Peter Vertacnik was born in Saginaw, Michigan. He holds degrees in creative writing and English from The University of Florida, Texas Tech University and Penn State University. His poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in 32 Poems, Bad Lilies, The Cortland Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, The New Criterion, Phoebe, Plume, The Spectator (World), THINK, and Water~Stone Review. He was a finalist for the Donald Justice Poetry Prize in 2021.
His debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, (Criterion Books, 2024) was the winner of the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize, judged by George Bradley, Roger Kimball and Adam Kirsch. Established in 2000, the New Criterion Poetry Prize is awarded each year to a book-length manuscript of poems that pay close attention to form. The poems in this collection depict a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of traditional and inventive poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, the memories of old houses and towns left behind, and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous household items. It is a book of elegies, but also one of celebration.
He now lives in Jacksonville, Florida, where he works as an English instructor at the local Episcopal School, a co-educational college-preparatory school.
FORGOTTEN GOOD POEMS
Peter Vertacnik has curated Forgotten Good Poems on the Twitter (X) platform for many years. Calling it Just good poems the world seems to have forgotten (and should read) he has managed to introduce followers of the site to a very wide variety of poems that have, through time, slipped under the radar of many poetry readers. It has been a cosmopolitan selection, accompanied by clear images of individual poems by writers from a variety of backgrounds. He has done much to reignite an interest in poets who he feels, and I mostly agree with him, deserve a wider audience.
These poets come from a variety of backgrounds. There are American poets whose audience deserves to be wider, such as Fred Chappell, N. Scott Momaday and William H. Dickey. Canadian poets featured include Steven Heighton, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Charles Bruce. Irish poets Tom Duddy, John Hewitt and Gerard Fanning share a space with English poets Vernon Scannell, E. J. Scovell and Lawrence Sail. There are poets from Scotland (Maurice Lindsay) and Wales (Paul Henry and R. S. Thomas) as well as Australian poets (David Malouf and James McAuley) and the Jamaican poet Anthony McNeill.
An anthology winnowed from these selections would make an enticing collection.
ASSES OF PARNASSUS
All of the poems below first appeared in the Asses of Parnassus, a Tumblr-based blog devoted to short poems and edited by Canadian poet, Brooke Clark whose own collection of poems Ubanities (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2020) also contains many brief poems. These are poems, as Reader’s Guide below puts it, in the tradition of Martial, Herrick, Nims, Cope, Cunningham, a tradition that merges formal exactitude with concision and wit. The work of Martial, Herrick and Cunningham is featured in distinct posts on this site. The humorous and irreverent approach of the Asses of Parnassus site is illustrated with the Tumblr avatar (see image right), a detail of an etching – originally entitled Hasta su abuelo (And so was his grandfather) – from Los caprichos (The Caprices), a set of prints created by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya in 1797–1798. The poems chosen reflect, in a contemporary manner, Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foibles of the Spanish society in which he lived.
The Asses of Parnassus not only features a multitude of translations (in rhyme) from Greek and Latin authors, in particular plenty of rude, witty and scurrilous barbs from Martial and Catullus, but also promotes the work of many of the finest practitioners of the art of the epigram today, writers as diverse as Jerome Betts, Robin Helweg-Larsen, Bruce Bennett, David and Daniel Galef, Damian Balassone, Susan McLean, Alexandra Oliver and, of course, Peter Vertacnik.
Brief Poems by Peter Vertacnik
Conscience
Though you don’t hear me with your ears,
I speak as lucidly as mirrors.
My voice maintains a constant call,
Which most obey, but never all.
***
Concerning Pedestals
Our would-be leaders shift and whisper, nervous,
As their dead forebears topple in the street:
“Surely we’ve done nothing to deserve this.
Everyone’s free to grovel at our feet.”
***
Reader’s Guide
Some lines illuminate, dissect, or slam
(See Martial, Herrick, Nims, Cope, Cunningham).
Each forged for you—old, middle-aged, and younger—
In sharp, recurrent verse. Like pangs of hunger.
***
Standardized
Numb hours of teaching to the test,
And hours more of silent filling,
Filling of bubbles. A bored unrest
Of minds, compliant though not willing.
Seasonal Change
Each autumn now feels warmer,
And our maple’s leaves less bright
On the branch that scrapes the dormer,
Keeping me up at night.
***
Hyperopia
Youth’s hard to see, until we’ve seen it through.
Only old eyes can recognize what’s new.
***
“Why Are We Doing This?”
for my students
Each day you’ll grasp a little more,
Something you haven’t seen before.
And as new skills and knowledge link,
You’ll learn not what but how to think.
***
Accolade
What is the most sought poet’s prize?
That what you scan now with your eyes
Tomorrow you may memorize.
***
Dial Tone
Seems strange to miss this barren baritone
Once known to all, and by all overthrown;
To miss, whenever I pick up my phone
And make a call, the barely noticed drone
That spoke of reaching out, of being alone.
Final Illness
The medicines have ceased to make him stronger;
He takes them to stay weak a little longer.
***
Malpractice
“Of course one must be cleansed of mortal sin
In order to receive the Eucharist.”
Yet what humane physician would insist
Only the healed ingest his medicine?
***
Nomenclature
Though names may alter—graveyards, cemeteries,
Memorial parks—the function never varies.
***
Patient
He wasn’t dead; nor was he tougher.
What hadn’t killed him made him suffer.
***
American Medicine
Another pill: devised to heal,
Or coddle those afraid to feel?
***
All poems © Peter Vertacnik. Reprinted by permission of the author.
All poems first published on the Asses of Parnassus blog.
LINKS
The Twitter (X) account of Peter Vertacnik.
Peter Vertacnik wins the twenty-third New Criterion Poetry Prize.
The Amazon page for The Nature of Things Fragile.
The Encounter Books page for The Nature of Things Fragile.
All poems © Peter Vertacnik. Reprinted by permission of the author.
All poems first published on the Asses of Parnassus blog.
Brief Poems 