Len Roberts is the author of nine books of poetry, including Counting the Black Angels, The Trouble- Making Finch, Black Wings, and Sweet Ones. Individual poems have appeared in Boulevard, Partisan Review, POETRY, Quarterly West, American Poetry Review and many other prestigious publications.
Len Roberts has a Ph.D. from Lehigh University. He is a professor of English at Northhampton Community College in Bethlehem, PA. and a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh's Writing Project.
Hayden Carruth has said of his work, "When I read Len Roberts I feel my heart being broken and put back together again." C.K. Williams has said, "There is always in Roberts's poems a gentle sensibility, a probing intelligence and an acute attentiveness to what is urgent in our lives." The late Allen Ginsberg characterized his poetry as "grounded in native, humane, and objective perceptions."
Roberts started writing poetry at 28 as a way to cope with his father's death. A year later, he read some of those poems at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. Allen Ginsberg heard him read and liked his work so much that he got Robert's manuscript to Bill Mohr, a Beat Generation poetry editor, who published Roberts' first book, "Cohoes Theater," in 1981.
Roberts not only is a prolific and widely published poet, but he continues to teach the elements of poetry to both teachers of writing and even very young students, characterizing that as one of the best things he does.
We Sat, So Patient
We Sat, So Patient in that third grade class, learning the numbers of days, weeks, months, repeating the numbers as they flashed in the air, forming the curved 3, the angular 4, the easy 1, counting the rain drops that wriggled down the gray window, counting the hearts and cars on our desks, our crayons, Ann Harding and Richie Freeman making 2, 10 on each side for the spelling bee, counting Sister Thomas said 5 of us would not reach 20, showed the chart where children dropped off into 0, the blue zone of no return that Jimmy Legasse whispered, making us laugh. Looking around, I thought Al Aldon, Jackie Schuster, Margaret Blake who already coughed blood on her gold glasses when she spoke, the thin girl just come over from Germany, and Ray Martineau who had no lunch, the zigzagged white lines of lice forming mazes on his crewcut head. And the good Sister herself, number 6, at least 40 years older than us, her rosary beads clicking as she walked down the aisle like the Angel of Death, black wings spread, brushing our faces, our arms, wafting blackness reminding us that God was watching and could tell who knew 9 times 9, 144 divided by 12, telling us it was God's will that we die, Jimmy Gleason pulling up his white sock on a leg he would not have 10 years later, Barbara McGill raising her hand with another correct answer, the same hand so whitish-blue as she lay in her eight-grade coffin, Jimmy Amyot and Donald Wilcox quietly passing drawings of naked women back and forth, the car they would die in revving unheard in that classroom where we yelled out 360, 225, 32, 0, 10, waiting for the split-second flash of red, yellow and blue cards beneath the slow, steadily clicking clock.
Gift Shop in Pecs, Hungary
They paint yellow and red flowers on the white vases, with pale green leaves and stems, some with dark blue centers, three dark blue circles with X's. The embroidery, too, and the small carved walnut boxes, flowers jutting our everywhere, not one Jew on the train to Auschwitz, which is not so far from here, not one young wife with two children dragged from her side. And African masks, the death mask, the life mask, the mask of love chiseled in jade-like stone, so heavy I could hardly pick it up to see the naked bodies, the veils covering and uncovering them. I almost bought the many-armed Lady from India, the Wise Fool from Vietnam, I almost paid the full thousand forints for the hand-made Polish moccasins with the pointed toes and small beaded white horses, smaller men with sabers drawn as they rode off the stitched edges. I had to lift them all to feel their weight, I had to bring them close so I could see the tiny hands and feet, the curve of an arm, the straight nose, the buckle on his shoe, the gilly- flower on hers, I had to feel the heaviness of their dreams, the foolishness of their hopes as they dipped black bread into the bowls, as they snuffed out the candles name by name by the tiny carved altar. I had to bend to hear their silence as they bowed from the waist and curtsied, stiff-legged, without a single moan, not one face turned away, not one hand raised as they began their strange dance on the dustless shelves.
The Moment
Walking the three tiers in first light, out here so my two-year-old son won't wake the house, I watch him pull and strip ragweed, chickory, yarrow, so many other weeds and small flowers I don't know the names for, saying Big, and Mine, and Joshua -- words, words, words. Then it is the moment, that split-second when he takes my hand, gives it a tug, and I feel his entire body-weight, his whole heart-weight, pulling me toward the gleaming flowers and weeds he loves. That moment which is eternal and is gone in a second, when he yanks me out of myself like some sleeper from his dead-dream sleep into the blues and whites and yellows I must bend down to see clearly, into the faultless flesh of his soft hands, into his new brown eyes, the miracle of him, and of the earth itself, where he lives amont the glitterings, and takes me.
Learning Our Place in the Hierarchy of Angels
Jon Dumas wanted to be a Throne,
a fiery wheel
sent by God to bring justice to
us all,
which meant beating up Dougie
Freeman, the class bully,
and no more spelling bees or
math,
while Gabriella Wells politely
asked if she could be a Virtue
and work miracles on the earth,
help Jimmy Lagust take his braces
off,
give Dorothy Blake a new stomach
so she could stop throwing up
into the black bucket
filled with sawdust,
and I wildly waved my hands
to be a Power,
stopping the demons from overthrowing
the world,
my father on his last drunk,
my mother kicked out of Boney's Bar
where she pressed herself
into the dark,
thunder in my left fist,
lightning in my right
as I rose from that third-grade seat
to assume my place
with the other eight who were holding
orbs or swords
some singing Holy, Holy, Holy
while others kept the stars fixed
and bright,
all nine of us flapping our wings
hard
in a circle around the emptiness
Sister Ann kept pointing to, insisting
That, That was God.
The Goldfinch, My Father,
in the Forsythia
He is going on forever in the newly brilliant forsythia, gold blur in yellow, ready to take on the grackles and robins if he must, tough little bastard that he is, and he will not shut up. Of course he's you again, left hand six inches from your left cheek, right hand ready to snap the wrist, send me reeling in that backyard grass while old man Tremblay watches from his window and shouts Out! I finally learned to box before you died of that rotten heart, clipping your ear anytime I wanted,-- you could make a comeback, get a woman, some money, a job-- always falling for the second feint that got you open, wide-mouthed, like that morning you were lifted into the ambulance and wailed away, knocked out on the spot by the very right cross you'd always warned me about, the one that shot straight from the heart.
©Copyright,
Len Roberts
Permission of Len Roberts