The World of Ed Roberson

Ed Roberson is a master poet. Let’s get that out of the way up front. In his early 80s, he’s 13 books in, and he continues to go strong; if he writes another 13 books, I won’t be surprised. Some of his most recent collections are asked what has changed (Wesleyan University Press, 2022); Aquarium Works (Nion Editions, 2022); and MPH and Other Road Poems (Verge Books, 2021). I’m in my late 50s, and Ed looks like he’s maybe 10 years older than me. There’s an active body and an active mind at play. And, despite the number of books he’s published, he never seems to repeat himself. The work pulses forward and stays as nimble and timeless as his spirit.

We talked for two hours on Zoom, and he answered some questions via email beforehand. This is a blog post, which, as a form, must be kept short, but I will offer some of the highlights here. We’ll have to unfurl the rest of this scroll at another time.

When Roberson first responded to my questions via email, his answers came back in a form that reminded me of his poems. My questions are of little importance here; I’ll let his voice speak for itself:

I’ve lived in Chicago twenty years,

but before that, I lived in New Jersey twenty-eight

years —            I was born, raised, educated

in Pittsburgh     I left after thirty-three years.

I am 83.            Then, I was 33.

 

The most influential place I’ve lived

is on the road —       not as in going

anywhere particular  famous or important

site to see    yes   I lucked up on some

                    truly marvelous

 

but that wasn’t any stated destination —

just moving      just being on the move

and all of what that comes across,

that has been my greatest deepest influence writing.

 

“What’s dis over here, what dat over dere?

   Can I have that great big elephant over there?”

                     That’s me. 

                     That’s where

                                 I am [...]

 

I got my feet on the ground in New Jersey, sure,

but the best thing about New Jersey was the Turnpike

out.       My New Jersey intellectual life

was the Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Poetry Project

at St. Mark’s in the Bowery, The Frederick Douglass

Center and The Studio Center in Harlem     that’s where

my New Jersey was —                                 in the suburbs

 

                                  — As for Chicago,

this has been a second life, a rebirth, a new start.

I came here after a major crisis of cancer.

I’ve had two other serious health crises since I’ve been here,

but Chicago really has got me steppin’

and I’ve come right through these,     steppin’

Chicago’s good for me like that          that way.

 

That said, however,

I am grateful, thankful for my basis in Pittsburgh,

there is no place like it as good a hill to come off.

Pittsburgh is where the strength of my compass comes from,

but the road gave all of that   its life, its art.

 

Alaska, Peru, Ecuador, and the Amazon,

Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, the Alcan Highway,

The Pan American, Routes 40 and 66, Route 6

so many summers up to the Cape, twelve

miles off the coral reefs in the Bermuda sea —

my head has never come away from these

spaces I think they are what I carry as influence, mainly.

Literature turned upside down once I faced the cultural,

the world source of it, all   these different folks on the road.

Now, I go at it, literature   writing like field work,

not like Shakespeare, or Stevens, or Morrison,

or Hurston, even   Thelonius —    just good notes.

Take good notes.

***

Here are a few more exchanges:

I want mostly to have a better sense of your method of composition. One of the first things I have students do before we read a poem is to look at it, to notice the architecture of the poem before they read the words, just looking down at it from an aerial view. Your poems take shape on the page and utilize white space in a manner that shows purpose. Can you speak to your strategy around this?

There are two ways to go about that, one of them is the transcribing of sound in a poem. Whether you’re counting syllables or relying on a traditional format. But the way to make the poem sound and the way to make the voice sing, I kind of got creative with that real early on, you know. I talked about this long ago, where I noticed how when you’re reading a sentence it will complete itself before it completes itself. And the leftover part of the sentence seems like another sentence, but it’s really the same sentence taken to a new position; the syntax allows you to see, Oh, this is the sentence we’re working with, and then that second sentence says, But this is where you’re taking it. 

People just read the syntax without thinking Oh, he said this and now he’s saying this! So what I was doing was doing that thing that kids do. Just breaking the sentence up, so that it’s like two sentences.

And I began, in my first book, you see I began putting periods in the middle of sentences. And I worked with that for a while […]. And I noticed that that not only created the voice, you have the voice that makes a statement, and [you have] that same voice coming in as though it’s a second voice; you almost get this polyphony. Early on in the poem, I was always talking about the polyphony of the voices in a line. And that’s how I played with it, with these periods.

