Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Evie Shockley on Ed Roberson ("Open / Back Up (breadth of field)")
1.6k Plays1 year ago
What a gift this conversation was. I talked to Evie Shockley about a poem from Ed Roberson's book City Eclogue, "Open / Back Up (breadth of field)."
Evie is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. She is the author of five books of poetry, including the just-released suddenly we (Wesleyan UP, 2023). She is also the author of Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (U of Iowa P, 2011). Her essays and articles have appeared in such journals as New Literary History, Los Angeles Review of Books, Jacket2, The Black Scholar, and Callaloo, where she published "On the Nature of Ed Roberson's Poetics."
As ever, if you like what you hear, follow the podcast, and leave us a rating and review. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Close Readings Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Cameron Javidizadeh, and I am so excited today to be talking with Evie Shockley, who is a poet and a scholar and critic that I've long admired and I've been
00:00:17
Speaker
I'm trying to get onto the podcast now for a little bit and we finally made it happen and I couldn't be more thrilled. The poem that Evie has chosen to share with us, talk about with us today is by the poet, Ed Roberson, a contemporary poet. And the poem is from his book, City Eclogues. The poem itself is called, Open Back Up, Breath the Field.
00:00:42
Speaker
a title that has some interesting typographical features embedded within it. So that might not be audible, but so between open and backup, there's a slash, Brett the Field is a parenthetical. We can talk about that as we go. Of course, there will be a link to the poem or an image of the poem that will make available for you in the episode notes.
00:01:09
Speaker
And of course, more links and things like that to come in the newsletter that'll be coming out with this episode.
Evie Shockley's Contributions to Black Aesthetics
00:01:17
Speaker
But first, let me tell you more about our very distinguished guest, Evie Shockley. Evie is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University. And she's the author of several books, including just a hugely important critical book called Renegade Poetics.
00:01:38
Speaker
Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, which came out from the University of Iowa Press in 2011. That book is concerned with what might sound like a simple question. It's an intriguing one. It's a beautiful instance, I think, of a scholar taking something that we all do, I don't know, we all, many of us do sort of reflexively without thinking about it and saying,
00:02:08
Speaker
what's going on when we do this? So the question that she's asking there is what do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, forms of expression, poems for instance, as quote unquote black? What do we mean when we use that term? And one of the things that is so appealing to me about the book is that she answers that question sort of patiently and descriptively that she's not trying to
00:02:40
Speaker
theoretically define a category and then seeking out examples. Rather, she's working inductively from the examples that she's drawn to and methodically and sort of lovingly articulating a definition out of the evidence at hand. So that's a book that has readings of poems by people like Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez,
00:03:07
Speaker
Harriet Mullen and Spencer, Will Alexander, and today's poet, Ed Roberson. So that's very exciting. Evie is also the, as I said, a poet and the author of four, well, now we have the very exciting news actually, five full length collections of poetry. Let me tell you their titles. The Gorgon Goddess, A Half Red Sea,
00:03:34
Speaker
The New Black, semi-automatic, and Evie tells me tomorrow, though that tomorrow will have become a yesterday by the time this episode comes out. In any case, just now, just out, a new book of poems called Suddenly We, which is out from Wesleyan University Press, a press that Evie's had a long relationship with and a really important press for poetry and poetry studies.
Discussing Ed Roberson's Role in Black and Eco-Poetics
00:04:05
Speaker
As I sort of gestured towards in talking about Evie's book, her critical book, that is, the aspect of her scholarship that I find most
00:04:20
Speaker
exciting and endearing, really, is what I take to be a kind of critical modesty. For me, that's almost the highest praise you can give. It might not sound like it, but for me, really, that is such an important idea. She takes seriously a responsibility to describe what she sees.
00:04:44
Speaker
And then she builds slowly, surely something really beautiful and new and places it in the world of the reader, in our world. So just to take for instance, and it's almost unfair for me to do this because what I'm about to do is to spoil the plot of an article that she's written on Ed Roberson in the journal Kalulu.
00:05:13
Speaker
I'm spoiling the plot by reading you the last sentence of that article, which I just found so beautiful. As we'll see, part of Evie's interest in Roberson, I think, is in the sense in which he's both participating in and contributing to something that we can describe as Black aesthetics or a tradition of Black poetry.
00:05:38
Speaker
Now he's also, I want to be careful with the conjunction I use there. Do I mean and or but or, you know, he is also, I'll leave it at that, a nature poet.
00:05:49
Speaker
and participating in a tradition of poetry that has come perhaps to be called eco-poetics. So in the article, Evie is thinking very carefully about how Roberson is navigating those dual commitments and ways of being as a poet. Here's how that article ends. Neither, quote, recognizably black, nor, quote, recognizably green, end quote,
00:06:17
Speaker
Roberson's poetry works out the structures of language able to reveal to us the verdant shadows of an undivided world. Just took my breath away. It's so beautiful. And it's typical of the sensitivity and care and intelligence that you find everywhere in Evie Shockley's work. So I'm just so thrilled to have Evie Shockley here to talk about Ed Roberson. What could be better than this? Evie, welcome. How are you doing today?
00:06:47
Speaker
I'm fine, although I am. Even though I've been listening to this podcast and knew what to expect, it is still quite lovely and awkward to to hear so many nice things said all at once. Oh, well, you deserve them. I'm sure they weren't nice enough. That's but yes, it's my it's my pleasure. It's really an honor for me to have you here. The pleasure is mine for sure.
