An Interview with Ed Roberson

The opening stanzas of Ed Roberson's "Sit In What City We're In," from his 2006 volume City Eclogue (Atelos), illuminate his sense of his poetry's responsibilities. The first stanza positions the poet as anticipating a future generation's need to understand how people during Roberson's lifetime navigated the urban geography of their built environment:

Someone may wantto know one day how many steps we took            to cross one of our streets,to know there were hundredsin one city    streets in one directionand as manyas could fit between the land's contourscrossing those,            our hive grid as plumbas circles flanked into the insecthexagonals,            our stone our steel.

(26)

Mention of the "hive grid" links human building to the "insect / hexagonals" constructed by a nonhuman species (bees) as Roberson ties urban nature to what environmental critics call "first nature." In the next stanza, the poem's terrain narrows to a specific, racialized geography and the relational dynamics of the marches and lunch counter sit-ins of the early civil rights era:

Others may want moreto know what steps aside the southern streets required            to flow at last free to clear,to know how those kept outset foot inside, sat down, and how            the mirrors around the lunch counterreflected the faceto face —the cross-mirrored depth reached            infinitely back into either—the one pouring the bowl over the head ofthe one sitting in            at that counter

(26-27)

Throughout Roberson's work, one finds a similar seriousness of purpose, an interest in recording the environments of human lives in terms that reflect a keen sense of social and environmental (in)justice along with a commitment to recognizing what he refers to later in the poem as our "shared / being in common in each other," even in contexts of profound historical division (31). In "Sit In What City We're In," a series of mirrored reflections yields a vision "of the once felt sovereign / self . . . march[ing] back / into the necessary together / living" (27). While an insistence on the "necessary together / living" has been present in his work since the publication of his first book, When Thy King Is a Boy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970), the social, ethical, and environmental implications of that communitarian and ecological imperative are most fully realized in Roberson's most recent volume, To See the Earth Before the End of the World (Wesleyan, 2010). More than he has before, Roberson incorporates dramatically shifting scales of space and time in this latest collection, moving deftly between the micro- and macrocosmic while voicing a broad range of feelings (depression, anger, bemusement, wonder, grief, awe, and even love) in response to what he describes in "Topoi" as the many "shit outcome[s] stepped in . . . from which there is no step out of" (12). Possible "shit outcomes" contemplated here include global environmental catastrophes such as "this dragon's breath / freshener of nuclear fire" (19); while fear of such disasters acts as "almost a silent / language among us" binding all of living humanity (19), Roberson observes that "All connection to us is made surface / to surface" (20) when considered from another scalar perspective: "The oceans of the time men don't exist / include only a drop that we do" (21). Unlike much writing about environmental apocalypse (one meaning of the "end of the world" in the book's title), Roberson's coolly avoids either being mired in despair or insisting upon programmatic solutions to our intertwined social and environmental problems. Instead, he proposes a more concerted effort of attention in the hope, as he writes in "Lunar Eclipse," that we may "see bodily / in raised detail / a measure deepen into our world / in each other," and from there "see / ourselves whole, see in whole perspective" (10). For Roberson, neither clear sight nor a deepened sense of mutual enmeshment with the world is easily obtained, but each is possible, and his poetry seeks to enable and activate both.

Key to the multifaceted seeing enacted in Roberson's poetry is the...