Over the past ten years, Peter guided and supported me through two Master’s degrees at UIC and a number post-graduate art & life bumps.
In this time I had the pleasure of learning from a teacher who had a remarkable sense of wonder—one who could accurately be called “wonderful.”
I recently re-read a quote from his Facebook page where he called me “an eternal chrysalis” and couldn’t help but respond with scrunched up eyebrows and a smile because the statement was paradoxical, like a hidden message inside of a complement. It felt like a critical complement—both puzzle and poem to be “eternally in chrysalis"
It is an unusual mentor who communicates in poems.
When I learned of Peter’s death, I hunted down one of the most memorable messages Peter sent to me, in much needed sympathy to some wild superstitions I was expressing about a hawk:
He said, “There is nothing to living beyond the dead. There is just what that is, with all its cruel banal sublimity: we are…”
Peter, your courageous thinking is still in motion in me. At a loss for poetry, I return, word for word, what you wrote me when I needed it, “you are good and I miss you.”
Rebecca Beachy