Peter Kline: California Poets Part 10, Five Poems

Peter Kline

April 2nd, 2026

California Poets: Part X

Peter Kline

Five Poems

Pandemic Feature: Survivor

Someone arranged to put us here together.  Father, we call him,

though we understand this is a metaphor, like Big Sister or

Score Keeper or any other.  He judges us with hidden eyes. Each day he sends ingenious miseries so we can please him 

with the vigor of our struggling.  Our privacies are his: he

oversees our sleep, and renders secret changes to our bodies,

which may take years to realize.  Some think he can even see

the color of our conscience, and remember the dreams we

forget.  These and more he cuts together into books of one

great story, each with a hero and a devil and a moral.

So these other watchers must be angels.  Look at their rapt

contentment, the play of light on their faces.  See how much

they care for the lives of others. 

Pandemic Feature: Superhero

What made him different made him dangerous: he was

immune to doubt.  So he became brave and reckless, a zealot

in Infidel City, wandering like a child through the brothel

alleys, parting the market crowds like a pennant blade.  A kind

of modern paladin, he intercepted each villain between inkling

and trigger-pull, always just in time to sever the finger.  Then

he was gone while the would-be victims still stood weeping. 

And of course there was a cost, there were many costs, and he

made no friends, and no one knew him.  But least onerous of

these was the need for disguise, as who these days could be in

public without one?  (Who these days or ever?)  The mask was

black, bespoke, a second head with a white hook-beak.  He

wore it like a spike protein at Carnival.

Pandemic Feature: Neverland

You can’t seek out that other world.  It won’t be found by

snaking rabbit holes or barging into wardrobes.  Likewise

taking your little dog for a walk down Tornado Alley, or

threading shoals at full sail on a starless night while the

captain’s stoned––these are obvious attempts at pandering to

fate, and fate is a permanent loner.  Catch a plane to Xanadu:

the pleasure dome will smell like Disneyland.  Climb straight

up Blue Sky Mountain, and you’ll gaze from the pinnacle with

the same two eyes that guided you.  But look, late again,

hurrying back to work, full of an overpriced lunch and the

stocks’ new highs, you cut through the random crush and

fevered waiting behind the station.  You leap from the middle

streetcar stair and land in a place of testing.

Pandemic Feature: Conan the Barbarian

There’s no freedom like an orphan’s.  No mother or father to

steer you into the safety of mediocrity, corrupt your body by

forcing obedience to the king’s science, or bury you under their

loaded history.  No magic mirror into the future in an old

man’s stammer.  Nothing to predict your specific form of

inevitable suffering.  To light the pit of who you are and what

might be, there’s only the glint of ideas piled with the personal

effects, and the sparkle of unreal memories.  The killing edge

of the greatsword, and the pommel jewel.  Rivulets of blood in

a pool of ale.  Firelight on a fingernail, and the demon’s slinky

silver collar.  Almost laughable, I know, from this side (till

some cataclysm makes all our screens go dark).  But with such

scènes à faire is the fantasy of any life composed.

Pandemic Feature: Horror

Don’t worry.  It’s okay.  It will be okay.  It will change.  It will

be.  Let go of your fear.  Let go.  Don’t give it away to the

monster.  Don’t give it away to your lover, your teacher, your

child.  Give it to me.  It’s hard, it’s getting harder, yes, it’s bad,

it’s getting much much worse.  It’s almost unbearable.  Some

of us are giving in. Some of us can’t stand to see what’s coming

after what comes after, even though the ending is a timeworn

certainty.  The pupils fuzz, the fists relax, the jawline softens. 

The lever slips, the seals decay, the door drifts open.  The

power’s been cut––no one can see the other side.  But don’t

look for hope to come charging through: those flickers in the

dark are winking knives.  Hope, like terror, is the empty door. 

Here, sit close to me and hold my hand.  Let’s watch it

together.

Interview

May 23rd, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Peter Kline, Poet, Educator

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: You teach at the University of San Francisco. What do you enjoy most about it and how significant are the challenges of finding time to write?

PK: Carving out sufficient time to allow for the concentration, obsession, and dreaminess essential for creative work is a challenge for me, as it is for most poets.  But over the 20+ years I’ve been teaching, I’ve found ways to build my life around my writing.  And for all of the financial and spiritual precarity of adjunct teaching, working with students is a privilege and a joy.

DG: In 2012, you founded a literary reading series called Bazaar Writers Salon, which continues to this day. What was the impetus behind initiating the effort, how did it survive the pandemic, and what are you excited about for the future?

