ISBN13: 978-0-9796509-2-3; $15.00

by Richard Robbins

In this powerful collection of new poems, award-winning author Richard Robbins traverses hidden landscapes of memory and the American West to conjure forgotten vistas of a country’s dreams. Evocative, haunting, and compelling, Other Americas explores the back roads and intersections of private history and public life — set against a vast terrain of rugged beauty and mystery. Robbins summons a cast of visionaries and ghosts seeking promises of the past, while scanning uncharted, uncertain horizons ahead. Stunning language, stirring heart.

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A Conversation With Richard Robbins

Minnesota poet Richard Robbins and Blueroad Press editor John Gaterud recently talked about Rick’s new book, Other Americas, which is just off the press and now available.

Q: Describe the genesis of Other Americas, your latest collection, and some of the themes you’re exploring in the book.

I’ve always been interested in the connection between landscape and character: the way we imprint upon a landscape, the way the environment shapes us. And much of my poetry has been in conversation with my surroundings—enough so that people will sometimes describe my work as “nature poetry,” which drives me crazy. Other Americas began to take shape in my mind as a book that would be organized like a map, with four imaginary corners of the American West as its borders/sections. The poems would speak from those different corners. Some of that structure still remains, but the book has made room for the last poem, “Rain,” which really allows itself to travel all over the literal and imaginary map as a way of making meaning.

It’s impossible for me to think of people apart from scene—my memory of them, including my memory of earlier selves, is always in the context of some definite place—and my sense of history operates much the same way. My poems try to respect place as the stage of human and psychological drama. As I talk about the petroglyphs outside of Albuquerque, for instance, I’m connecting the personal concern of the speaker with the magnetism of a place that has brought hundred of others there first, in other times, to make their individual marks on stone. So I think everything happens somewhere, and the somewhere is not incidental.

Q: Southern California—specifically, Los Angeles, where you grew up—provides the backdrop for a number of poems. The sunburnt hills, smog, sprawl, neighborhoods, streets, flowers, beaches, even the weather, all contribute to create a certain vibe against which the poems unfold. California has always enjoyed an aspect of “the other” in national life. What in your mind (and experience) makes it so?

California for me represents a lot of things. It’s the end of the West, for example, where the American Dream that promises individuals the privilege to escape their pasts, to remake themselves, comes suddenly to a dead stop. California is the literal edge of a continent, where a figurative traffic of American Dream reaches gridlock. In some, this leads to cynicism and despair, as in “The Day of the Locust” or “Chinatown.” In others, it leads to a dream-making disconnected from the landscape, as in the entertainment industry. All these people seeking new histories, new selves, results in one of the most diverse societies in our country, which can be extremely scary for some, and exhilarating for others. So there’s an incredible optimism found there, in concentrated form, even though we can find that optimism anywhere in our country. It’s what makes Americans American.

Los Angeles is a powerful image for all this: as a city, it keep sprawling, uncontainable. To survive, it must capture resources from as far away as the snowpack of the Rocky Mountains. Its climate is heavenly. Its beaches renew themselves with each high tide. Some of the people think they will live forever. But the hills are ready to catch fire at any minute, as are the poorest parts of town. The sun can kill you, or turn your skin to leather. It’s literally and psychologically as far away as possible from the decaying cities of the East, although its police force is known for corruption. L.A. is a complex, inexhaustible character. My relationship to it will never be settled.

Q: Other Americas is also a road book, taking readers to many places off the beaten track. One theme traces rootlessness as part of national identity and culture. Talk a bit, if you will, about travel in your own life, as well as longing, wanderlust, and serendipity in these poems.

I come from a family of Teamsters on one side and railroad people on the other. Travel, to us, is natural as breath. For some of us, it’s the way we think best, when we’re moving. Even though we may feel rooted in specific places—for my family, that would be Colorado, Iowa, Idaho, Utah, then California and Montana—moving across the earth has been a way we stay connected to places, and fill in the blanknesses between them, as if we stitched threads in an invisible fabric that, at some future moment, would reveal our personal histories.

Q: Lots of poems about family, too—that is, how personal history intersects with larger public places and people. Many pieces feature an unnamed narrator recalling past scenes and events, in which loss haunts the landscape, while searching for answers to unresolved questions. Yes/no?

As a poet, I’m interested in how the local can locate the universal, so my mixing of family details with details of the culture at-large is a way of trying to write in the direction of some broader relevance. The third-person narrator allows me to use personal details while at the same time trying to discourage the easy inference that these are all “true” or confessional poems. And yes, loss sometimes haunts these poems, but I’m less interested in the reader thinking about my personal losses as I am in hoping the reader will see larger historical and cultural losses that might be along the edges.

Q: The book’s title poem, “Other Americas,” features a catalog of images and scenes from across the country: a lament, in part, about unfulfilled dreams or forgotten places. It also summons Walt Whitman—directly addresses him, in fact. Without tipping your hand too much, comment on some the threads running through the piece.

Whitman is America’s great oracle when it comes to American experience. His totem animal might as well have been the locomotive, so much is he consumed with energy and movement and the great diversity of peoples and ways of life. Behind Whitman’s dream of “democratic vistas,” though, is a history of genocide, theft, and violation of the earth that has to be reconciled, ultimately, with our human promise. The oracle’s pronouncements are always two-sided. I think Whitman gets it. I’m not sure we do.

Q: Who are some of the poets and writers you admire?

I’m pretty ecumenical. The five I will name today are William Stafford, James Wright, Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Theodore Roethke. They all write from the heart, from definite and differing places, sometimes internal, and they are not charmed by their own intelligence.

Q: You often write about “everyday” matters and occurrences—or so they seem on the surface. For instance, in your other recent book, Radioactive City [Bellday Books, 2009], you have a poem titled “Paperweight,” based on a simple object (presumably) sitting on your desk. Of course, nothing is “simple,” as the poem shows beautifully. Talk a bit, if you will, about sources of inspiration in your writing “process.”

I almost always start a poem with an image or a phrase that interests me or has the promise within it of some music that will follow. Another way of saying this is that I always try to start with attention rather than theme or idea. So I’m very accustomed to have a poem grow from my looking at a single thing, like that paperweight. I’m trying to honor whatever unspoken impulse within me drew my gaze to that thing in the first place—an impulse that might somehow lead me, through language, to a poem that will connect that concern with the world.

Q: And fishing. Lots of fishing—the art, science, nature, pursuit, sport, and way of life. Care to comment?

Not really an art for me, more of a meditation. Fishing generally happens in beautiful places, with the quiet of the mind and the loudness of water conversing with each other. And I like the taste of trout, especially, that small gift from the water.

Q: Finally, what’s one of your favorite drives? You know, if you could get in your car tomorrow morning and hit the road, where would you head…?

I haven’t been on this road for more than twenty years, but this summer I think I’ll drive U.S. 93 north of Twin Falls, Idaho, and into Montana. Much of it is the Salmon River drainage. The drive starts in the lava plains of southern Idaho and ends on a narrow highway over Lost Trail Pass. Near the summit, a new highway breaks east toward the Big Hole Battlefield and the town of Wisdom. From Wisdom, you could go anywhere. It could take you weeks to get back home.

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[Author photo by John Cross, with Minnesota artist Brian Frink's paintings inspired by Rick's "Key Fallen to Blue" seven-part crown of sonnets, from Other Americas, in background. Wisdom photo by Abbey Gaterud.]

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