Advice to My Son

Profoundly influenced by 17th-century English poetry and the work of John Donne in particular, Peter Meinke often uses literary devices like juxtaposition and irony to capture the contradictions of human experience. Just like Donne used unusual conceits and humor to navigate difficult questions of time and mortality, Meinke too uses wit to explore dark themes.

One way Donne tackled the idea of fully living within the ambit of mortality was through bringing the unlikely theme of death into his love poems. For instance, in “The Canonization” (1633), one his most famous love lyrics, Donne defends the primacy of love above all worldly matters. Yet he also acknowledges that he and his beloved are “tapers” or candles, who “at our own cost die.” Though the lover and his beloved are forever united in immortal spirit and in poetry, their mortal existence is time-bound.

In “Advice to my Son,” Meinke too offers contradictory suggestions to his son because the central question of life is unanswerable. The truth is one must live life to the fullest, while being aware that catastrophe can strike at any time. There is no evading this contradiction. While Donne reconciles the contradiction through religion—the lovers in “The Canonization” rise in their death like phoenixes—as a contemporary poet, Meinke does not have an equally definitive answer.

Though like Donne, Meinke often combines religious themes with secular imagery and vice versa (the biblical images of bread and wine, and the desert and nectar or manna in “Advice to my Son”) unlike Donne, Meinke interprets the questions in more contemporary and secular fashion than Donne. In “Advice to my Son,” beauty or art—rather than religion—is the nectar nourishing the soul. For Donne, writing in the 17th century, art, everyday life, and spiritual ecstasy coalesced into a whole.

Meinke believes poetry has a place in everyday living, and disdains overtly literary language and references. This is reflected in the use of aphorisms and colloquial language in “Advice to my Son,” as well as its concrete imagery of roses, bullets, gardens, and bread. Like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, Meinke uses easy language to illuminate complex, philosophical ideas. However, though Meinke’s language is straightforward, it is packed with metaphors, as if to underscore the point that everyday objects can also be imbued with great symbolic value.

As seen in “Advice to my Son,” Meinke is unafraid of using rhyme and traditional forms, unlike the poets of the 20th century who shunned traditional forms as too restrictive and old-fashioned. American poetry of the 1960s and 1970s saw a trend to reject form, since it was seen as antithetical to expressing organic truth. However, Meinke does not believe in the dogma. Not only is “Advice to my Son” packed with half-rhymes and end rhymes, its overall structure is a riff on the sonnet with the last couplet serving as twist to the preceding stanzas. In this Meinke can be deemed a precursor of the school of new formalism, popularized in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Protesting the debasement of the lyric, new or neo formalism promotes the celebration of meter and verse. In “Atomic Pantoum” (1983), Meinke uses the traditional French pantoum form, in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain (or four-line stanza) become the first and third lines of the next stanza. The freshness of Meinke’s approach is that he uses this traditional form to register horror at nuclear warfare—a wholly contemporary predicament.