00:07:17
Speaker
Oh, thanks. Well, you know, it's it's funny when I when I started this project, I thought, well, I have, you know, like our world is a small enough one poetry, the poetry world, the poetry studies world, perhaps even smaller. And I thought, oh,
00:07:34
Speaker
I'll ask these various friends of mine or people I've known for years and years to come on and we'll see how it goes. And then, and then at some point I noticed that you, who's, you know, someone I've been reading and admiring and I don't know, maybe we've met briefly at a conference or something like that, but, um, that was about it at that point that you were listening to the podcast. I couldn't believe it. I was like, Oh, it's really in the world. Evie Shockley is listening. And so then I invited you and, um,
00:08:02
Speaker
And then we had a heck of a time, Evie, with you trying to choose a poem for this occasion. And I hope I can, well, I wonder if I can invite you just to talk for a minute about what was it that made that
00:08:23
Speaker
a kind of challenging prospect, or what's it the process of thinking about what poem do I wanna talk about? What did that look like for you? What did it reveal to you about your relationship to poems or poetry? Any of that, Evie. What was it like? What a wonderful question and opportunity in a sense. Whenever I'm asked to choose one thing, a favorite poem or a favorite poet, or in this case,
00:08:53
Speaker
one poem to feature and shine a light on and give love as we say. I immediately am paralyzed because I think there's something about maybe at the intersection of being a poet and a scholar that compounds the kind of factors that I'm thinking through. I'm thinking about
00:09:23
Speaker
What could how in what way could this be a teachable moment like who who doesn't get attention? I'm also thinking about well who Who do who will people? Recognize and want to tune in to listen to I'm thinking about representation. I want
00:09:44
Speaker
you know, I want to lean on my strengths in African-American poetry, but I'm also like, well, maybe I could talk about something that, you know, I feel less expert about. And I think I, you know, I told you that I even picked a poem, even going with a poet whose work I know and love, I picked a poem that I don't feel like I have a definitive reading of, but more like a tentative reading of. And, you know, because that process of exploration is fun for me. So I was like,
00:10:14
Speaker
an older poet, a living poet, or a historical poet. I thought very hard about Anne Spencer. I thought about my love of Gwendolyn Brooks. I thought about another poet who was also a strong mentor for me, Lucille Clifton. I was all over the place with so many different criteria that
00:10:45
Speaker
that I didn't know at first what would be the deciding factor. But in the end, you know, Ed Roberson is both living but of a generation that I think can get buried sometimes under the
00:11:07
Speaker
the plethora of amazing young poets that we have in the world now. And by young, I mean, you know, possibly at this point, two or three generations that are writing who are younger than Roberson, right?
00:11:24
Speaker
Born, I think, in 1939. I find it useful to have some dates in mind, right? Okay, so yes. Absolutely. Born in 1939, so of my parents' generation. Right.
00:11:39
Speaker
I thought this is a way to sort of look backwards without looking beyond the contemporary, someone we can still enjoy and who can have his flowers while he's able to enjoy them, that kind of thing. Well, that's all lovely and fascinating. As you were talking, it occurred to me that
00:12:03
Speaker
Well, I don't get invited on podcasts where I have to choose a poem to talk about, but the kinds of thinking that you were going through do remind me of the kinds of questions one asks when designing a syllabus or even choosing things to write about in one's own criticism or scholarship or whatever. But that question of feeling
00:12:27
Speaker
a kind of responsibility, a desire to take advantage of one's expertise, but a desire also to feel interested and like you're learning something even as you're the teacher. Exactly. It's hard to balance, yeah.
Ed Roberson's Influence on Poetry
00:12:43
Speaker
That is such an apt comparison, the syllabus question, because
00:12:49
Speaker
cruelly or you know or not I I teach a signature course at Rutgers on black poetry and I
00:12:59
Speaker
I never teach it the same way. I mean, sometimes I use the same sort of thematic angle. This semester, as it happens, I'm working for the maybe the second or third time with Camille Dungy's Black Nature. She's amazing. Yes, she is. And then anthology is a treasure. I'm working with that anthology as the kind of spine of the course. But every time I teach, whether I'm, you know, working with it within a similar theme or
00:13:30
Speaker
exploring something like innovative black poetry or the black radical poetry tradition or so on and so forth. I teach it a different way. The syllabus is redesigned. Even working within an anthology, I choose different poems. So you're making more work for yourself, but you're doing it for a reason. I need to be as excited about the poems as I hope the students will be.
00:13:55
Speaker
I get it. I get it. You know, you want to have that experience in the classroom or anytime you read a poem or even when you write about it, like you're it's as though you're doing it for the first time or you're learning something then and there, not simply kind of delivering a canned line about something that you've learned by by rote or whatever. So I get it. Would you be willing, I guess, having said that,
00:14:24
Speaker
and to the extent that perhaps Roberson doesn't occupy quite as visible a place. I mean, he's by no means an obscure poet or a minor poet. I mean, he's celebrated.
00:14:39
Speaker
and quite accomplished. But for listeners who maybe don't know his work very well, is there a way you have Evie of giving us just a brief sense of where Ed Roberson fits in to the story you have in mind of like 20th century or second half of the 20th century into 21st century
00:15:02
Speaker
American poetry or a Black poetic tradition or a tradition of nature poetry. I mean, obviously, these are questions that we will be talking about in terms of how they make themselves visible within the poem that we're going to be talking about today. But I just mean as a kind of, just so people have something to begin with, could you situate Roberson for us a bit?
