ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com
Poetic Profile
Ed Roberson
1) Where were you born and what was your formation?
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Grew up in the Homewood and Hill District sections of town.
From 4th through 8th grade I spent Saturday mornings in art classes at Carnegie Institute, a natural history museum, art museum, central library and concert hall complex. I wanted to be a painter. After classes, we lived in the museums and library the rest of the day. Pittsburgh had a very positive and talented black community in those days. You couldn’t avoid its influence. Then, I started traveling and working odd places and jobs. Alaska, Bermuda, Peru, Ecuador, Mexico, Jamaica, Nigeria; back and forth across the States. The travel was probably one of the most formative elements of my history.
2) What are your poetic influences?
Non-literary influences would be the spirituals, the slave songs, not the Fisk Jubilee style compositions. You never hear the spirituals in the old congregational, open, moanin’ voice anymore. The blues. What my dad called cryin’, shootin’ blues. Too deep to dance to, you just hang on and rock side to side, well, maybe not side to side. More in and out.
And painting: there is Bearden, who I can almost hear; Magritte, de Chirico, Hopper for the disorientations of loneliness; Kandinsky and any Bauhaus geometrical take to things that spirits composition off the scale. And discovering anthropology /ethnography books, the non-western world’s mythologies; and the traveling which allowed me to see these in the flesh.
3) When did you realize you were a poet?
The people I talked to about poetry were friends from college who were mostly from 500 miles to a whole continent away from New Jersey. After college, I was never a real part of any community of poets. I’d go to New York for workshops or readings at The Poetry Project, Poet’s House, The Frederick Douglass Center, but I always had to be back at work in New Jersey the next morning. I learned who people were and had a sense of what they were doing, but I was never a real part of it.
At the university I was an administrator mostly. What I did when I left my office was considered my business. I felt pretty much the same way even as a faculty member. I was never part of a community that had any use for me being a poet, so I was never a poet. What I did at home I accepted as simply my business for thirty years until I retired. That said, “When did I realize I was a poet?” The answer to the question is: “Tomorrow, when I start my next poem, I’ll realize it then; but it doesn’t last.”
I have a feeling that you can never realize the poet you want to be. If you’re really serious, you’re always a few steps behind what you want. You follow, taking note as deeply as you can. Rarely, but every now and then, he’ll turn around and say something you recognize as your own to you; or you may just bump into each other and, as if in a mix up, exchange souls. Then, you know he still thinks you have it in you -- for him to speak through, to. He’s your own soul in that brief moment. You know then, from outside, from the language, that you are still permitted to see into its voice. This may have happened only once before, but that time no longer counts when it re-turns to look at you. It has something to do with the power of coming back to come back.
4) Usually a room full of experimental poets is painfully white-how does being an African American and a person a little older color what you do poetically?
This question is answered over and over again, and it has yet to be understood and clearly perceived as the work itself. “The work itself,” as an answer, should feel expansive rather than reductive or evasive, as it does in our current language.
When we read, we make sense, make meaning from the connections and associations living has opened to possibility in us. To read with any depth, we need open as many connections as we can hold open at one time and need to be also open in our decisions as to which combinations mean. The more possibilities and connections we judge as apt, the more complex and encompassing the work.
We know this and train ourselves to the depths of these connections and associations. But few are aware of the extent to which they refuse connection and deny association. None think of themselves as experienced or even trained to systematically devalue words. Yet a long sad history of our society has demanded (legislated) that associations of devaluation be made or at least stay open when experiencing all things African.
You know how an association in a Donne poem opens world upon world of the same poem. I do that in my work with the worlds (black, white, male, educated, middle class, reclusive – yet all of them black) in which I live. Not with Donne’s specific metaphysical formality; but there is an exacting formality of my own in what I do. Yet I have little reason to expect that readers get more than one world of connections when they experience my work in today’s language.
I can justifiably assume that my work is not given access to or presumed to carry certain of the multiple associations to be got from a reading of a mainstream work. I can also reasonably assume that many readers think a black writer writes only from that black perspective which has nothing in it for them/ nothing of them in it beyond just the intellectual value of a “perspective”…without ever guessing that I might occasionally have no choice but to write from their own white “black perspective” at the same time; how could they see this, peeping through closed eyes?.. You miss some lines. I knew this soon after I began writing, it has only become that much clearer.
I knew I had to write in such a way that readers knew the poem carried its own definitions within it, its own grammar, its own dictionary since the white dictionary has blacked out certain levels of words. Trying to speak fully, clearly is what gets me labeled experimental. I’m trying to get a fully honest and open emotional and psychological reading of the language that’s already here, but dishonestly read; unlike a lot of folks in the room, I’m not creating a new language. I’m just trying to un-White-Out the one we’ve got. No sleeping through the words to put the White-Out back in.
