (Boston), 1982; Bounds Out of Bounds by Roberta Berke, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982; "Trying to Surprise God" by Eric Nelson, in Mickle St. Review (Philadelphia), 1983; "Poems to Embrace" by Jason Scott Bell, in the St. Petersburg Times (Florida), 20 September 1987; "Meinke Revisited" by Dionisio Martinez, in Organica Quarterly (Tampa, Florida), autumn 1992; "Easy Listening" by Henry Taylor, in Poetry (Chicago), May 1993; "The Illusion of Wholeness" by Dionisio Martinez, in International Quarterly, June 1993; "Beginning to Bloom: A Talk with Peter Meinke" by David Jasper, in Weekly Planet (Tampa, Florida), 1998.

Peter Meinke comments:

My poems and stories have to stand on their own, and I have little to say about them. I am a slow writer in both genres and try to write as clearly as possible. I am seldom surreal, though occasionally my dreams enter my writing in strange ways. I am interested in the formal problems of sounding contemporary in traditional forms. I do not know what I would do if I did not write; I've never tried it.

(1995) I took early retirement from Eckerd College in order to devote more time to my writing.

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Peter Meinke's The Night Train, and The Golden Bird contains a variety of poems, both lyric and comic, free-form and formal. Yet all are imbued with the poet's seriousness and hardheadedness, an unmistakable tone the reader discovers in the very first poem, "The Night Train." In Meinke's train the passengers are suicides on the way to nowhere, and their misery and futility are embodied in the rhythm of the train:

their fingers drum the drumroll of their wake
on train compartment windows, when they take
their lives it is the right place
this closed anonymous world inside a train
a nothing sort of place; for god's sake
get on with it: there's nothing much at stake

Note the rhymes: "wake," "take," "sake," "stake." By breaking his lines where he does, by using repetitive rhymes, and by reducing punctuation to a minimum, Meinke creates a powerful and evocative poem.

What Meinke does in "The Night Train" is similar to what he does in most of his work. He seems to let the poem dictate its own form, to let the lines break where they must and to punctuate themselves. What gives his poems power is the ability to risk lines like these in the grimly comic "Vegetables":

	Disemboweled peas

slide into tumbrils, dizzy
with air, beets bleed on the
sinkboard, celery wilts with its heart
in our hands.

At the same time Meinke's poems are highly controlled and show a firm understanding of conventional prosody. The second title poem, "The Golden Bird," is a villanelle, and the moving antiwar poem "The Monkey's Paw" demonstrates his lyric gifts as well as his concern and his anger:

When the war is over the bones of the lonely dead
will knit and rise from ricefield and foxfield
like sea-things seeking the sea, and will head
toward their homes in Hanoi or Seattle
clogging the seaways, the airways, the highways
climbing the cliffs and trampling the clover
heading toward Helen, Hsueh-ying, or Mary
when the war is over

Measures like these make Meinke a rare poet in our time, one who hears music where there is mostly din.

—Cynthia Day