Poems performed by author Peter Money with original music by Mike Salvatoriello (guitar, background vocal, keyboards, and percussion) along with Brian Peck (bass), Ryan Abraham (electric guitar), Owen Grenich-Young (flute), Shane (drums), Alex Haynes-Buob (keyboards). “Post-Ginsberg acoustic-electronic intimate meditative riffs and companionable pared-down House pulses, … sunny grooves to drive through any patterned rain … illuminated, traveler’s spoken journal opera.”
Peter Money says:
Currently I operate Harbor Mountain Press and teach a class or two at the Center For Cartoon Studies and at an independent community college called Lebanon College.
Books to date: These Are My Shoes, Minor Roads, A Big Yellow, Instruments, Between Ourselves, Finding It: Selected Poems, To day—Minutes only, and the autoseriographic fiction Che.
But to go back: Born, November 6th 1963, Queen of the Valley hospital, Napa California. Third son of two teachers, a Vermonter and a Californian. Grew up in neighborhoods in Napa (until I was 5) and in Centerville, Massachusetts (through high school), and in Vermont (between 5 and 8, and holidays). Always thought I’d go into theater, from an early age (when I was 9, for two weeks I played Fantasy Island actor Ricardo Montalban’s son in the musical South Pacific). Heard about Oberlin College and went. I visited on a damp dark October day but the difference — a creative lasting pang and subterranean energy — was felt as I watched the students. Just the right place. My first night visiting Oberlin I saw King Crimson fill an old chapel with echo, reverb, and purple light. Later, I saw R.E.M. (1983 or ’84) and would see them soon in a small audience (in a big hall) in Dublin, Ireland. I could relate to Stipe’s vocals and many forms. Through Oberlin, spent a semester studying in Ireland in the fall of 1984 (then and there decided to become a poet). Felt a gun pointed in my direction at a checkpoint in Northern Ireland. We looked each other in the eye. I returned to start an alternative literary magazine with other students from that Dublin program. So, the story: While browsing poetry books at a bookstore senior year, determined to study with poet John Ashbery. At 21, his poems seemed to be my language. I traveled around the world (to New Zealand, Australia, India, Egypt, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, Spain, France, England, and a return to Ireland) after graduating from Oberlin (and after waiting on tables, busing, painting houses to finance that). Arrived at Brooklyn College to study with Ashbery but he’d received a MacArthur award and left the college. Beat legend Allen Ginsberg was left in his place (how fortunate!), as well as Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Joan Larkin, Lou Asekoff. Ginsberg took particular interest in me, introduced me to my first little magazine editors (David Cope and his Big Scream), gave me a blurb for my first book (These Are My Shoes, 1991), and gave me a place in one of his trademark snapshots (reproduced in the Stanley Kunitz issue of Provincetown Arts. While in New York, I worked in a midtown office (the new railroads!), first as a temp, and taught my first English Comp classes at Brooklyn College. Married Oberlin classmate Lucinda Walker (now a library director). In 1992 moved to San Francisco (Carl Rakosi, Jack Hirschman, Lawrence Fixel were at points pivots for me), then across the bay to Berkeley – where Robert Hass met with students 100 feet from my house. Taught poetry in the schools (WritersCorps); got a degree in Librarianship at San Jose State, since I’d been working in libraries anyway. Have been an at-home-dad (many a stroller in many a used book store) to my son and daughter. Magazines started: Writer’s Bloc (at Oberlin, 1985), Lame Duck(initially in Brooklyn 1989), and Across Borders (Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2003). In 2003 I appeared with a nod to poetry and a wink to comics in James Sturm’s Fantastic Four prequel for Marvel Comics, Unstable Molecules. In it, the poet Joey King spouts Kerouac and inspires the boy who would become the Human Torch (get it?).