00:15:27
Speaker
Yes. And of course I should have like almost a script ready on this, but let's see what I can do. Um, I like unscripted better. So he, he's at the juncture of, um, you know, two or three different, um, movements you might say, um, within black,
00:15:57
Speaker
African-American, American poetics. For one thing, and I think the less often reckoned with thing, he published his first book, I don't know, I can't remember what you mentioned already, but he published his first book, When Thy King is a Boy in 1970, and his second in 1975, which if you are a student of
00:16:26
Speaker
African-American poetry or black studies in the US, you know those dates coincide with the Black Arts Movement. And so he's someone who was, I think he's described it as not on the front lines, but in the amen corner of the Black Arts Movement, writing in ways that
00:16:54
Speaker
were thinking through his own very unique, really idiosyncratic poetic style about what black poets might need or want or feel compelled to write about and how. So that's one thing. He was formed by
00:17:22
Speaker
by beginning his poetic career during the Black Arts Movement. He's also a poet who, as you already gestured towards, fits well within the tradition of eco-poetics, eco-poetics. I never know which way is that pronounced.
00:17:43
Speaker
economics, eco-poetics. Fair enough. I'm Southern, so pronunciation is always a challenge.
00:17:58
Speaker
And the sentence that you read from my essay about his work kind of gestures towards this. He is not in the romantic poetic tradition that romanticizes, for lack of a better word, that idealizes nature and that sees it as sort of the other to mankind, the place where we go to
00:18:24
Speaker
learn about ourselves or rejuvenate ourselves or any of those kind of more instrumentalizing forms of nature writing but comes into visibility I think with poets who are trying to challenge that model of nature poetry and
00:18:50
Speaker
you know, what I learned from him very, very particularly and importantly for me, like a very fundamental takeaway for me from Ed Roberson's work is that
00:19:06
Speaker
there is no nature that is separate from culture, so to speak.
Analyzing Roberson's Poetic Style and Themes
00:19:13
Speaker
That as another scholar would say, Carol and Finney, if you're breathing, you're in nature. So that's the whole world, the whole earth. And so to take that
00:19:26
Speaker
that understanding to heart is something that his work continually challenges me to do. And it puts him in conversation with a lot of people from people like Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver to Camille Dungy, for example.
00:19:53
Speaker
Then I think the other thing I would say is that he is really important for the Black experimental, innovative Black poetics tradition, Black radical poetics tradition, a lot of ways we might talk about it. And just an important innovator in language whose work
00:20:15
Speaker
presents itself in some ways as Difficult and you should see my air quotes. Yeah No, I think we yeah, we hear them. We hear them. Yes You know it it it can look and and actually feel difficult Yeah, but for me in a in the best possible ways never difficult for the sake of difficulty always I've heard him talk about it
00:20:45
Speaker
He visited a class of mine one time when I was teaching his work and a student asked him why he made his poems so difficult. Why did you do this to us? Why are you trying to be difficult? Why not just say what you mean? This is me saying what I mean. What I mean is complicated.
00:21:07
Speaker
I could go on and on, but outside. Well, and you'll get a chance to, which I'm really excited for here. But I have so many thoughts. And on the other hand, I'm wanting to balance those thoughts, my desire to express some of them with a feeling that we ought to get onto the poem. But maybe I could just say briefly,
00:21:29
Speaker
that I think some of what you were describing as his investment in being a nature poet, but maybe not in the sense that one ordinarily thinks of nature poetry as a kind of romanticizing or idealizing or separating
00:21:49
Speaker
out from the way we live, you know, like nature is something we encounter when we go on a hike, but, you know, not when we're going to work or whatever. Some of that is evident already. I take it in the title of the book that the poem you've chosen is from, City Eclogues, right? So an eclogue, you know, might
00:22:10
Speaker
suggest an interest in nature as a topic. And this gets me to thinking also about how
00:22:22
Speaker
to the extent that we can't help but be in nature, we're always in nature. I mean, we are, after all, natural beings. Maybe some of what constitutes nature poetry as such is not so much subject matter,
00:22:41
Speaker
as it is like a way of seeing the world or a way of describing the world. Yeah, I'm thinking back to, I mean, it's a different point entirely, but in a recent conversation on the podcast with Eric Lindstrom,
00:22:58
Speaker
He was offering the idea that James Schuyler was an ekphrastic poet even when he wasn't describing a painting. He looked at the world as though it were a painting and was describing it in something like those terms. And maybe there's something kind of analogous going on with the kind of nature poetry that we're interested in here. That makes sense to me.
00:23:18
Speaker
Let's get to the poem. I'm really eager to hear it. Evie, would you be willing to read this poem to us and maybe remind our listeners too if you weren't going to already of its title?
00:23:33
Speaker
not a problem. And I, again, should have knew to anticipate this and haven't practiced how I'm going to read this, so this is going to be interesting. So this is a poem from one of the sections of the book, City Eclog, called Ornithologies.
00:23:53
Speaker
just to, you know, because Roberson tends to write in series and sequence. And so how his poems are lodged is important to the reading, although we're not going to, I promise I'm not going to try to do all that in this conversation. But this poem is called Open, Back Up, Breath of Field.
00:24:18
Speaker
To state for the case of poetry, the most recent open field I've crossed would have to be the block long park lost in the midst of the security of local campus mounted police. Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university ID by the ones in cars. The auspice of the animal mounted doesn't fly.
00:24:46
Speaker
Really neither do the comic cops. Nature, life and limb gone through divestiture of place from point reads to the lie of open breasts of field, Elysian, nor the narrow badge number of the gun.
00:25:08
Speaker
Thank you so much, Evie. So that was Open Back Up, Breath the Field by Ed Roberson, read by Evie Shockley. Evie, I was sort of glad to hear you say that you hadn't prepared a way to read it, although you may have been disconcerted in, you know, noticing that just before you read. I say I was glad because it occurs to me, well, maybe
00:25:32
Speaker
just like we were talking about with respect to teaching or whatever before, maybe there was something new for you in the reading then since you hadn't rehearsed it or whatever. We'll wanna back up, sorry, no pun intended, that's in the title, but we'll wanna in some way or another make our way from the top of the poem to the bottom of the poem eventually, but just to take for a minute the more kind of global view, like what are you noticing about the poem as you read it here and now today?