PK: Philosophically, I founded Bazaar Writers Salon, and have kept it going these fourteen years, because I believe in the power and necessity of live literary events, which can create an electric, intimate connection between writer and audience, and because I believe in the value of artistic communities, which reading series do much to help create and sustain.  More practically, I started the series because Les Wisner, former owner of Bazaar Café, asked me if I might be interested in launching one there.  At that time, I had recently been involved in running a series that dissolved due to lack of interest from the venue, so I was eager to give it another go at Bazaar Café, with its passionate owners (a passion maintained by the delightful couple who subsequently took over the café, Rozanne Stoman and Josh Johnson) and its well-established reputation as one of the most prominent singer-songwriter venues in the city.

The pandemic was brutal on the series, as it was on almost everyone and everything.  We took a few months off, but as soon as possible I began running readings via Zoom.  While of course that format couldn’t reproduce all of the warmth and humanity of coming together in a cozy café, I felt that any kind of connection at that time was deeply necessary.  And we were able to include readers and audiences from outside the Bay Area who otherwise may not have been able to engage.  But as soon as the Covid vaccines were released, we started up in person again, happily! 

As far as the future, I’m just hopeful that Bazaar Writers Salon will be able to continue its service to the Bay Area as an intimate, attentive forum where talented writers and devoted readers can come together to celebrate the written word.

DG: Given the five-poem series published here related to the pandemic, I’d like to ask about the effects that forced isolation had on your writing. Some writers are deeply lonely. Some writers deeply want to be alone. Did your writing change during this period and how did you emerge in the end—from the pens of solitude or the screens of loneliness?

PK: For the first few months of the pandemic, I wrote almost nothing.  My sense of dread and disbelief, combined with the stress of adapting to radically constrained routines of life and work, made it impossible for me to feel creative.  I spent much of that time instead reading and watching movies––especially comfort books and films that I’d loved for decades.  Sometime during the fall of 2020 I was able to return to creative work, and realized that the combination of comfort media and the pandemic might make for a fruitful source of art.  I went on to write about 50 of these “Pandemic Feature” prose poems, exploring different ways to address the estrangements and losses of Covid via defamiliarized experiences of my old favorites.  So even though life hadn’t yet returned to normal, my creative practice––which requires a certain amount of solitude/isolation––was productive.  My sense of social ease, however, took a lot longer to return!  I’m afraid the pandemic made me a bit feral.

DG: In addition to Bazaar Café, what are your favorite literary spots in San Francisco and which places do you find beautiful in general?

PK: My favorite reading series (other than Bazaar Writers Salon!) is Literary Speakeasy, which James J. Siegel has run with great energy and verve for more than a decade, and which takes place in Martuni’s piano bar, a San Francisco treasure (just be careful––the martinis are legendarily large!).  I love the annual poetry readings at Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, run by Doug Powell for many years, which makes for a majestic experience with its grand reverberations and hush.  And of course the marvelous bookstores––Green Apple Books and The Booksmith and City Lights and Clio’s, to name just a few––are right at the center of Bay Area literary culture.

I find San Francisco so shockingly beautiful, and so endlessly fascinating, that it’s hard to choose any highlights––it’s all a highlight.  This is a city where extravagant calla lilies sprout wild out of any old ditch, and where you can climb any hill to find yourself with a postcard view of cypresses and ocean.  One of my favorite things to do is to spend the day rambling the city from neighborhood to neighborhood and discovery to discovery.  A great starting point for any such ramble is the cliffs and beaches on the northwest side of the city, which run from the Golden Gate Bridge all the way out to the Sutro Baths.

DG: It’s no secret that you employ meter in your work and you’ve spoken about the importance of it on many occasions, for instance writing: “Meter connects poetry to song, to the voice rather than the page, and thus to the body, to the sensual, to the warm and present and human and living poem.” Who are poets which best embody this tradition that aspiring writers in search of greater musicality should be reading?

PK: The history of English-language poetry is rich with music, much of it part of the metrical tradition.  My own lineage runs through Thomas Wyatt, William Shakespeare, Robert Herrick, John Keats, Robert Browning, and Emily Dickinson (among many others!).  In the 20th century, I return again and again to E.A. Robinson, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Philip Larkin, and Thom Gunn.  I find much contemporary metrical poetry to be overly conservative, aesthetically.  But Alicia Stallings is a wonderful metrical poet in the traditional vein who is also a brilliant innovator (her sonnet built on mirrored opposites, “Alice in the Looking Glass,” is a great example of this), and I find Randall Mann (who writes in both metrical and sharply-sculpted free verse) to be one of the most exciting, groundbreaking poets currently working in English.  His pantoum “September Elegies” is a poem for all time.  Some other fabulous contemporary poets who work in meter (at least occasionally) are Marilyn Hacker, Kim Addonizio, Patricia Smith, Moira Egan, and Brittany Perham.

DG: Your work makes use of traditional poetic parameters to express topics not traditionally expressed in those parameters. To what extent are you trying to undercut the notion that “form is never more than an extension of content?”

