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Pete Landers, Poet (birthdate) May 19, 1956 (place of birth) Salem, Mass. (height) 6'2" (weight) 180 lbs. (hair color and eye color) blonde/blue (sex) male (sexual orientation) bisexual (ethnic background) Irish American (pets) 3 cats, 2 parrots (spouse) Tami (number of children) 2 (occupation) Technical Writer (yearly earnings) 35K (schools and degrees) none. I'm an autodidact. (vocations) I take vocation at least once a year. (hobbies) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't approach anything as a hobby. If I like it, I immerse myself deeply. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (religion) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I'm working on a poem that will explain this. I think Jesus wasn't the guy that CHristians say he was. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (politics) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't like people who want to tell me not to smoke. I vote for people who want to provide health care to poor people. I don't vote for people who start wars. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (what respondent enjoys in the arts besides poetry) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I like classical music, especially opera. I can listen to Wagner for hours, I try to ignore his message. I like Mahler, too. Claudio Abbado has some good interpretations. I don't like what Boulez is doing with Wagner and Mahler, but I love his Debussy. I listen to the King's Singers, whether they are singing barbershop or renaissance. I am a baritone and I sing in the Rochester Bach Festival Chorus, the oldest continuous authentic instruments / performance ensemble in the world. I also play new age sounds on my midi keyboard and have been in a few performance art / poetry performance ensembles, most notably _Health and Beauty_. I also listen to rock, particularly Rush, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, Jethro Tull, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush. I'm an old John Lennon fan. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (science and philosophy) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I've read enough of the Germans in translation to dismiss them completely, except for Neitzsche. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (interests in sports) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- NASCAR and MLB. I don't participate. I get my exercise from sex, once, hopefully twice a day. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (life- in-general) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- I wanted to have a family, I mean a Family of many lovers. My first wife said she wanted that, too. Over the years we insulted several former friends by asking them to join us. Recently we were joined by Tami, but then my first wife got jealous and converted to Christianity. Now I am going to marry Tami. She and I believe in polyamory, we are both bisexual, but I doubt if anyone will ever get involved with us again. I don't really care. Tami is wonderful. I miss my daughters. If I tried to sue for custody, Karen will use my pot smoking against me. I visit often. I read to my girls. One thing that I hope to improve is my financial standing. My ex- was secretive about money and got us evicted a few times for screwing up the rent she screwed up the house, too, and the reposession has just come off my credit rating. Tami and I will be getting some kind of Queen Anne painted lady in town after we save up the bucks. We recognize that borrowed money and not paying it back is pretty much theft. I know a lot of my friends were hurt by this money thing over the years. It will take a while for them to realize that it was my ex-wife's doing. Soon Tami and I will have enough saved to get the publishing company going again. That's another thing Karen sabotaged. She told me all this stuff at the lawyer's office, how she sabotaged our money because she didn't love me, how she was jealous of poetry. It's really dirty. I'm glad to be free of her. I still don't know why I loved her. I don't know how she can smile at me like everything is OK. I guess her Bible is giving her some comfort. It tells her that I am a sinner. To me, that book is just a collection of war stories and some saved poems by people rounded up to become slaves. The so-called new testament is really a hodge-podge compiled out of Orphic mysteries and Mithraism. It would make even less sense if they had kept all of the books instead of trying to supress the ones that were recently found at Nag Hammadi. Anyway, I think people who believe that stuff are would believe anything. Take the resurrection, for example. None of them would think Isis actually succeeded in putting Osiris back together. None of them would believe that Orpheus descended into Hell and returned. None of them would believe that Dionysus was nurtured back to life by the Muses. None of them would drink the kykon or eat the bread at Eluesis, or open the earth to let Kore out. But every day they do re-enact these myths, only using a different set of names. Basically, I think there are 3 kinds of metaphors: igneous, sedimentary, and metamoprhic. The first is what great poets are all about. Moby Dick was an igneous metaphor. The second is what most poets are about. Our work is built from precipitation from previous generations. We rarely get that overwhelming volcanic explosion. Then there are these really hardened metaphors from ages long dead. They are too hardened for any useful purpose so we generally use them to make statues. The statue of Homer, for instance, which is pitted from the acid rain. The statue of Blake is still being carved... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- (The first poem that comes to mind right now is) Spring and All (What do you think of the current status of the world, and can you do anything about it?) I think of it, yes. I can only write. |