Look at Page 5 in Etai-Eken “Found: Under the Mountain Wall”:

The ferns like the
mist hung on the cliffs
the squall of parrots echoing on
the walls
the sun
the distant river
were part of him   as he
was part of them   they were
                             inside him
behind                  the shadow of
his brown eyes      and not
before him            before him

There are actually three poems there that are all layered on top of each other.  See like: “as he / [like] they / were inside him the shadow of / and not before him,” that's one poem. 

Oh, I see. This is the thing that I was saying before, about when you look at the poem just from an aerial view, you can see it. You know, like I'm looking at it now, and if I look at the way that this space is used, I can see “behind / his brown eyes / before him.”

Yeah! That's the next poem and there are two more. They end up in these little fields overlapping each other, or you can actually read them as a line we're going to actually stop at, that space, thinking of that as the limit of the page for the other poems, so the poems pattern like that.

When you’re in that awkward period of learning it and then later when things lose their luster over time. Can you talk a bit about what happens when you start taking in the environment, and it’s ready to come out on the page. On page 43, still in Etai-Eken, you write the following lines: 

green is greener in the heated air
when the air is cooled the color too
frosts like the surface of a pitcher.
the wind and moving have shades
if not exact color.
the meadows on the mountain are always flying

What do you hold in mind as you move from one image to the next one?

One continuous argument, one poem. I know what you’re asking, but I don’t think I have a rule for it. I just let the images argue one to another. The optical people tell you the atmosphere changes the color of green. So, you’re picking up on cloudy or cold, and the wind moving on a landscape changes the color of it, the glaucous white or blind […]. It’s the silver side of a green leaf, the fuzzy underside of a leaf, an olive leaf, the fuzzy underside of it, but when a tree blows, wind blows, some people call it a shimmer. But there’s a moment when that tree turns silver on you. You see, so, that’s what glaucous means. But you read it as an adjective, yeah yeah, but for a moment it’s blinded by the underside of the leaf. So that line there—“the meadows are always flying”—wind and movement have shades, if not exact color, and you have the shift from green to the glaucous side of the leaf. But you also have, if you have distance,  you’re looking at a meadow, but what you see is not the individual blades but what you see is the whole meadow going like this [he makes a wave motion with his hand]. So that thing there, “the meadows on the mountain are always flying,” you’re looking up there hoping to see a green meadow and all that peacefulness, but what you really see are these waves, like hair, and the waves moving. So, I’m trying to write all that down rather than just describing the wind in a meadow.

Any thoughts on where poetry is right now? I come across stuff [poetry] all the time that I find exciting, and I think there’s more great work in poetry than any of the other writing arts right now, probably because there’s not much commerce in poetry, so we have a lot of freedom. But my students are more tuned in to what’s happening in the poetry world than I am; I don’t think in trends; I respond to conversations that the work is having with a world that may or may not be listening. I try to get my students to take some time after graduating or coming out of a workshop, like the Stegner workshop, to let their work sit for a while, for them to think about what they want to say to the world through this work they’re making. I think poets who take the MFA route need space between their programs and the page. Do you have anything to offer on that idea? I’m not even sure how to make this into a question.

You know, I just started writing art reviews and stuff. I’m really beginning to get a handle on a term I’ve come across called “market-driven art.” And how the taste for certain things actually creates color and rhythm and all that stuff that we thought was created by the muses and all; that stuff is actually created on the spot. And the market, money, can actually make the size of the painting. You can’t buy shit that hangs on the wall anymore. You gotta buy shit that you put in a vault. And the determination of what moves you and the determination of what the perspective is, all of that is in that […] a whole different appreciation of what the angles are and what the shapes are. So, the canon is bullshit. The canon is just the authentication of what’s making the money at the time, or what’s supporting the power at the time—who’s seeing and who’s just waiting to get sold? 

We used to hear people saying, I had to unlearn everything I learned in [my MFA program]. I ran across a couple people who said that. It took me two years to unlearn everything I learned at the [their workshop in grad school]. And I think, What the hell are you talking about? They’re wanting to hook up with what’s now, but they don’t see if they’re in that now or where that comes from. Like when you say when you finished your MFA, the way you said that,what came to my mind was that you were writing for the MFA, rather than writing from what you had actually learned. So, if you can forget what you learned, what you were taught, and write from what your experienced learned for you […]. And what aligned with your experience as learning, write from that; forget what they taught you, you know. And that’s hard for someone to […] you know, you win a prize for a book and they want a second book. Do you have to write the next book or do you write some new shit altogether? So, I guess I was lucky because I was doing such weird shit that I said I better get this together, and so it just led me to writing for what was happening.

Well, we’re grateful for it.