Len Roberts: Poet

On the anniversary of Len Roberts’ death, I would like to reprint the tribute I delivered at his funeral service.

Memorial Service 5/31/07

Lipkin Theatre, NCCAC, Bethlehem, PA

It was in the mid-80s, perhaps ‘84, probably ‘85, that I first met Len Roberts. Ted Kloss, chair of the English Department at Lafayette College in Easton, PA was conducting a weekly poetry workshop and I was one of the community residents who attended regularly. One day Ted got sick and Len took his place.

I had submitted a couple of poems. One was about kite-flying with my children in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, the other was a war poem about a child in the ruins of a town in an island in the Philippines.

Len said that he liked the war poem, that writing political poetry is very difficult. After the workshop, Len told me that I should bring some of my poems to him at his office at the college. That I did. At that time, I was writing a sheaf of poems about Hiroshima. I still have a copy of the notes he had written at the time about 25 years ago. I have kept them like the other letters he had written to me over the years, mostly comments on drafts of poems I had sent him from wherever I was as I traveled the world.

Four years ago, as I packed my things to move to another house, I saw these letters again and re-read them.

These comments were not only meticulous, they were generous and gentle. Len would ask for details, suggest another word, or hint that perhaps there is another poem sitting behind what I had written. He would say something truly encouraging and mark certain lines that he liked. There was never a time when he was cruel or nasty. And always he was thoughtful and kind.

So over a period of more than two decades, Len helped me with my poetry. I sent him and his wife Nancy postcards – from Egypt, UK, Thailand, China, wherever I was. I visited him at his house, sometimes slept over. He would get a pizza or Nancy would cook, I would bring a bottle of red wine, Nancy would leave us alone, and Len and I would sit in the living room. One time we listened to Yoyo Ma, another time I showed a Tai chi DVD I had done and talked about my Taoist practices – Tai chi, acupuncture, internal alchemy, qigong. A favorite subject of his was his new project – building a house on an island in Nassau. Always his son Joshua was a concern and travels with Nancy was the topic of much laughter. Sometimes Len and I took a walk in the backyard where he had planted black walnuts and a grove of pine trees. One night, sitting in front of the fireplace, with a bottle of wine on the table, he read his favorite poems from Thomas Hardy and DH Laurence.

One summer afternoon, I brought him a new poem. Let’s think about it, he said and jumped in the water, did a few laps, and when he came back he had a few ideas to improve my poem. Water always seemed to invigorate him: he loved the sea and planned to spend his retirement at the home he was building in the islands.

We often wrote to each other, sometimes long letters, often just short notes. We read together in the Philipsburg Art Center, NJ. Here is our correspondence about a reading the two of us did at the Borders Books in Allentown, PA:

At 01:13 PM 3/28/00:

Dear Len,

Thank you for making me a part of that poetry reading at Borders. I truly

enjoyed doing it. The tea with you and the others was fun, too. Sometimes

I need a break from my otherwise solitary life and the regimen of

meditation, qigong and Tai chi chuan.

It’s easier now to do these things. I do bits and pieces often. I can go

out at any time of the day and do a sword or spear form like it’s not

really a routine but just the flow of the universe.

Breathe well!

Rene

Dear Rene,

I had a fine time, too, reading with you! One of my students who was there

praised and praised your reading presence as well as the poems. Thank you

for the kind dedication at the start, also. I am touched whenever I think

I have had anything to do with your fine poems.

I admire your practice and wish I could incorporate some of what you do

daily into my poetry life. But the world encroaches, snares, …

Hopefully this summer will open up new avenues. As well as provide time to

see you here!

All best,

Len

His poetry often explored and engaged the everyday life: none of the big issues of the world but the ordinary happenings in school, at home, in his life. He wrote about the tools of carpentry, the search for the best Christmas tree in the backyard, shopping at the grocery store, doing the laundry, shoveling snow. He talked about the ordinary objects in the house and neighborhood: the gold carp, copper frog, mocking bird mobile, crickets, the periwinkle. Many of the poems are about his childhood at a Catholic school or about alcoholism, recovery, his parents and his brother. Sometimes he wrote about his early sexual experiences, which were more funny and awkward than erotic.

Even if the poems dealt with the quotidian, they were often metaphors for a bigger, larger universe or symbols of existential conflicts. He wrote about a snapping turtle that wandered in his lawn:

… his departing hiss at me a warning,

I did not take lightly,

having seen those eyes before,

and that thick shell,

that reptile brain,

knowing even as I let him go

that he would be back again.

In a memorable letter-poem, to his friend poet Hayden Carruth, who was sick and dying in a hospital, Len wrote:

… and because I know you’re close enough

to death now so you feel its breath,

its stink you’ve written so often about,

old man who used to sit at our round

oak table those blue-gray dawns

to stare out at the pond, waiting

to catch just one more glimpse

of the great blue heron flapping,

clumsy, its prehistoric wings

as it rose over the telephone wires

and trees, into the mountain

that has no name.

One of my favorite poems “Talking to a Poison Sumac” recalls his older brother who went mad, was confined to the VA hospital for 24 years and received electric shocks treatment:

And I didn’t know why I was out there

thinking of his soft body I had not held

for more than twenty years, repeating

his story when I knew that nothing

I did or said mattered, that the sky

was powerless, and the sun setting

powerless, that the snow that started

to fall, the beautiful falling

itself, was nothing, the field, the world

the unlivable, burning stars, the emptiness

of it all contained here in one small human heart.

He did not use any big words. You understood every single word, every single sentence, because they referred to things that we know, things that are familiar, but somehow, there was something else there, something we had to decipher, something we had to translate, something much bigger than the things he seemed to be writing about.

And his long lines are something else again. You read through a whole poem non-stop, possibly in a single breath, as if the poet cannot stop the flow of his narrative, he has to take in the whole experience in one gulp. I tried the style – which my father perhaps influenced by Victor Hugo, also used back when I was in high school — and found it very effective.

The body of his work describes a life, from the grades to maturity, the slow transformation and redemption of a human being through the anguish and pain of growing up in a totally dysfunctional family, through separations and divorces, and nervous breakdowns and drunkenness, and self-inflicted suffering. Somehow, we know that poetry played a great part in that life, poetry shed light on the darkness, cleared the way for him

and fulfilled the destiny that was waiting like a hidden treasure in his heart.

I look at his attainment: selection of “Black Wings” for the National Poetry Series, grants from National Endowment of the Arts and Fulbright and awards from the Guggenheim. There is also an award for his translation of Sandor Csoori’s poems. Eight books of poetry and a couple of chapbooks. Decades as a teacher. It is a solid achievement.

When I read his obit in the local newspaper, I was struck dumb. I was standing at Wegman’s in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, paying for my lunch, and in front of the cashier, I could not hold back the tears. My family consoled me because they knew how much I loved and respected this man. He touched my soul and my life, both, and I’ve never been the same since the first time I met him at Lafayette College a quarter of a century ago.

Len Roberts’ books

Poetry:

The Disappearing Trick (posthumous)

The Silent Singer: New and Selected Poems

The Trouble-Making Finch

Counting the Black Angels

Dangerous Angels

Black Wings

Sweet Ones

From the Dark

Cohoes Theatre

Translations from Hungarian:

Waiting and Incurable Wounds (chapbook of Sandor Csoori)

Selected Poems of Sandor Csoori

Call to me in My Mother Tongue (chapbook of Sandor Csoori)