#Peter Payack

[marcogiovenale]

phone-a-poem highlights

library.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/static/poetry/listeningbooth/poets/phone-a-poem.html Phone-A-Poem Online presents highlights from an installation that celebrates the popular Cambridge-based poetry hotline, Phone-A-Poem (1976-2001). Founded by Peter Payack (and later edited by Roland Pease), Phone-A-Poem invited hundreds of poets—including Allen Ginsberg, Jane Kenyon and James Tate—to…

[peterpayackthepoet]

The original edited page of my poem, “Darkness at Dawn” about my son, Peter Paul Payack at age 4 in 1990

[linguistinspace]

Rainbow Bridges by Peter Payack

Rainbow Bridges

An environmentally enlightened engineer decides that all river ways, canyons, crevices, and valleys are to be bridged by rainbows. This evanescent design was chosen because of its imperviousness to wind, storm, and flying creatures.

The lightweight and immaterial bridges will be planned to hold seven lanes of traffic. Red, orange, and yellow will be restricted to high-speed commercial vehicles. Green, blue, and violet will be designated for passenger cars. While indigo will be reserved for pedestrians, bicyclists, and runners. Handrails and flashing lights will be added to assure the safety of those on foot. It is hoped the faint glow of the roadways itself will ease driversʼ eyestrain. Until engineers can perfect a practical nighttime model, the rainbow bridges will be operational only on sunny days. Peter Payack

[theparisreview]

Mary wants to make some jam, so she buys 1000 mason jars: 700 quart size, 200 pint size, and “for variety” 100 half-pint. She likes making jam. Next she goes to the fruit stand and buys an orchard of peaches, but at 4 pounds to the dollar she feels “it’s a steal.” The fruit stand delivers the peaches in a truck; it dumps them into the kitchen. The kitchen is getting a little cramped with a ton of peaches and all those mason jars. We phone all the people we know to borrow canning pots. We rent a U-Haul 16 footer to pick them up. We get our sugar directly from Cuba. It costs a little more, and the diplomatic procedures are horrendous, but Mary feels “it’s sweeter.” For the next 72 hours we peel, dice, and boil peaches, sterilize the jars, and add gallons of pectin which we bought from a wholesaler “at a bargain.” After all the jars are filled, we realize we forgot to buy the lids. We call all over, and find that there are none to be had. As the jam begins to spoil, I grow desperate. But not Mary. She feels it was all worth it. She says, “I like making jam.”

—Peter Payack, “The Jam”

Photography Credit Dan Credu

[asuddenline]

Peter Payack is an American poet from Massachusetts, and Cambridge, MA's first Poet Populist (from 2007-09). The role suited Payack well, who believes in de-mythologising poetry from dusty library shelves and bringing it back into the community. His poem 'No Free Will for Tomatoes', from the collection of the same name, has been sand-blasted into the floor of the Davis Square T station in Cambridge as part of the city's cultural revitalising projects. You can read more about the Poet Populist project here.

[peterpayackthepoet]

A Peter Payack musing, from an early 1978 notebook. Of course, handwritten as was the custom back then!

[peterpayackthepoet]

Happy New Year! An early collage from Peter Payack’s “Mr Infinity” series.

[peterpayackthepoet]

Science Fiction Poet Peter Payack’s poem “Assembly the Model” presented and analyzed in “Kowing & Writing, New Perspectives on Classical Questions” literary anthology (Harper Collins). Poem originally appeared in the “Cornell Review”

[peterpayackthepoet]

Poet Peter Payack, US Magazine, March 1980

[peterpayackthepoet]

Collage, science fiction poet Peter Payack, 1984

[peterpayackthepoet]

Cambridge Poet Populist Peter Payack read with Boston poet Laureate Sam Cornish in a reading sponsored by the New England Poetry Club

[peterpayackthepoet]

Science Fiction Poet Peter Payack won the 1980 Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem

[peterpayackthepoet]

Science Fiction Poet, Peter Payack, as a marathoner. Actually, now I’ve run 92,000 miles and 24 marathons, including 12 Boston’s!

[peterpayackthepoet]

The Stonehenge Watch, invented by science fiction poet Peter Payack, on the longest night of the year. On the Weeks Footbridge in Harvard Sq Cambridge

[peterpayackthepoet]

Phone-a-Poem creator Peter Payack in archival Christian Science Monitor article from 1977.

[peterpayackthepoet]

Peter Payack, science fiction poet, inventor of the Stonehenge Watch, and innovator of Phone-a-Poem in a 1988 interview at his book party at The Grolier Book Shop in Harvard Sq Cambridge