"The Umbilicate Ear": Audition in Ed Roberson's Lucid Interval as Integral Music

                      our mouths dropopen tongues about to do the work.

—Ed Roberson, "Nine Chicago Poems"

The challenges faced by formally innovative African American poets are generally understood as a conflict between notions of textuality and orality, a critical binary that would seem to isolate textually focused innovation from the more popularly identified oral tradition that informs many African American artistic practices. For this reason, much of the critical discourse on innovative African American writing has sought to problematize the textual-oral dichotomy and to recover the importance of textual experimentation in a critical discourse that is too easily reliant on an idealization of the oral. For instance, in Black Chant, Aldon Nielsen argues forcefully that "African-American traditions of orality and textuality were not opposed to one another and did not exist in any simple or simplistic opposition to modernity and postmodernity. African-American poets both birthed and fractured modernist and postmodernist practices" (34). More recently, Fred Moten has considered "how the idea of a black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically—as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence upon the exclusion of the other," and counters with an "assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing… and an assertion that blackness is an avant-garde thing" (32–33). Meta DuEwa Jones, too, has advanced this position, particularly in her treatment of "jazz-influenced texts as indicative of poets' unique approaches to scripting African-American musical and verbal sound" (67). The work of these critics both charts the interconnectedness of textuality and orality in experimental black writing, and, thereby, presents us with a tradition that has significant implications for the broader literary landscape.

In this essay, I address an important figure in this tradition, the contemporary poet Ed Roberson, in particular his serial poem Lucid Interval as Integral Music, originally published in 1984 and then collected in his 1995 Iowa Poetry Prize-winning book Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In. Written in three sections, "The Form," "This Week's Concerts," and "Interval and Final Day's Concerts," Lucid Interval contemplates the living history of racism in the United States, the responsibilities of a father, and the potential of poetry and music to give shape to lived experience. In doing so, Lucid Interval worries the circumstances and mechanisms by which a poem comes into voice in the first place, its conditions of enunciation, and takes the construction of voice as both the central problematic and the prime opportunity of lyric poetry, an opportunity that is shot-through with a poignant sense of responsibility and even ethics. Attending to Roberson's framing of voice thus illuminates the significance of his work not only for the way in which it bridges the popular opposition between avant-gardism and voice-based lyric within African American writing, but also as an important example of how contemporary writers, African American and not, seek to move beyond this rift.¹ For Roberson, in particular, this reconsideration and reshaping of voice is based on its profound relationship to listening in a two-fold process that I will call "audition."

Although Roberson's work has received relatively little critical attention, those critics who have addressed it almost inevitably attend to the ways in which he bridges the boundaries between the categories that so strongly shape commonplace understandings of contemporary poetry.² For instance, in a review of his 2006 collection City Eclogue, Evie Shockley describes the poems as "lyrical, even in their disjunctive sentences; intimately conversational, even in their determined orientation toward the page" (60). Kathleen Crown similarly argues that Roberson's work, "refuses [the] binary divide between orality and literacy, evoking the musical rhythms of speech and graphic signs of writing in equal degrees," and explores the ways in which it troubles divisions even within the avant-garde, drawing from such disparate traditions as concrete poetry, ethnopoetics, language poetry, and the Black Arts Movement ("Reading the 'Lucid Interval'" 192). Crown approaches Roberson's poetry through the critical lens of trauma theory, and focuses on...