00:26:02
Speaker
Well, what comes out anytime you attempt to read any Ed Roberson poem is the fact that he writes in a kind of two steps forward, two steps back kind of syntax. And what I mean by that is that he's writing in sentences that are somehow also including fragments within them that overlap
00:26:32
Speaker
so that within each sentence there are bits that he wants or seems to want one to understand as little units within the sentence and those units overlap each other so that
00:26:50
Speaker
your brain is moving backwards and forwards, even though your reading is linear, necessarily. Yeah, it can help it be, I guess, right? Can't help it be. Although, you know, sometimes I think about, you know, our teaching, I might read a line, stop, go back, you know, and perform that.
00:27:08
Speaker
which is another part of, I didn't plan how I wanted to read this poem. I think it only does justice to read it straight, quote unquote, the first time. Well, I guess we'll have other chances to read. Clearly we'll be reading little bits of it out loud again to remind ourselves. You know, I hear what you're saying so distinctly and it occurs to me like, so for people who aren't looking,
00:27:39
Speaker
The poem, well, I'll just say this to begin with. It begins with two stanzas that are each four lines long. That first stanza doesn't have any punctuation in it.
00:27:54
Speaker
Right. Though I think a careful reading like the one you gave us, you know, you could almost as a reader, you're almost like enjoined to like silently insert commas here or there to make sense of the way the phrases want to hang together to state. Comma for the case of poetry, comma, maybe you'd want to, you know, you're doing something like that in your mind as you read.
00:28:23
Speaker
But it's interesting that he's not giving you that, right? So maybe the effect of that is what, to like slow you down as a reader or to open up multiple directions, you know? Talk about that. I think the second, I definitely think he uses punctuation sparingly just enough to keep you sort of
00:28:45
Speaker
a little bit tethered to the ground. Maybe even tethered is not the right word, but to give you a true north, I guess, in the syntactical logic. But he's very interested in
00:29:03
Speaker
leaving as many possible readings open as possible. Very much. I think even when there is ultimately one reading that makes sense, quote unquote, there are processes of thought that go into arriving at that
00:29:27
Speaker
single reading that he might be encouraging us to literally go through. So yeah, I think maybe that it does end up circling back to both of the, to slow the reader down as well as to leave open multiplicity of meaning.
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, maybe to attend to that multiplicity, you've got to slow down or something or slowing down makes it possible to hear the multiplicity. Absolutely. But to work with the language.
00:30:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, let's do some of that. Let's work with the language here. So like I said, there's a four-line stanza, though we haven't gotten to the end of the sentence until we get to the fifth line that begins the second stanza.
Interpreting the Poem's Themes of Race and Identity
00:30:19
Speaker
I think it's a short enough poem. I don't think we can hear the language often enough, especially for people who aren't looking at it. So I'll read that first sentence again, and then I'm curious about
00:30:33
Speaker
maybe you could walk us through some of what you think is like a primary kind of way of making sense of the sentence and then maybe alert us to some of the sort of lurking or secondary kinds of meanings that are accumulating here. Okay.
00:30:51
Speaker
to state for the case of poetry the most recent open field I've crossed would have to be the block long park lost in the midst of the security of local campus mounted police. Then we get to the period. So much packed in, right? So much. That third line in particular is hard to read. I don't mean that in a pejorative way. It's just, that's our challenge. You've got to, you know, anyway.
00:31:19
Speaker
I want to hear what you think. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay. So stop me when I get to in the weeds. I'm not going to stop you, Evie. To state for the case of poetry. So already I feel like there's this
00:31:38
Speaker
It's not exactly, but it is the echo of a kind of legal or courtroom discourse to state for the case, right? Evidence. But the case of poetry.
00:31:52
Speaker
which is one context among others that one might be offering evidence. But to state for the case of poetry, that's where I'm going immediately. The most recent- Which suggests that what poetry requires a defense or something, that someone's been making the case against it or
00:32:13
Speaker
That's true. Four versus against. But also, yeah, as opposed to in the case of poetry. I love that. I love that. Yeah. I mean, the
00:32:30
Speaker
This is this is exactly the kind of double nest that he Specialized. Yes. Yes. I love that. I love that great. Well, let's let's sit with that thought and yeah, keep going though I interrupted. I'm sorry. Not at all. Not at all. This is a conversation The most recent open field I've crossed So with that
00:32:55
Speaker
if we weren't already thinking about it from the title, open field poetry, this is a poem that's in conversation with Charles Olsen in projective verse, right?
00:33:09
Speaker
Tell people who don't know anything about anything. I don't know, Charles Olsen, Projective, what does that have to do with open field? You know, maybe just that. Right, right. So Charles Olsen, mid-century American poet, white American poet, for what it's worth, writes this essay called Projective Verse in which he is,
00:33:36
Speaker
involved in trying to make a case, I think, for a shift in American poetics away from closed form poetry to what he calls open field poetry or composition by field. And he's interested in a poetics
00:33:58
Speaker
that discovers itself line by line in the process of its making, that's propelled, that sees the page as, you might say, an open field. So one thing to note just right off the bat there is that for Olson and perhaps for the way of thinking that Olson might sort of stand in for here as an example of
00:34:21
Speaker
field in that sense would be metaphor, or it's a metaphorical way of speaking. Absolutely. In the same way maybe that we talk about a scholarly field. And so Roberson is
00:34:38
Speaker
playing with that way of talking, right? Yes. Roberson's full of jokes, lots of puns, maybe not quite as punny as Harriet Mullen and sadly myself, but yeah, there are all kinds of plays like that and I appreciate you bringing that out. So the
00:35:02
Speaker
The idea of a field in poetry, which is the page as being compared to the field, becomes more literal in his stanza.
