Scissortail Poets: Brady Peterson

I was compelled to purchase Brady Peterson's book on the basis of one poem he read at the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival in Ada, OK this month: "Chant." I'm a sucker for vocabularies used by workers in jobs and careers other than my own. Peterson had me at "Soffit is a builder's word, a carpenter's word-- / like fascia and header and stud."--the first two lines of the poem. The balance of the poem did not disappoint:

                                                ...Top plate
and joist. Soffit though has a mantra quality.
Whisper it over and over as you slip into deep
meditation.  soffit, soffit, soffit...

As if to quietly call the angels to your side,
whispering low so they have to move in close
to hear.  What is it you want, they ask--nothing.
What is it you want--nothing.

After this lyrical opening, there are two more stanzas of reminding us the practical purpose of a soffit ("seals the attic, keeping out squirrels / and raccoons"), and then Peterson's easy style of storytelling gives us a mini-narrative with rising action ("You set out a trap / ... // It's raining.  You check for leaks, / ...listen to the rain), punctuated with lyrical lines that, once again, end in the penultimate stanza with "What is it you want--nothing," meaning, I'm pretty sure, that it is not that we are being told that there is not anything that we want, but that we want something--precisely nothing, as in nothingness--a state of the ineffable, achieved with the incantatory nature of this poem.

And then the killer final two lines, bringing us back to the concrete world:

You are dry and warm inside your house.
Puddles form on the driveway.

Those puddles offer us all the promise we need of more showers, more cleansing, more poems by Peterson.

I thought it interesting that Peterson comments somewhere that the poems he likes are rarely liked by editors, and that he is always surprised by the ones editors do like. I found the same thing to be true of his poems, almost without exception. (The one and only being "A Summer Night," previously published by Ilya's Honey, and one that I marked with a big "+".)

A Summer Night

We lie to children, unable to bear
the emptiness of what we know--
My daughter realizes heaven is full
of dead people--just a bunch of dead
people, she says. She is four.

Death is a door, we say when fireflies
glow in the evening. A summer night
in Arkansas--the air thick with the smell
of bark and honeysuckles. The knob
turns, a door opens, then shuts.

Someone you loved--still love.

Fried catfish with French fried potatoes,
sweetened ice tea--the ice clinking
in the tumblers. They drove past our house
on the way to the restaurant, my cousin
says. I waved at them.

We sing old songs, the ones we sang
as children when the only radio was AM
and fuzzy. We walk the street of a town
where we lived, waiting for my father
to come home from the war.

But what about "Chant," "The Delicacy of Wood," "Passage," "Sleeps Through the Morning Marm," "Turning," Measuring Gaps," Fireflies and Baseball," "Saturday," "Tucked Away in a Drawer," "The Birds Chirp," "In Session," "Free Breakfast," "One Small Step," "Sawdust," "Keeping the Files," "3 AM," "Floss," and "And Now"--all 5 star (at least 4 star) poems in my estimation? None of them published prior to From an Upstairs Window! The second stanza of "And Now" could serve as Peterson's Ars Poetica: 

I call it as I see it, he says.  Back seat
love on a gravel road--before the dam,
before the lake, the Kingsmen singing
the only song we ever really needed.
What were the fucking words--

Peterson's poems are quest poems--searching for the words, the forms, the memories, and the best way to combine them, as if he were working in his garden, bringing together the dirt, the water, the sunshine, or ripping a 2 X 4 to make something better than what he could buy at the store to solve a nagging problem in his life--the nagging problem about his life: that it will end.

Saturday

I spend the day shoveling turkey shit and dirt--
plant tomatoes, onions--scatter a few basil
seeds.

Work shirtless, though almost seventy--
too old and wrinkled to work half naked
in the open air--to old to give a shit.
Drink Shiner in the afternoon--
soil and sweat making the beer taste better.

Walter was working his garden when he died--
so we figure--lying in the back yard.  The phone ringing
when we arrive--something whispers in my ear,
and I pass quickly through the house to find him
lying on the grass a few yards from the squash--

under a pecan tree.

Something about growing your own food.
It's better than hating immigrants
or worrying over who gets into heaven.

My accountant tells me he probably has less
than five years left--he is seventy-two
with a bad heart. I spend my days listening
to people grumble about paying too much
in taxes, he says.  No way to live.

I don't complain, I tell him.  He grins.
You believe in taxes, he tells me.

Grady Peterson believes in the power of language and story to redeem us in this life, if not in another. And I believe in Grady Peterson. He's probably writing today from an upstairs window.  You can get a copy of his book with the same name and learn a thing or two about writing and living. And you can email him at bpete1764@aol.com and he'll put you on his list to receive what he puts down on paper almost every day. I did, and I'm already a better writer for it...as far as a better person, that may take a while...