"Down Break Drum": An Interview with Ed Roberson (Part 1)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- "Down Break Drum"An Interview with Ed Roberson (Part 1)*
Could you begin by talking about the title of Atmosphere Conditions, which won the National Poetry Series award and was published recently by Sun & Moon Press?
The book is a discussion on things that you see in the air, and of perception as "thin air." I was always fascinated by the idea of wandering stars, as meteors are sometimes called. "Meteor" means "things in the air," and the old Greek set-up was that anything that occurred in the air was a meteor. There were hot meteors, cold meteors. A rainbow is a meteor—I think it's a fire meteor. Lightning's a fire meteor. I've always liked to look at those things that you see in the sky, the sun pillars, sun dogs. I let images return, they deepen.
I began to write a couple of poems about what you see, and how you see, and what it is that you actually see. So the poems took off from that: the way, in certain kinds of weather around here in New Jersey, the sky will really lower; it just doesn't do that in the valleys back home, and the planes have to come in under that, breaking a pattern of altitude you've become used to. Those things used to be taken as auguries. Now we look up, and those things are still there: but you look at them and see them only as pretty, or you just don't see them at all.
In the title poem, you say that the "great prophesies" are "graffiti."
We used to see the world as messages—we used to be in communication with stuff that's written in the sky, written in the air. Graffiti are messages. I think it was Kamau Brathwaite who remarked to me that graffiti shows up on things that are dying, in cities that are collapsing or cultures that are coming apart. I picked up that image of what is disappearing and always held it in my head. And then all of sudden I began to think about what is disappearing and what is written on those disappearances.
You've used the phrase "visual possession" to describe your work. Is there a sense in which these writings "possess" the one who sees them? [End Page 651]
Yes, it is possible to see something that means something to you, and find that sign deepening or extending in meaning inwardly. Sometimes if you see a sign that means something to you, it just takes you over. Take, for instance, that poem "Down Break Drum" (Atmosphere Conditions), about the way a fish would see a heron. A friend of mine, Tony Halfhide, a Trinidadian, once took me up to a West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn. I had read a little bit about West Indian traditions and Haitian vodoun, and it was interesting to see those images I had read about actually current there, in fact, in the landscape. The same thing happened to me in Africa. The masks that you see in museums are not unique pieces but living tradition: kids there carve them for Boxing Day. You can be driving down the street, and—whoosh!—there goes the museum. At the parade, there were stilt walkers, but there was one other character who certainly possessed me. The guy running among them was dressed up in bowtie and tails and hat, but he didn't have a shirt on. He had on pantyhose and high heel shoes. Then he had sewn to the pantyhose one leg of another set of pantyhose that he'd stuffed with stocking. So he's going down the street with this big penis waving! Not only that, but he'd put grease or some kind of paint on it. So he was chasing people and if he'd catch somebody, he'd give you a hug, and you'd have this soot all over you. That's a real Guede figure.
In "Down Break Drum," the possession is visual but also musical.
When the possession occurs in the vodoun...
