Charles Edwin (Ed) Roberson (born December 26, 1939) is a distinguished American poet, celebrated for his unique diction and intricacy in exploring the natural and cultural worlds.
[1] Roberson, the oldest of four boys,[2] was born and raised in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,[3] drawn to visual art and aspiring to be a painter.
[6] His travels were plenty and stimulating for his poetry; he also visited West Africa (Nigeria) in 1980 and the Amazon jungle and the Andes in South America (Peru, Ecuador) on two climbing trips with the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh, in 1963 and 1975.
[5][8] Roberson then transitioned to an administrative position there in the 1980s when his tenure was denied - the same time his father died of cancer, his marriage was dissolving, and his writings were being turned down.
[2] During his thirty-year tenure at Rutgers, he held various administrative positions while continuing to indulge his passion for adventure travel, poetry, and motorcycle journeys.
His background in earth sciences, particularly limnology, gave him a profound appreciation for the natural world, reflected in the precision and vivid imagery of his poetry.
Engaging with literary traditions and drawing from his extensive travels, including journeys to Nigeria and motorcycle trips across the United States, Roberson's poetry reflects a spirit of adventure and a deep respect for diverse landscapes.
This disruption takes shape through fragmented narratives and the skillful use of enjambment to imbue end-words with multiple meanings, invoking a spatiotemporal freeze-frame moment, momentarily suspending space and time (Horton, 2015).
The "magic hour," particularly drawing from cinematography terminology, captures these moments of fragmented distraction, akin to a camera's shutter, sequestering and then releasing images.
The spatiotemporal moments within Roberson's poetry present a multifaceted examination of history and the fallacies inherent in the concept of skin color, shaped by social constructs, all within a language that is both agile and revealing.
In "Chromatic Sequences," the spatiotemporal phenomena unfold, allowing space, time, and connotative meanings to converge through distraction, which restructures the narrative based on polemic structures.
Throughout his poetry, Roberson employs history and race as grounding points to incite moments of distraction, reflection, and potential epiphany through memory.