00:35:18
Speaker
he wants us to think about something like an open field in the physical, spatial, Earth-like sense, right? And what happens then is, of course, he shifts that from field to park
00:35:42
Speaker
Right. What's at stake in the shift from field to park? What's the difference between a park and a field that matters here, Evie?
00:35:53
Speaker
that matters. I mean, so this is a poem in the book City Ecolog, which, you know, Ecolog, as you said, refers to a kind of pastoral poetry and a poetry that that opposes the city and the countryside or the rural. Roberson's book is all about sort of showing us the
00:36:17
Speaker
maybe the pastoral within the city or just breaking down the idea that city and eclogue have nothing to do with each other, right? So an open field in a city context.
00:36:30
Speaker
You know, the closest thing you're going to get, the analog is a park, right? But it's interesting because it's a block-long park which already circumscribes this idea of openness.
00:36:49
Speaker
And I think Roberson's really interested in the contrast between open field and it's more circumscribed. It's something that might look like nature, but is being asked to fit the confines of the urban environment and is planned and is delimited. Yeah.
00:37:12
Speaker
Yes and no. This is the trouble with talking about Ed Roberson's poetry. We don't really have the language for it. It is not to oppose the block long park to nature. It is to say this is what nature looks like in the city.
00:37:33
Speaker
And once we're aware of it being circumscribed in the city, we have to then recognize that a field, an open field, is also circumscribed, quote, unquote, in nature.
00:37:48
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, that it's a clearing. It has edges. But there is a difference in scale. And I think that becomes important for, you know, just thinking about what human activity, as opposed to the activity of other animals, might mean for this planet, right?
00:38:07
Speaker
Yeah, and we get to other animals in a minute. But let me just because I want to stay for a moment on the block long park because well, a couple of things when you said edges, you know, my mind is immediately going to like the edges. Formally speaking of the poem, like the line line breaks and the way a stanza is also like a block like.
00:38:32
Speaker
section of a text, right? And here I guess the description or the image sort of spills over that stanza break too. Very nice. But also in that phrase, you know, like I said, the third line is hard to read would have to be the block long park lost. I think it's hard to read in part because of those monosyllables that come at the end. And you're not sure, you know, like,
00:39:00
Speaker
I guess if I were to insert punctuation to make it easier but less interesting so it's good that the punctuation is not there it you know you'd want to put a hyphen between block and long because exactly it's a block long park and then it's lost.
00:39:16
Speaker
also, which makes me think of, you know, it's like as soon as it's like, you know, so the park is like a field, but it's a delimited one. But even as a park, it's lost. Yes. Like it was there, but has been transformed into something else now. Oh, beautiful, beautiful. I mean, you're setting up one of the things that we can foreshadow for the end of the poem, which is perhaps we have an echo here of Paradise Lost.
00:39:45
Speaker
Yes. Which is nice because you could think even the block long park has a paradoxical feel to it, but it has been lost. I really do love that mouthful of sounds at the end and how
00:40:09
Speaker
how the vowels are working with each other. It's not just that they're these spondes or these monosyllabic words, but it's the a-o-a-o of the vowels. That's absolutely right. And the confusion one feels about their syntactical or grammatical relation
00:40:29
Speaker
to each other I mean you kind of don't know how to until you've read the whole thing you don't know how to read it exactly so now I guess we should say what what the park has been lost to right in the lost in the midst of the security stands a break of local campus mounted police and so it's um
00:40:51
Speaker
Ah, so lost in the mist as opposed to midst with the D. It's something I hear in the language, right? Oh, yeah. I'd miss that. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, my God. This is all Ed. Lost in the mist, but then the mist or the midst is of security, right?
00:41:17
Speaker
And we have a moment, not just a line break, but a stanza break to sit with the idea of a park being lost in the midst of the security, which for me immediately begs, who's security, right? Yeah. I mean, it does make it seem, at least for the first stanza, a little bit like Paradise Lost. We're secure and it's sort of in the midst of security, we're kicked out of Eden or something.
00:41:45
Speaker
Exactly. But then when you come down to the next stanza, the security of local campus-mounted police. I mean, one possible reading is that the police are secure, which is counterintuitive, but usually it's the police providing security. But
00:42:11
Speaker
In theory, totally in theory. But we get this set of ideas in one sentence, one stanza in a line more that have us thinking about openness versus constraint, presence versus loss,
00:42:39
Speaker
security, you know, is this is this boundary about keeping things in or keeping things out, right? All of that introduced in one sentence. And then suddenly, as the next sentence begins, at least to my mind, Evie, the
00:42:58
Speaker
I mean, at least in one sense, it gets easier to follow, easier to read. It's like a much more plain spoken kind of, you might not even recognize it as poetic language if it weren't in a poem. Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university ID.
00:43:15
Speaker
at least up to there and maybe even up to buy the ones in cars. So yeah, like how are you hearing the sort of juxtaposition of that kind of plain spoken language and shift even in topic or whatever? Like what's happening for you in that shift?
00:43:35
Speaker
I mean, it's interesting. I process it at the level of sound, the sort of difficulty, quote unquote, of giving voice to the words moves away. And we move into this speech that comes off the tongue more easily and also
00:43:59
Speaker
maybe suggesting how easy it is to think ideologically along with the logic that underwrites those lines, right? Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university ID by the ones in cars. I mean, there's so much going on in these lines for me. The police stop.
