Peter Pereira may be the most popular Seattle poet. He may be the nicest and that counts for a lot in polite Seattle. He’s also a neighbor of mine. I remember attending his book release reading at Open Books and they had to turn people away. In this intelligent review by Joel Weishaus, I get a better sense of what Pereira’s doing, but I’m left wanting a deeper experience than the review provided. Is it me, or is there something about this review that is missing?
Here’s the first paragraph:
Although books and anthologies of poems by physicians and other healthcare workers are not uncommon, Seattle family physician, Peter Pereira, has a particular gift in revealing of the pulse of his psyche through his relationship with patients. Perhaps this is because he has had to absorb the prejudice that goes with being a gay man in America. Even in his office, when he refused to write a prescription for the powerful pain-killer OxyContin, “because the Xrays / and MRI don’t show it,” for a man who claimed he had broken his spine in a car accident, the man walked out muttering, “Damn fag.”
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/weishaus/Poetica/blog-3.htm
What say you? It may take a while before getting your response up here, as the spam is relentless and I may be in Brussels, but do let me know what you think.
Paul Nelson
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
