Money, Peter 1963-

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MONEY, Peter 1963-

PERSONAL: Born November 6, 1963, in Napa, CA; son of Maxwell Stow (an educator) and Shirley (Bryant) Money; married Lucinda Hudson Walker, June 22, 1991; children: Hartley, Lily. Education: Oberlin College, B.A. (English), 1986; Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, M.F.A. (writing), 1990; San Jose State University, M.L.I.S., 1999. Politics: "Took part in antiwar and National Organization for Women marches on Washington." Religion: "Raised a Congregationalist, will die a Tibetan Buddhist." Hobbies and other interests: "A poet's philanthropy and collecting, semi-active visual artist."

ADDRESSES: Home—Old Barn Lane, Box 487, Brownsville, VT 05037. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Lebanon College, Lebanon, NH, instructor in poetry and literature; also taught at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Community College of Vermont, and California schools. Gives readings from his works, including performances at City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, and Knitting Factory, New York, NY.

AWARDS, HONORS: New Press Quarterly essay prize, 1992, for "The Importance of Dada at the End of a Century and the Quiet Example of Marsden Hartley."

WRITINGS:

These Are My Shoes (poetry), Boz Publishing (New York, NY), 1991.

Minor Roads (poetry), privately printed (San Francisco, CA), 1993.

A Big Yellow (poetry), Cloud (Newcastle upon Tyne, England), 1996.

Instruments (poetry), Tel-Let Press (Charleston, IL), 1998.

Finding It: Selected Poems, Mille Grazie Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 2000.

To Day … Minutes Only (prose poem), Goats and Compasses Press (West Windsor, VT), 2003.

Author of poetry broadside "Between Ourselves," Backwoods Broadsides (Ellsworth, ME), 1997. Work represented in anthologies, including The Adobe Anthology, Adobe Bookshop (San Francisco, CA); and This Far Together: Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, 1980–1995, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal (San Francisco, CA). Contributor of articles, poetry, and reviews to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Talisman: Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Hummingbird, First Intensity, Swansea Review, Yinna: Journal for the Bahamas Association for Cultural Studies, Quiet Dialog, Hawai'i Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Provincetown Arts. Founder of literary journals Writers' Bloc and Lame Duck.

WORK IN PROGRESS: New and Selected Poems by Peter Money; Each New Place, an essay collection; Brightness Followed, a work of fiction; The Great Australian-American Novel and Other Stories; a compendium of quotations on poetry, art, and the living; a biography of Saadi Youssef, Arab modernist and translator; children's picture stories, including Ruby Bridges, Shiver, The Red Wheelbarrow, and At Home Dads.

SIDELIGHTS: Peter Money told CA: "This poetry: it's not a painting, it's not a sculpture, it's not a dance, not film or music—quite, but it's possibly of the same origin, the same subject, as those other arts. It's a form which illuminates through syllables, often a more transitory subject—perception of being—than the longer works of narrative in fiction and nonfiction, and which conjures fresh suggestions out of the ordinary by as little as minute juxtaposition. The poem follows its own form, its own logic, music, sense—text and context. It is landscape or figures within anew, palpable, intuitively and intimately expressed through the breath of one into the formation of a sound—ringing you. It is, ultimately, empathy sought, perhaps to an audience of one. My first book came out of a travel journal: notes from India, New Zealand, Italy, Egypt.

"(Yet) I, too, paint, sculpt (with found materials: I-beam, banister, rocks, bamboo, grass, a bookcase), have danced 'til the sweat dropped my head (I hear the English Beat as I write this); I envision film, and am provoked by music. Such activities as these provide necessary physicality, communion, and social context and discourse to the side of this otherwise solitary self-employment. I came to poetry because it came to me—but I take it as my wheelbarrow, pill, water, boat and harbor, flesh. I mean I depend on and I will the strengths and traits poetry conceals for my every day, and each (I say this without one feather-weight of drama) breath. And I came to it, at least in a way a teenager senses attraction, at Oberlin College and in Dublin, Ireland.

"I look for sacred places, although I am not 'religious,' because I need them: Provincetown Harbor in Cape Cod Bay and the solitary steady vision of Mount Ascutney (some say part of a Heart Chakra) are two. Mount Vision, Point Reyes, California, was another—for a day.

"The most luminous poems are a gift of the subject. And, it is an unpaid-for gift (the original gift), it is sustenance, diagnosis, prescription, and medicine—in a word. Its invitation is to the dormant psyche, compelling our closer participation in being alive, in all and what little that means: perhaps to simply identify with the struggles of some other birth, to sympathize with the distance through time and matter that struggle endures, and to witness in ourselves and another an empathetic wave stirring—as if the last pulse in our chest, as importantly the first.

"Two poets who return in my constant awareness are George Oppen and William Carlos Williams. But also, the paintings of Marsden Hartley (his writing, too) have had a curiously personal resonance. Allen Ginsberg was the first to perceive this. Lately I have been encouraged by the poems and example of Saadi Youssef, an Iraqi modernist poet who has endured exile in many different places. My book To Day … Minutes Only is a prose-poem 'dialog' with Saadi's lines. No doubt my relationship with the writer Lawrence Fixel had something to do with my venturing (to my surprise) into prose-poetry. The book A Big Yellow was, in part, a response to correspondence with Theodore Enslin and his Ranger. The best teacher I had was a painter: Juanita Pierce. The force of Joan Larkin's (another former teacher) poems, raise the bar of intensity.

"In 1986 and 1987 I had intended to study with John Ashbery but studied, and this was my fortune, with Ginsberg. My inclusion in Michigan poet David Cope's Big Scream provided significant community. Today, Art/Life, out of southern California, provides consistent support.

"I still read an early poem of mine, 'To the Lady in Pink Standing atop the Bridge.' That poem, written after a cab ride across the Brooklyn Bridge, stands as a more dramatic example of what I have come to feel daily. There are people and things we pass and to acknowledge their dignity, affinity, and kindred features is to 'inact' and inhabit the presence of poetry. I write about what's here with me: as a visitor to the Na Pali Coast, about this modest tsunami-pyramid of a mountain just beyond my window, my transition back to California, or where I find the most solace—in Provincetown. The forms and the subjects vary, but the reasons are the same."