When people will allow themselves to see and feel something of themselves not devalued in what a black man says he thinks, sees and feels – other than what people want or think they know – when that happens, this question will disappear into a real reading of my work fully experienced through a common language…not as an experiment.
5) Favorite team or sport?
Basketball. At least until I sat there and watched Julius Erving retire. There was a matter of the grace of it to me. I followed it less and less after that until I never watch anymore.
Not long ago, I began really wanting to experience the mountain climbing of my younger years again, but I can barely keep my balance now on level ground some days. Remembering climbing is the one thing that makes me feel really old. I hate it, hate to think about it..I took things so lightly, as if I could always come back to them. You can’t.
6) Food?
Having eaten grub larvae, snakes and rats to survive in the Amazon, anything that doesn’t bite back or move on the plate I’ll try. I’m just glad not to be hungry. But I have re-discovered my love for ceviche in Chicago. I ate one here for the first time since South Amer.; and Danny Suarez’s sister cross town makes an outstanding flan, far better than I remember from Ecuador. I like coconut milk and ginger based soups, or peanut soup with ginger. Chicago pizza, any dish, crust and anything on it.
7) Vacation Spot?
Most of the places I’d wanted to be by now are all being bombed or in flames.
8) Swear word?
I have always loved swearing. The sudden possession that overtakes the person swearing is like speaking in tongue. The intense musicality of it. I’m known for my “shit!” I especially like “o-oh shit” the way it’s said when you realize what’s ahead isn’t what you expected. “What the fuck!” has that compellingly rhythmic rhyme, also. I sing that a lot.
9) Are you working on a book?
I like to work in several piles which always comes down to working on a couple books at a time. Maybe two right now.
10) Is there a poem or poet who continues to move you artistically?
A lot of them. Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”; Spicer’s “Heads of the Town Up To the Aether” and “Language”; Jay Wright’s “An Invitation to Madison County”; Nate Mackey’s “Song of the Andoumboulou”; Joe Donahue’s “Terra Lucida” all move me deeply in different ways. There are more.
11) Why did you choose to move to Chicago? Do we get to keep you here?
After my recovery, I wanted to do things all over again, only better this time around.
The high adventure of mountains and motorcycles was out of the question, so I thought of maybe living in a foreign country. A few weeks later, I got a call from Columbia College Chicago asking if I were interested in applying for a Visiting Artist term. I could have been on his doorstep before he hung up, but there were procedures.
On the way to Chicago some guy I’d never seen in my life was helping load my car, he stopped and looked at me funny and started to laugh. He said, “You want to do it all again, you’re going to give it one last run.” He explained that sometimes he knows things, he didn’t know how he did, and sometimes it scares him, and it’s even scarier that he might be psychic. He said he just knew that about me.
I recognize Tennyson’s “Ulysses” in myself at this point in my life. I’m afraid to go home for fear that what I have here is not transferable. I would probably be dead without whatever this is. I’m not joking.
Craft Questions
1) How do you write a poem?
I enjoy the fact that I don’t have a way to write a poem. Some come whole in a single sitting, some sit around for 15 years or more, added to word by word. If it comes as an idea, it’s usually an image of some spacial-structural pattern or design, almost architectural. Sometimes it’s only an image, in which case it’s usually already a key phrase. Other times it comes in words that are more music than sense. There are even times when I’ll pick up on a note I’ve taken simply because I feel something should or is about to come through. I like best the ones that suddenly have you say “OOOh shit!” about a fourth of the way into the writing.
2) Is poetry a synthetic or organic process for you?
The pieces are organic, but when the pieces begin to refer or talk back to each other, then it’s hard to tell what is still organic and what is synthetic or procedural.
3) Where do you write? Is ambience important for you?
On anything, bills, newspapers, pay stubs. That note then gets re-written on clearer, more appropriate paper, several more times with more notes and possible revisions, and then I input it into the computer. After about a ream of paper’s worth of revisions, I start thinking of its final shape/ form. When I give it up for publication is when it actually gets to feeling finished, but I have revised work after publication. That seems like a straighter answer to the first question, “”How do you write a poem?” except that this is actually an ambience more than a procedure. All of these pieces flying around take on different ways of saying what they are and what they want to say. Everything finally collects in one or two rooms of months–deep stacks of papers, no matter where it is originally written. Maybe even more than ambiance, it’s the working model of the chaos in my head.
4) Do you use sources?
Rarely. The poems are mostly my response to those sources. I did translate one of the Ghost Dance songs of the Plains Indians into a black language experience in Etai-Eken. I’ve always felt that was one of those poems which are given to you, you don’t write them. The word is recorded by James Mooney: A-nea’thibiwa’hana. Mooney explained the context and the use of the word, and I recognized it from there.
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/roberson/
http://www.uiowa.edu/uiowapress/robvoicas.htm
http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/180,roberson,47770,21.html
http://galatearesurrection2.blogspot.com/2006/05/city-eclogue-by-ed-roberson.html