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He Has A Way With Words

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KAREN HAYMON LONG

Published: October 12, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG - ST. PETERSBURG - ST. PETERSBURG - For years, Peter Meinke had been stopping in to shop at Haslam's Book Store. One day, a high-powered New York editor overheard the owners' son, who clerks at the store, say Peter Meinke was due in.

"Peter Meinke?" the editor asked.

"Yes," the young clerk replied. "He comes in all the time."

"He's a world-famous poet," the editor informed him excitedly.

"I was so surprised," the clerk says. "To me, he was just a good guy named Peter. I never knew he was a world-famous poet."

That perfectly describes Meinke: a good guy who's a world-famous poet. "The Contracted World," the most recent of his 15 poetry books, was published last year by University of Pittsburgh Press.

"Unheard Music," his second book of short stories, came out in September. His first, "The Piano Tuner," won the prestigious Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. In fact, some critics have likened his stories to O'Connor's, with similar humor and surprising twists.

One critic wrote: "Meinke dives into language like an otter and comes up with a harmonica in his teeth."

Meinke, 74, and his wife, painter Jeanne Clark, have lived in the same house in a heavily wooded neighborhood overlooking Tampa Bay for 40 years. They raised two sons and two daughters in the two-story frame house with a yard full of azaleas and an upstairs porch with a treehouse view.

It seems the perfect home for a writer, with thousands of books, an antique roll-top desk and his quiet upstairs corner office decorated with friends' artwork, books and a chalk board marked with the dates of his book signings.

Meinke came to St. Petersburg in 1966 to teach at Florida Presbyterian College before it became Eckerd College. He created, then directed its Writing Workshop for 27 years, retiring at 60 in 1993 to write, travel and take advantage of writers-in-residence programs.

Although he's been out of full-time teaching for 14 years, he often hears from former students and sometimes gives readings at the college.

A poet since childhood, he's still getting used to new technology, preferring to start a poem or short story in longhand and transferring it to his computer. And he always carries a small spiral notebook in his pocket to record snatches of conversations, observations and thoughts he hopes to weave into a story or poem.

After hearing about a man who said he wanted to shoot a horse, he wrote a fictionalized story about such a man and included it in "Unheard Music."

Sometimes a little of himself shows up in his poetry and stories. For instance, he says he's a bad sleeper. One of the 18 stories in "Unheard Music," is about an insomniac with vivid dreams.

He and his wife play tennis. His story called "Doubles" is about two tennis-playing couples. A third is a murder mystery set in Poland, where the Meinkes once lived.

"Sometimes, I use these things that happen. Then I fictionalize them," he says.

His favorite poets are John Donne and Howard Nemerov because, he says, their poems seem simple and easy to read, but often have layers of meanings.

Author Sterling Watson, who replaced Meinke as director of Eckerd College's Writing Workshop, says Meinke's poetry is like that, too.

"The quality of Peter's poetry that is so remarkable is that it is the kind of poetry that can be read by the ordinary reader. The surfaces are deceptively simple, but as you go into the depths you find more ambiguity and more depth of meaning," Watson says.

Watson, author of "Sweet Dream Baby" and other novels, admires the way Meinke writes about Florida.

"He understands the place and the spirit of Florida in a way that few writers do," he says. "One of his poems equates the process of epiphany with the look of a palm tree — how you go up the long stem to the sudden poof of green at the top."

Meinke has epiphanies of his own when he's writing. Sometimes, he says, he surprises himself.

But then, he says, he likes "the idea of being surprised when I'm in the midst of writing and learn something about myself."

Reporter Karen Haymon Long can be reached at (813) 259-7618 or klong@tampatrib.com.

HIS WORDS, HIS VOICE

WHAT: Poet Peter Meinke will read from his new book of short stories, "Unheard Music."

WHEN & WHERE: 7-9 p.m. Thursday at Barnes & Noble Bookstore on the ground floor of Coquina Hall on the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus; 7 p.m. Oct. 25 at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia Ave., Tampa; Oct. 27 (no time set) at the St. Petersburg Literary Festival at USF's St. Petersburg campus; 2:30 p.m. Nov. 8 at Lewis House at Eckerd College.

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