Black Serial Poetics: An Introduction to Ed Roberson

This special section is the first collection of criticism devoted to the work of Ed Roberson, one of the most quietly dazzling poets writing in English today. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Roberson's first book, When Thy King Is a Boy, as well as the upcoming appearance of his latest (ninth) volume, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, and given the extraordinary layers and depths of this body of work, its incisive attention to the complexities of black life in the United States, and its singular formal complexity—in overlapping syntax and unsettling enjambment designed to suggest multivalence and multivocality—it would be an understatement to say that this initial scholarly attention is long overdue. The essays and interviews assembled here are intended both as a first foray and as an attempt to provide source materials, conceptual framing, and methodological approaches that will inspire further consideration of Roberson's unique oeuvre.¹

While critical interpretation has been slow to come to terms with Roberson's accomplishment, it is not that he has been overlooked. He won the Grand Prize in the Atlantic Monthly poetry contest as a college student in 1962, and has been recognized with numerous honors and awards over the years, especially in the last decade and a half. When Thy King Is a Boy was one of the selections for the Pitt Poetry Series in 1970 (along with Michael S. Harper's first book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane), and Roberson's collection Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize in 1995. He received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers Award in 1998, and his book Atmosphere Conditions was selected for the National Poetry Series the same year and then nominated for the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Award in 2000.² In 2008, Roberson was awarded the prestigious Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (presented to a living American poet "selected with reference to genius and need"), and the citation praised the "meticulous design and lasting emotional significance" of his writing (Wright and Hejinian).

The reviews of When Thy King Is a Boy were emphatic in suggesting that the book marked the emergence of a major talent. In the Saturday Review, for example, Robert Spector discusses Roberson's volume with works by Daniel Berrigan and Denise Levertov as examples of innovation in recent poetry. "The quiet fierceness of Ed Roberson's poetry terrifies," Spector writes, "as it comes out from a controlled if unconventional verse form that seems an amalgam of Charles Olson and E. E. Cummings." For Spector, Roberson's poems were "like ominous icebergs, seven-eighths invisible and threatening beyond their placid surface appearance" (51). A few months later in Prairie Schooner, Charles Peek reviewed Roberson's book alongside Michael S. Harper's debut and Edward Kamau Brathwaite's Islands, the final volume in his magisterial "Arrivants Trilogy," and concluded that

where Harper startles with his vigor and his ability to contain that vigor in his poetry and Brathwaite's ability to mellow his passion in poetry calls for respect, Ed Roberson overwhelms one with genius. One might return to any of these books a second time, but he would return to When Thy King Is a Boy first. …

Anyone interested in black poetry, in modern poetry, in literature with life, should read these books. The first two will be memorable books; the last, an unforgettable one.

(84, 85)

These kind of notices make it all the more puzzling that Roberson's second book, Etai-Eken, hardly made a ripple when it was published in 1975. It would be nearly another decade before friends of Roberson in Pittsburgh raised funds to publish a limited edition of the remarkable Lucid Interval as Integral Music (1984), and another decade after that until Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In (1995), the larger volume of which Lucid Interval comprises the first half, was chosen for the Iowa Poetry Prize.

The critical establishment, especially in the world of African American poetry...