00:44:29
Speaker
I think in the era of Black Lives Matter, we don't have to articulate the serious stakes of that for anyone. But we acknowledge that they are very serious stakes.
00:44:47
Speaker
Um, they get stopped regularly to show they have university ID. Well, I love the line break here because I wondered if you were going to talk about that. Tell us about what, so the line break is between the word university and the abbreviation ID. Okay. Yes, exactly. There's this way that, um, you can,
00:45:10
Speaker
the line suggests something to like to show they have universality as opposed to I mean we're talking about and I guess it should be mentioned I mean I think this is a poem about
00:45:27
Speaker
This may be apocryphal, but I feel like I've heard Ed say that this was a poem about basically a campus green at Rutgers Newark. Or it's some city campus, right? So it's not just a park. We've got campus-mounted police. The university is here. And suddenly, the issue of boundaries
00:45:57
Speaker
brought into relief as, at least in part, a town gown boundary, a racial boundary, and the overlap between those two things, right? That Black people, again, in the case of poetry, are always being asked to show that they have universality, that they can write something that speaks to or for everyone, whatever the lyric speaker is supposed to do.
00:46:27
Speaker
And I hear that being at least made possible to think about with that line break. Yeah, that's so nice. And then when we get ID, you can start to think about
00:46:45
Speaker
Who has universal ID? How does whiteness function as a badge, a visible badge? We can talk about visible and invisible, but a visible badge of belonging anywhere.
00:47:02
Speaker
Anywhere and everywhere, so one might say. Who has to have a university affiliation? Who might not belong to the university and yet not be precluded from entering this park, this paradise?
00:47:26
Speaker
Who's identification, not just in the sense of the card that you carry in your wallet, but your identity?
00:47:33
Speaker
counts as universal versus who gets thought of as having a kind of racialized identity.
Exploration of Poetic Forms and Race
00:47:44
Speaker
One of the things about whiteness is that it gets to sort of pretend that it's not a racialized position in any way, that it's just the kind of default or standard one.
00:47:58
Speaker
that feels really present to me in those lines. I wonder what's at stake. I mean, I guess it emerges somewhat later on as we go. In the business of the mounted police versus the ones in cars, I guess the mounted police
00:48:19
Speaker
I'm just gonna speculate here and you tell me what resonates or if you have something different or better to offer, but like the Mounted Police suggests a kind of, like a nostalgic or like an older model of, and then I guess for a poet who's,
00:48:42
Speaker
interested in nature and troubling the distinction between nature and urban life. The horse versus the car might be a distinction that matters.
00:48:57
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Does this matter to your reading of the poem, Evie? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it has to, because Mounted comes back up in a sense, right? So yeah, I agree with what you're pointing to. I think
00:49:15
Speaker
And remember, City Eclog was published in, I want to say 2007, 2006. And so it's before, well, several years before Black Lives Matter, not before police pullovers.
00:49:38
Speaker
It goes without saying. You'd have to go pretty far back. You'd have to go before police. It's at a moment before our
00:49:57
Speaker
our contemporary hyper consciousness of these things. And also before social media makes, I think, some of these kind of campus located policing issues, common knowledge or puts them on the radar. So there's this way that I think at that point, though, the idea of being stopped by the police would suggest instantly
00:50:26
Speaker
in a car for some kind of a moving violation. Here we've got police on horseback stopping pedestrians. That's the implication, right? Right. Yeah. And then so after the kind of plain spokenness of most of the second stanza, at the tail end of that second stanza,
00:50:55
Speaker
So the last line of that stanza is ID by the ones in cars. Then we get, I think it's, yeah, it's the only semicolon in the poem. There's a semicolon. And then the words, the auspice, line break stanza break. So the auspice of the animal mounted doesn't fly.
00:51:17
Speaker
Love that line. Oh my god. I'm hearing it doesn't fly like a kind of idiomatic, oh, that's not going to fly. That doesn't work. But then is there also some kind of
00:51:33
Speaker
witty allusion here to like a winged horse or something? I don't know. I think so. I mean, and maybe not in a more specific sense than that, but there's the buried or not so buried joke that the animal mounted doesn't fly. Horses literally don't fly, except in myth. Pegasus
00:51:57
Speaker
a solid white horse with wings can fly. And so I think it brings in this idea of
00:52:07
Speaker
you know, the horse of the gods, right? It brings in myth, which has, which maybe foreshadows the word lie that comes later. And it brings in the idea of divinity or, you know, the gods. I think there's what I know about the
00:52:30
Speaker
about the mounted police is not much, but my understanding is that one reason for mounted police in urban context is to elevate them for surveillance. They can see over people, right?
00:52:47
Speaker
And they're also used in crowd control because you might feel like you can break through a wall of men standing, but with horses, it presents different dangers. And so they would form a wall with mounted police and move crowds back.
00:53:06
Speaker
like that. So the backup starts to come back. Yes, I see. That helps. It's a really useful context to have. And as you were talking, Evie, I just want to confess to something here, which is that I was shocked as I was looking at the poem and I realized something which I had not noticed.
00:53:26
Speaker
which is that this poem is a sonnet. This poem is a sonnet. Yes, it is. It's got, you know, typographically, it slightly obscures that at the end because the lines get broken up and that's very interesting. But, you know, it's an Elizabethan sonnet. It's got four quatrains and a couplet. And these quatrains are rhyming, right? So if people, you know, in some cases, it's a kind of slant rhyme or near rhyme, but in case you're not hearing it, in the first stanza,
00:53:56
Speaker
A, B, B, A, so poetry and security, the first and fourth lines and the middle lines are crossed and lost. In the second stanza, police and auspice are a kind of rhyme, you know, it's a near rhyme.
00:54:09
Speaker
regularly in university, those, you know, again, a kind of slant rhyme, I think, in the middle of that stanza. Exactly. But then I was hearing it, really, and of the animal mount, it doesn't fly. Fly is going to rhyme with lie, and nature and divestiture, yeah, are the internal line. OK. So, yeah, you know, I don't know. What does that mean? You know, your poetry professor missed it. It's a sonnet. Yeah.
00:54:38
Speaker
This is the thing. Ed Roberson writes so many sonnets, and each one of them might have a very different visual form and subtlety of rhyme that helps to
00:55:00
Speaker
to make that form less immediately noticeable than it would be in other people's hands. So yeah, I love that. That is part of the
00:55:17
Speaker
I was going to say the joke of the poem, but it's a serious joke. Very serious. And, you know, my taste is towards jokes that are deadly serious. So so, yeah, I think let's see. One, well, I think. It will become clear what what is happening with the sonnet as we get a little bit further down into the the sestet.
00:55:45
Speaker
Well, let's do that because, I mean, unless there's something you want to say before we get there. But to look at the poem on the page is to notice, like the way I was talking about it before was we have these two quatrains and then things get a little more fragmentary, the lines just visually get broken up.
00:56:12
Speaker
So the third quatrain, like the second half of its fourth line, which would be the twelfth line of the poem, like drops down a line, but that's... Right in the middle. Yeah, and then the couplet that wants to end the poem, which rhymes, illusion and gun,
00:56:34
Speaker
It's just fascinating. You know, the penultimate line of the poem is also broken up in a couple different ways. So a line drops down and then there's a kind of caesura between breasts of field and a lesion at the end of the line.
00:56:51
Speaker
And so, yeah, I don't know. Evie, I guess what I would ask you to do, and maybe just at whatever pace suits you, talk to us about what is going on in your reading of the poem that might correspond to or help us make sense of why the poem visually just looks different in its final lines as opposed to its opening ones. Yeah.
00:57:22
Speaker
It's really interesting and I keep going back and forth between thinking about that as a quatrain and a couplet versus a sestet because it's hard for me to tell because the lines are fragmented whether there is a full break between the line that ends with lie and the 12th line and the 13th line.
00:57:52
Speaker
It is that hybridization of the Petrarchan and the Shakespearean sonnet that lots of people like to use.
00:58:03
Speaker
think that this is a moment where now that we know we're within a sonnet, but have been asked to think about open field poetics as a discourse against closed form, we're being shown a closed form that you could say opens up a little bit.
00:58:33
Speaker
I love it. That the line breaks, you know, kind of open, make an opening within the sonnet, so to speak, right? And are those openings corresponding to something that's going on like in the argument of the poem or the thing that, yeah? I do think so. I do think so. It's hard for me to know how to like, it jumps ahead of
00:58:57
Speaker
kind of a couple of things that I want to point out. Oh, good. So back up and do that. Yeah. Is that okay? It's totally okay. Yeah. I, you know, readings, everything is so organic for me. It's like, and it's partly because Roberson syntax is so tightly woven. Yes. And I don't want to bog us down in a sort of a line by line, but. But back up as far as you need to.
00:59:21
Speaker
Well, I think we're in this sestet. We've kind of moved on from the joke about the animal mounted doesn't fly, which is followed by, and I'll just read this last bit, really neither do the comic cops. We used to call them rent-a-cops when I was in college. Nature, and here the
00:59:47
Speaker
Punctuation just vanishes, and we've got all kinds of sejuras, visual, and things that point to different possible readings. It's a very, very difficult section to read. But nature, maybe colon, life and limb gone through, divestiture of place from point,
01:00:09
Speaker
reads to the lie of open breasts of field, which is B-R-E-A-S-T-S as opposed to the title B-R-E-A-D-T-H.
01:00:29
Speaker
which we also have to be reminded to hear through Olson's emphasis on the breath as the measure for or the means of locating the movement of a poem in open field poetics, right? So breath is hovering underneath breath
01:00:48
Speaker
and breasts, open breasts of field, Elysian. And I'm reading that with the visual pause, hopefully audible field, Elysian. So all, I mean, we've got possibly a sort of a definition or a statement about nature or a sort of interrogation of nature. I'm interested in
01:01:18
Speaker
life and limb as a phrase that's suggesting life and the body, but in a context usually of harm. Like, I was afraid for life and limb or something like that, right? Or to protect life and limb or whatever, yes. Exactly. The way the syntax makes me question, so gone through,
01:01:46
Speaker
life and limb have gone through divestiture of place. Or there was another possible reading that was coming to me at one point that, oh, life and limb gone through like,
01:02:02
Speaker
punctured or pierced, right? Possible. Divestiture, which I associate immediately with stocks and bonds and that kind of selling stocks or parts of a company and that kind of thing. Divestiture of
01:02:19
Speaker
financial resources, but there's a secondary definition that is explicitly something like compulsory transfer of title or disposal of interest upon government order. It's like what happens to Adam and Eve.
01:02:39
Speaker
Exactly. It's the expulsion. Exactly. That's why I said Paradise Lost earlier. Yeah. And it's also the expulsion by the campus cops of the black person who may or may not, quote unquote, belong in this park. But, you know, there's the expulsion.
01:03:02
Speaker
of place from point. I even think of point as being the pointing finger that you see in a lot of visual images of the expulsion from Eden.
01:03:14
Speaker
Some of which have sword point, as well as, or instead of the pointing finger. But there's also a kind of geographical place from point. Sonically what's happening with life and limb, the L's place from point, the P's.
