The Geography of Seeing: An Audio Profile of Ed Roberson

To read the poetry of Ed Roberson is to engage in the act of 'un-white-outing' the world. Born in Pittsburgh in 1939, Roberson has spent over five decades crafting a body of work that is as much a feat of cartography as it is of lyricism. He does not merely write about nature; he writes from within the thick of it, whether that 'it' is the jagged peaks of the Andes or a high-rise window overlooking a Chicago street.

Roberson’s life has been an odyssey of observation. Before he was a celebrated poet, he was a man of the elements. He worked in the Pittsburgh steel mills, served as a tank-man and diver for the Pittsburgh Aquazoo where he trained porpoises, and conducted research as a limnologist—a scientist of freshwater systems—in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and the reefs of Bermuda. He was a mountaineer who summited peaks in Peru and Ecuador, and a traveler who once motorcycled across the entire United States. These weren't just jobs; they were ways of seeing.

A Double-Jointed Syntax

His poetic style is often described by critics like Nathaniel Mackey as possessing a 'double-jointed syntax.' His lines flex and pivot, allowing a single phrase to belong to the sentence before it and the one that follows. This creates a sense of perpetual motion, mirroring the fluidity of the water he studied and the jazz-inflected rhythms of Thelonious Monk. Roberson famously told an interviewer in 2006, 'I’m not creating a new language. I’m just trying to un-White-Out the one we’ve got.'

One of his most enduring innovations is his reimagining of the pastoral. In his seminal 2006 book, 'City Eclogue,' Roberson breaks down the false binary between the 'natural' and the 'urban.' For him, the city is an ecosystem, and the sky is a shared roof. In the poem 'be careful,' from his earlier work, he demonstrates this meticulous, scientific care for the word as an object:

'i must be careful about such things as these
the thin-grained oak.
the quiet grizzlies scared
into the hills by the constant tracks squeezing
in behind them closer in the snow.
...
i must be careful not to shake
anything in too wild an elation. not to jar
the fragile mountains against the paper far-
ness. nor avalanche the fog or the eagle from the air.
of the gentle wilderness i must set the precarious
words.
like rocks.
without one snowcapped mistake.'

Critics have hailed his later work, such as 'To See the Earth Before the End of the World,' as a masterpiece of ecopoetics. He moves away from the romanticized 'I' of traditional nature poetry, choosing instead to focus on the 'visual field' where human history and geological time collide. In the title poem of that collection, he writes:

'the world
is mortality, the earth goes beyond us.
is the ours of cosmos.
is our hour of cosmos.'

For those looking to enter Roberson's world, the recommended starting point is the poem 'be careful.' It serves as a perfect primer for his work because it highlights his dual identity as both scientist and artist. It teaches the reader how to look closely, showing that the poet’s responsibility is to set words with the same precision a mountaineer uses to place their feet on a treacherous slope.

Today, Roberson is a recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Yet, despite the accolades, he remains a poet of the 'now,' still documenting the changing climate and the shifting urban landscape from his window. He reminds us that we are not separate from the earth; we are, as he puts it, 'nature's way of looking at itself.'