Peter Sears

Peter Sears, a graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers Workshop, has taught at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and has served as Dean of Students at Bard College. He was the community services coordinator for the Oregon Arts Commission and director of the Oregon Literary Coalition. He also taught in the Pacific University low-residency MFA program in Portland, Oregon. He has most recently served as Oregon’s poet laureate, 2014-2016.

Sears’ work has appeared in several national magazines and newspapers such as Saturday Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and Rolling Stone, as well as in literary magazines such as Field, New Letters, Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and Seneca Review.

Peter Sears is the author of four full-length poetry collections; Small Talk, Tour: New and Selected Poems, The Brink, and Green Diver. He has also published a number of poetry chapbooks, and books on teaching writing, including Secret Writing and I’m Gonna Bake Me a Rainbow Poem.

More information is available at PeterSears.com.  (Photo credit–Helen Caswell.)

During the war, I wanted to be a fighter pilot,
but I would probably have crashed and be captured
and tortured. All I could do was pull my wagon

around from house to house, collecting newspapers
for the newspaper drive, and in a basement room
at school, Janitor Wesley weighed my papers, gave me

a slip of paper with my name, date, and weight—
then tied my papers into bundles and neatly stacked
them against the wall. I kept his notes at home.

Paper-clipped, in a box in my chest under my bed.
I liked to take them out and thumb through them.
Each day the pile of papers at school climbed higher

up the wall. Then one day a delivery door
opened and light poured in. The truck backed up
to the door and a guy got out and threw

the bundles of papers in the truck,
closed the door and drove off. The room
was so empty it felt like a torture room.

Sister Arnoldine lent me her book for a science project
said keep it as long as you like
–the mechanics of an auger’s spiral had cast a spell on me–
but when I got off the school bus the next morning
empty-handed
she said in a voice cold as stone
I want my book you must go back

she thrust upon me Debbie’s bike with the missing pedal
which I cranked in a fever through town and neighborhoods
to the bare blacktop of the county road
beyond the college to cornfields then gravel pit
closing the distance to the woods and home

maybe half mile before the trees
broad nose of a Buick approached–my dad
leaned out his window to hear my tale of woe
–flushed cheeks a smear of tears–
take your time listen to the birds he said
then continued to classrom and laboratory

end of school day book and bike
restored to their rightful owners
I cleaned the blackboard clapped erasers
didn’t falter when Dad walked in
spoke to the sister his low tones icy as needles
don’t you know she could have been dehydrated?
shame of the morning lifted like a cloud of chalk dust

 

Rachel Barton:  I focused first on the voice of the young boy in Peter’s poem which took me back to my own elementary school and ultimately to a memory of my dad. We lived in a community of faculty families near the college and distant from the town. This separation created a bit of a power struggle between the nuns who taught at the parochial school and my father who taught at the college. 

I had to sit with this poem a while to come up with the last line, the emotional truth of my experience. I was amazed at how clearly I could remember my father’s words.