Robert Roth: “In Our Essential Beauty And Defiance”

Hailed by Free Williamsburg for his rebellious, undiluted style reminiscent of Norman Mailer, Robert Roth’s poetry and assorted convention-rattling discourses on life, social justice, hierarchical presuppositions and many other subjects hits the senses like a stiff breeze at a time when exchanges over crucial issues too often get sidelined by fears of stoked, or even concocted sensitivities.  
 

Robert will be reading from Health Proxy (Yuganta Press, 2007) and Book of Pieces (2016) this Tuesday at Curley’s. Spanning 35 years of writing, his latest collection complements commentary and poetry with an interview and a libretto, and is released through And Then, his ad-free, reader-supported literary journal, which in the past has also published material by Rona D. Schenkerman and other PoemAlley members. 

Together with co-founder Arnold Sachar, Robert has used the annual (now in its third decade) as a platform to explore the ties between the individual and the political through relating experiences via art, photography, poetry or short prose. 

Robert currently resides in New York (check out this 2010 biographical interview with Dyske Suematsu on Vimeo) and likes to think of the PoemAlley community as “his home away from home”. 

The “Green Fuse” spring poetry celebration, a 2010 co-presentation of PA and Stamford’s Unitarian Universalist Congregation (Robert appears in the video highlights below at 5:29) is one of numerous area poetry activities to which he has contributed over the years:

You can get further details about Robert, his writing and social observations, as well as And Then here; reach Robert for information on ordering the latest issue at roblroth@gmail.com.

An Unapologetic Pride In The Face Of Time

Tonight’s featured speaker, Robert Roth is based in New York and was born in Jackson Heights, Queens in 1943. A past participant in PA events in the Stamford area, Robert is the author of Health Proxy (Yuganta Press, 2007) and is co-editor with Arnold Sachar of And Then, an annual magazine of poetry, short prose narratives, art and photos, which has published the work of several Curley’s poets over the years.

In addition to sharing selections from his book, Robert will also discuss the evolution and continuing mission of his magazine, which, after 26 years of publication, is being recognized in literary circles for its radical inclusiveness and focus on the connection between the personal and the political—a prospect that once seemed elusive in “On the Ever Increasing Difficulty of Selling And Then”, Robert’s 1998 essay on the threatened supplanting of physical periodical media by the Internet.

Covering several decades over the course of a creative life beginning in the sixth grade, fueled by everyday experiences and thoughts on managing life, work and conscience before the ever-heavier awareness of one’s finiteness, Health Proxy embodies a quiet but brave impatience for the Easter Bunny-like pretenses that shield us from the challenges implicit in direct awareness of how things really are and the uncertainty of where we are heading. J. Stefan-Cole, in his 2008 review for Free Williamsburg, sees Robert as “…Not a tepid salesman of the self, but one to expose the good, the bad and the not so pretty.”

Good examples of his easy-going stoicism are this commentary he makes in an interview about how stronger community ties of past decades made it easier to live “decently poor”, compared with today’s more unforgiving social/economic climate and a glib description in the 2007 reading below from Health Proxy of his tenacious cat’s frail but claw-deployed final days, wherein her owner agrees with the veterinarian to “let her be killed” (as opposed to be being “put to sleep”):

“Time Stand Still”, by the 2015 Allan Waters Humanitarian Award-winning prog-rock trio, Rush (now into their fourth decade), makes for a sympathetically frank and affecting meditation on the regrets and joys of life’s passage: