Greenfield poet and novelist Wilson Roberts is well known to many as their Greenfield Community College writing and literature professor, a position he held for 31 years. But Roberts has long written fiction and poetry and has returned to it with increased vigor since his retirement in 2001.
Roberts placed second in this year’s 25th Annual Poets Seat Poetry Contest with his poem, “Cider Day in Franklin County.”
With the 22nd Annual Franklin County Cider Days coming up November 4 through 6, featuring workshops, tastings, a supper and other events to celebrate “all things apple,” I’d thought I’d run that poem here but, after talking with Roberts, who showed up at The Brass Buckle with a folder full of more recent poems, I changed my mind.
Though we talked about his prize-winning poem, another of the poems in the folder, “At the French King Bridge,” took over the conversation. Roberts said he wrote it after someone he knew jumped from the bridge this summer.
“It’s really more of a statement than a poem,” Roberts says. “It’s a little didactic.”
“I always get confused about the word ‘didactic,’” I say. “That means you already know what you’re going to say when you start? Or it means ‘preachy’?”
“It’s a little preachy,” Roberts says of the poem.
“But I think the questions that you ask, the mundane questions, are very moving,” I say.
“They’re real,” Roberts replies.
We’re referring to the questions of where to park the car, whether or not to lock it, how to place a note, choosing which side of the bridge from which to jump.
“‘Death here is deliberate,’” I read, quoting from the poem. “That’s — What I almost said, well, I’ll just say it. That’s a killer line.”
“Yes it is,” Roberts says.
“And what I think is that — I may have had times in my life when I’ve been despairing,” I say. “But I’ve never been here.” I point to the poem.
“It’s not that I’m stronger than other people,” I say. “It’s something else, I don’t know.”
Roberts says, “That’s what was interesting, in playing with this, was … I made myself go there. I tried to put myself in that position. What would I be thinking of? Less, ‘What would I feel?’ But more, ‘What would I be thinking?’”
“Right,” I say. “The logistics, weirdly enough. It’s logistics.”
“Right,” Roberts agrees. “It is a very deliberate process.”
We look at one of the questions that the poem poses: “How long to stand on the ledge/Looking at the river…”
I tell Roberts, “The sort of naïve optimist in me likes to think if you stood long enough, you might not jump. But that might not be true, either.”
“I don’t know,” Roberts says.
Roberts talks of having read that cameras will be going up on the bridge soon, and then shows me another poem, this one a brutal narrative about a man who stomps on newborn kittens in a bag, thinking it is a faster, and therefore fairer, death than drowning.
“Both of these poems make me question the sentimental impulse,” I tell Roberts. “Which I really think we should question. The sentimental impulse in not in any way more redemptive than looking at things head-on. And maybe it is less so.”
“I agree,” Roberts says.
“Was this something you witnessed?” I ask.
“I didn’t witness it, but I knew a man who had done that,” Roberts says. “He was an old guy who drank a lot, lived in a trailer in the mountains (in North Carolina). The rest of it’s fiction.”
“That’s something I’ve tried to touch on from time to time,” I say, “Whether poems are autobiographical, or whether you should assume that they are.”
“I think that’s a common misconception,” Roberts says. “Poets wear a lot of different masks.”
Yet, Roberts never wants these masks to get in the way of his meaning, or confuse his readers.
He says that, “My intended audience would be people who might read a poem if it was posted on the wall of a gas station bathroom, or tacked to a telephone pole or left lying on a bench downtown.”
“Right,” I say. “The only thing to read at the bus station.”
“Right,” Roberts agrees. “It’s anti-New Yorker poetry, which I think is abominable, mostly.”
Roberts says that one of his biggest influences is the ninth-century Chinese poet Han-shan, or Cold Mountain, who, according to the various mythologies that have grown up around him, wrote his poems on rocks or attached them to trees or the walls of people’s homes.
Later, in a follow-up email, Roberts writes: “Among endless things I neglected to mention were my goals of trying to get the sound of the human voice into my poetry and my attempts at writing poetry that is accessible and speaks to readers who may not think of themselves as interested in poetry, at the same time offering visions that might challenge them. As a teacher I all too often had students who said they hated poetry. I believe the fault for that lies in the fact that all too many poets write for other poets and not for people.”
Teachers who “lecture on given poems as if they are revealing secrets to their students” are even more responsible for causing people to hate poetry, Roberts says, “ … ergo, students too often resenting what they refer to as hidden meanings.”
You can find both “At the French King Bridge” and “Cider Day in Franklin County” online at www.recorder.com.
Trish Crapo is a writer and photographer who lives in Leyden. She is always looking for poets, writers and artists to interview for her columns. She can be reached at: tcrapo@mac.com