PK: I don’t see my poems as undercutting that notion – quite the opposite, I hope in my poems to discover unexplored affinities between form and content.  Even though at this point in history, millions (billions?) of sonnets have been written, I still believe that the form is in no way exhausted.  There are still vast new areas of thought and feeling that the sonnet form can embody and express, both in strictly traditional versions and in looser or modulated versions.  Therefore, one of my goals in working in traditional forms is to expand the viable uses and possibilities of those forms – and to change the tradition in the process.  I’d also note that in this era of largely unformalized free verse, writing in form can be a potentially radical act.

All this being said, you’re quite right that I’m interested in exploring ways of thinking and feeling that fall outside of mainstream poetic sentiments and pieties.  Eliot warned against the dangers of this in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” arguing that seeking “new human emotions to express” would inevitably lead to “the perverse.”  But it seems to me that new eras bring important changes to human beings and culture, and shift relationships between the artist and society, and that art should address and reflect (and even drive) these changes; one era’s perversity is another’s cultural norm.   

DG: From Thomas Hood’s famous saying that “the easiest reading is damned hard writing,” to Bukowski’s famous maxim “don’t try,” there have been plenty of quotes about the creative process. Is there one that most resonates with you and why?

PK: I’ve always loved Charles Wright’s coy definition of poetry: “Poetry is language that sounds better and means more.”  It identifies the two essential elements of poetry––verbal music and concentration of meaning––and leaves the rest open.  No constrictive ideas about subject matter or emotion or metaphor or “personal expression.”  Here’s another one I like, of uncertain attribution––this is a kind of Zen Hippocratic Oath for writers:

First, do no harm

to the silence.

DG: Fifteen years ago, you composed a short blog entry about the contemporary poet and self-promotion, where you write the following: “Many poets I know have a complicated relationship with social media and self-promotion, a relationship that must be constantly renegotiated to allow them to best achieve results for their careers while avoiding crippling public scorn and private feelings of worthlessness.” Over the years for you personally, to what extent has your approach towards social media changed? Are you using it more or less and have you tried some new platforms?

PK: I’ve steadily resisted further engagement with social media, perhaps to the detriment of my career, as I’ve heard that many publishers now routinely investigate writers’ social media presence when evaluating whether to publish their manuscripts.  But remaining disengaged has certainly been better for my spirit––between the shame and disgust of arrant self-promotion and the feelings of inadequacy and petty competitiveness and disgust that arise from engaging with the arrant self-promotion of others, using social media is, in most ways, not good for me, and antithetical to my creative life.  From a practical standpoint, I’ve also resisted engaging with social media because I’ve figured that by the time I master the newest platform, it will already have become obsolete, and I’ll have to move on to the next fad and start all over again.  So I’m only on Facebook (which, I know, dates me!).  I use it predominantly for promoting Bazaar Writers Salon readings.  It’s also a good way to share poems I’ve published in literary journals that may otherwise go unseen due to their limited circulation, something I do once or twice a year.  But I much prefer engaging with people “in real life” (if such a thing exists!).

DG: What’s the last book you read and what did you think of it?

PK: I’ve just finished re-reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poetry collection Headwaters, a book that I first read with interest shortly after its publication in 2013, but which has taken on new relevance for me because of my current writing project (see my next response for more on this).  I think it’s a marvelous book.  Not only do I love the book’s formal inventiveness (the poems omit punctuation and are largely uncapitalized, creating widespread, productive syntactical ambiguity), I also admire its nimble thinking––its surprising feints and thrusts of insight––as well as its willingness to embrace moral uncertainty and ambivalence (a dying art!).

DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?

PK: I’m currently in the early stages of a new group of poems that omit punctuation and capitalization.  The immediate impetus for the series is the work of Max Sessner, a contemporary German poet (Francesca Bell’s translation of Sessner, Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems, is fantastic and first brought him to my attention).  Sessner uses the unpunctuated method sparingly and with lovely subtlety––his deceptively simple domestic poems are shot through with existential terror and wonder and alienation, often enacted via the syntactic slippages created by missing punctuation.  Sessner’s work has led me to also re-read other practitioners of that method, including Ellen Bryant Voigt and E. E. Cummings.  I’ve been exploring using the method in metrical poems, particularly when combined with a more flexible approach to syntax and thought that allows for mid-thought revisions and interjections.  The combination of these allows for a finely controlled chaos that I’ve found exciting, and liberating.  All of my formal explorations are intended, in part, to allow me to express thought and feeling that I could not have captured via any other method.  Different forms additionally allow for different kinds of verbal music, another driving impulse.

I’m also in the process of submitting a manuscript of poems for publication, entitled Protagonist, which the prose poems published here are a part of.  That manuscript is centered around the Covid pandemic, and around our use of stories and storytelling to make sense of our lives.  Hopefully Protagonist will be out in the world before too long – stay tuned!

Author Bio:

Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Hemingway House, Amy Clampitt House, and James Merrill House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon.  He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University, and can be found online at www.peterklinepoetry.com.