Evie Shockley on Ed Roberson ("Open / Back Up (breadth of field)")

Close Readings: Episode 14

One of the real thrills for me in launching this podcast has been discovering that people I don’t really know personally—but whose work I’ve long admired—have been listening. Imagine my delight, then, when I learned that Evie Shockley—poet, scholar, critic, and all-around poetry superstar—was a fan. And then the dream: we got to have a conversation about poetry. Evie came on the podcast to talk about the great Ed Roberson and a poem from his book City Eclogue, “Open / Back Up (breadth of field).” You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.

Ed Roberson is (among other things!) a nature poet, but, as Evie explains near the top of our episode, for Roberson, “there is no nature that is separate from culture.” Here’s the poem Evie chose for our conversation, where that conviction (and the interesting complications that follow from it) is fully on display:

An “open field” might seem a clear enough example of what counts as “nature,” but what about a park? (Incidentally, I’m reminded of the conversation I had with Katie Kadue about Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden,” where she offered the idea that the kind of cultivation that went into the creation and maintenance of a garden was a metaphor for the work performed by “nature poetry” itself.)

And what if the “park” in question is (merely?) “a block long park,” which, as Evie says in the episode, “already circumscribes this idea of openness”? That this “block long park” is described, from the beginning, as already “lost” suggests that it is in fact a version of that first garden, Eden, and that what we’re dealing with in this poem is a contemporary version of Paradise Lost.

The lost edenic world in this case seems to be an urban campus green, presumably the center of an intellectual and cultural community, and what it has been lost to is the “security” of the campus police—and the racial order they work to maintain. So on the one hand we have the idea of an “open field” (perhaps an allusion, as Evie suggests, to Charles Olson’s notion of “composition by field” or “open verse” in his manifesto “Projective Verse”), and on the other we have a park (not a field, and a park already circumscribed within a city block) and a verse form that is analogously delimited, constrained to the block-like units of stanza and sonnet.

Here’s what Evie has to say, near the end of the conversation, about the relation of circumscription of “nature” described by the poem and the poem’s navigation of its own “closed” form, the closed form of the sonnet:

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 show themselves affiliated with whiteness sufficiently. We have this poem that at once shows us a closed form in conversation with the idea of open form but focuses on race as the real closed form with which Roberson is concerned. Race is the closed form, and, to draw the circle complete: a life lived within the closed form of race teaches you to innovate in ways that allow you movement within the sonnet.

A breathtaking reading, and an exhilarating conversation for me. And I hope for you! I was so touched by Evie’s evident love for this poem and poet, and the seriousness with which she takes the work of criticism. After she recorded the episode with me, she (like so many of our poets) traveled to AWP, the annual conference of writers and publishers, where she got a chance to visit with her old friend, Ed Roberson, and to tell him about our conversation. Here they are, two greats of the poetry world.

Evie Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University and has just been named the winner of 2023 Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America. She is the author of five books of poetry, including, most recently, 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.” You can follow Evie on Twitter.

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