01:03:33
Speaker
kind of leads sonically into the lie of open. He sends you back and forth through these words and phrases. It's just building, accumulating images and ideas. Open breasts afield. So the visual breasts afield separated down a line from open,
01:03:57
Speaker
and over a space from Elysian, echoes the title, Breath of Field. But I think we're also supposed to hear open breasts, open heartedness, a kind of openness to each other's humanity, if you will. Like bearing your soul or something, right? Yeah, but also being receptive, being able to be open to someone else, right?
01:04:28
Speaker
The idea is that I think that the cops, the police, the amount of police do not have open breasts of field. This field is not an open place. The narrow badge number of the gun is another really brilliant and important line.
01:04:49
Speaker
And I've jumped over Elysian, but hopefully Elysian... Yeah, well, even before we get there, I guess we get, like, there's this sort of inversion of, you know, you hear the phrase Elysian field or the Elysian fields, right? So this is the field Elysian, you know, like the noun and adjective swapping places with that little Cesaro between them. Yes, that's right. That's right.
01:05:12
Speaker
And maybe that's done to sort of secure the rhyme that's coming, at least in part, but rhyme is usefully motivating as a constraint in that way. Yeah, I love it. So beautifully put, absolutely. But I do think that that open breasts gets to echo visually the idea of the badge number, right? It's such a
01:05:34
Speaker
Weird phrase the narrow yes, so the whole last line is just completely bizarre and that's why I said I don't have a definitive reading What is the nor? Relating back to I mean we have to go back to get to a neither and it's not in the same sentence and it's not even in the same syntactic
01:05:53
Speaker
Yes, you're right. Thread, if you will. I just, I really have a lot of questions about the NOR. Uh-huh. You know, but the narrow badge number of the gun, guns have registration numbers, cops have badge numbers. That was my question for you. Yeah. What's going on?
01:06:11
Speaker
I think we're supposed to, at once, we're supposed to see the badge number on the breast. Literally, they usually wear them on their shirt pocket, shirt sun, right? As the thing that's closing off the breast, maybe. As though it were a shield, right? And often quite literally looks like one, right? Exactly, exactly.
01:06:36
Speaker
And this idea of the defensiveness of whiteness against blackness is raised. But then of the gun, if it's not a gun doesn't have a badge number. So we've got gun as a metonym for the cop.
01:06:54
Speaker
sort of gives the lie to the like guns don't kill people, people kill people, but like the gun and the person is the same thing here, right? There we go. He makes it the same. The gun is, you know, of the cop in the way that, what's the usual, hands are a metonym for sailors on a ship, right? And it's that much of the cop, right?
01:07:24
Speaker
So here's where I come down. I feel like what we arrive at with this idea of a kind of racialized closure of cops, whether white or not, standing in for the defensiveness of whiteness, the securing of this Edenic park from black people who can't
01:07:55
Speaker
show themselves affiliated with whiteness sufficiently, right? We have this poem that
01:08:04
Speaker
at once shows us a closed form in conversation with the idea of open form, but focuses us on race as the real closed form with which Roberson is concerned, right? Race is the closed form and to draw the
Reflections on Humanity and Exclusion in Poetry
01:08:29
Speaker
circle complete,
01:08:32
Speaker
Race, a life lived within the closed form of race teaches you to innovate in ways that allow you movement within the sonnet.
01:08:47
Speaker
Boom, boom. That's just beautifully said. I mean, I couldn't possibly add anything to that. Evie, this is, I mean, you said you didn't have anything definitive to get to, but that's an exhilarating reading that you've just offered us. We got to it. We got to it. Yes, we did. Yeah. And it makes, you know, I guess one maybe very last thought is that it
01:09:16
Speaker
if what the cops are doing here is this sort of exclusionary policing that's expelling the black people from the campus green in order to make it safe, if we're being asked to read that as a kind of resonance or double image with the Edenic story, then by those lights,
01:09:43
Speaker
you know, the only humans in the Eden story are the ones who get kicked out, right? So it's like the black people are, you know, have the humanity and what's left inside the green is this kind of perhaps divine judged by its own terms, but like inhuman space that's left over, you know, once, once the people are gone.
01:10:09
Speaker
That is such a brilliant reading. I love that. And you send me back to the animal mounted. The police then could be read as the animal mounted on the horse. Like they're centaurs or something. Exactly. But I wouldn't have thought of that if you hadn't said that.
01:10:31
Speaker
Well, that's why talking is fun, because there's so much I wouldn't have thought about without your telling me. Evie Shockley, this is such a thrill. And I think the poem is short enough and interesting and dense enough that it might merit just before we go one last reading of the poem so that our listeners can hear it again in your voice.
01:10:55
Speaker
Happy to. We'll see if it comes out similarly or not. Interesting either way, I think. Right. Open, back up, breadth of field. To state, for the case of poetry, the most recent open field I've crossed would have to be the block long park lost in the midst of the security of local campus mounted police.
01:11:23
Speaker
Black people get stopped regularly to show they have university ID by the ones in cars. The auspice of the animal mounted doesn't fly. Really, neither do the comic cops. Nature, life and limb gone through, divestiture of place from point, reads to the lie of open breasts of field, Elysian.
01:11:49
Speaker
nor the narrow badge number of the gun. Thank you so much, Evie Shockley. It's been just a real pleasure and delight and education to get to talk with you, and I so appreciate you making the time.
01:12:05
Speaker
I'm really honored to come into this series, the conversations you've been having with lots of people whose work I respect, including your own. This is a real joy. Thank you so much. And thank you listeners for making it with us. And we will be back with new conversations soon. Be well, everyone.