Exclusive Interview with Poet Jim Peterson

 

Jim Peterson calls himself an Old Southerner having been born and raised in South Carolina. Being from the South had a strong influence on him as a young man and even still today.

“The South is a storytelling culture,” said Peterson. “A lot of my poems are stories or have some kind of narrative movement.”

According to Peterson, he was born with an artist’s temperament, something his parents and two sisters didn’t always understand.

“I was kind of spacey as a kid,” said Peterson. “Kind of a dreamer.”

Peterson was also influenced by pop culture. The music he listened to then and still today includes Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell, all of whom write out of a folk tradition of storytelling in their music. As a kid he never missed an episode of The Twilight Zone, loving the strangeness of the stories.

In his fiction and his poetry, Peterson says he often writes magical realism. Along those same lines of perhaps bending reality, Peterson uses improvisational jazz structure as a model for writing. 

“The fun of jazz is hearing the little touches of the ghost of that repeating melody in the music,” said Peterson. “If it’s improvisational, that means it’s alive, composed in the moment of performance.”

As in Jazz, Peterson is open to the fun of improvising and discovering what is inside himself and inside the writing that he might be habitually avoiding.

“Open yourself wider and let the poems you’re writing surprise you,” said Peterson. 

Peterson paraphrased Robert Frost, saying “no surprise in the poet, no surprise in the reader.” According to Peterson, it applies to the emotion of the poem as well: “No tears in the poem, no tears in the reader.”

Peterson has certainly been open to the emotion of his poetry. Of the three poems published in Issue #15 of The Good Life Review, two are about his wife Harriet, who passed away after a long battle with brain cancer in 2016. As her husband of 44 years and caregiver for her final time on earth, Peterson experienced the world in a way he can now share through storytelling and beautiful verse.

“Bend” and “The Hammock” are part of Peterson’s manuscript, Towheaded Stone Thrower. The book, set to be published by Press 53, is the story of Peterson and his wife, their life together, the onset of her illness, his caregiving, her death, and the aftermath.

In “Bend,” Peterson recounts the time when he first met Harriet at a barn on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Harriet was home from college for the summer and had a horse at the same barn as Peterson’s friends.

 “She was a true horse whisperer,” said Peterson.

“Bend” reflects on how astonished Peterson was at how sensitive Harriet was to the horses and how sensitive they were to her in return. Peterson said, “In riding, there is a certain point when the rider learns to ask the horse to bend, to cup its body in other words.” This movement requires a signal to the horse through the rider’s body position. The poem is also about bending toward your partner in a relationship. 

“She was also bending me,” said Peterson. “Psychologically and emotionally, I was bending towards her, and she was bending towards me.”

Peterson said Harriet brought that spacey boy down to earth and helped him live his best life by engaging more with the physical, animal world.

“The Hammock” reflects on the phase when Harriet’s illness prevented her from sleeping most nights. On those restless nights, she would swing in their hammock outside their home, noticing the point before dawn when the birds awoke and feeling the dew point change with the new day.

“I imagine she was getting something of the rocking she would have gotten from riding a horse,” said Peterson of their hammock. “That rhythm was like the horse under her. That’s the little magical leap the poem tries to take.”

“Faraway” is not a part of this new collection but was written beforehand. In Lynchburg, Virginia, where Peterson lives, the landscape is hilly with gorges that divide the town. Just a few minutes’ walk from his home, Peterson can find himself secluded in the woods at a spot where two creeks converge and the hills and nature they hold wrap around him. 

“Being a caretaker of someone you love who is slowly disintegrating is extremely difficult,” said Peterson. “A lot of people find themselves in that situation.”

Peterson had friends who would come and keep Harriet company while Peterson took a walk in those woods close to his home and got ‘faraway’ for a while.

Just as these poems are connected, Peterson views each poem as a fuse between the reader and the writer. The poem is the fuse that carries the electricity between them.

“The emotion, feeling, and insight of the poem is conveyed down the poem and into the mind of the reader,” said Peterson. “That’s why we read poetry, isn’t it? I read it to get that visceral feeling of a transfer of energy.”

Peterson said there are two things that are most important to him regarding connection through poetry. First, he wants there to be an insight that occurs in the poem organically—some new or fresh way of experiencing something for the reader. He also wants himself and the reader to be moved emotionally by the poem. 

“If you can get one of these,” Peterson said, “you’ve got a good poem that connects the poet and the reader. If you can get both of them, the poem has the potential to transform both the writer and reader.”

From the time Peterson was a child, he was a storyteller. Through the stories of his life with his wife Harriet, he provides shared experiences and uncovered emotions in his poetry that certainly transfer organically to the reader as demonstrated in “Bend, “The Hammock” and “Faraway.” 

Thank you, Jim, for spending extra time with us on this interview! We are grateful for your insight about writing and your willingness to share a part of your story, and your life with Harriet, with us and our readers. We wish you all the best.

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The three new poems by Jim Peterson that are referenced in this interview can be found in Issue #15 ~ Spring 2024, here: Bend, Faraway, and The Hammock