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CLICK HERE for a PDF of the Winter Methow Valley Arts Magazine

Luminous Moments: The Poetry of Linda Robertson

By Marcy Stamper, photos by John Hanron

Poet Linda Robertson has always been attracted to the sound of language, to its rhythms and its cadences. Growing up in San Diego, Robertson and her mother regularly took walks on the beach, which were made all the more special because her mother recited poetry while the surf crashed around them. “I learned how to listen early on,” she said. “I loved that my mother would recite these wonderful poems.”

Robertson also recalls being captivated by the sounds of church Latin in her youth. Even though she didn’t understand the words, the rhymes and the rising and falling meter of the ancient texts seemed particularly expressive. “I’m so in tune to sounds,” she said. “When I choose words, I always have a dictionary and a thesaurus—I’m using them for the sounds and the meaning of the words.”

This infatuation with both language and the rhythms of nature became a powerful, essential theme in Robertson’s life, guiding virtually everything she does. Whenever she walks in the mountains or watches the play of shadows outside her window, she creates a word bank, a list that serves as a record of what she saw, smelled, and heard. “It’s like taking a photo of a place, but with the senses—a wren, blue sky, an eagle—and writing it all down,” she said. “That’s the treasure chest—an authentic sense for a poem.”

That keen observation is evident in this verse from “Early March”:

Perhaps it is the scent of soil, finally
exposed against the south foundation of the house
that summons me to sit
among copper-colored shrubs, abundant
with swelling leaf buds.

Robertson draws on many techniques to convey her connection with the natural world. She may follow an exercise she learned in a writing workshop, in which participants were asked to write down their 20 favorite words and use them in a poem. People familiar with Robertson’s poetry and her ability to evoke the immediacy and intimacy of nature might be surprised to find her top 20 contained deceptively ordinary terms like blue, dusk, and wind. “The magic is in how we use them,” she said. “You can take a word like ‘blue’ and write about ‘blue wind.’”

Similarly, pondering questions such as “What does the river remember?” or “What is the mountain dreaming?” encourage an unpredictable way of seeing and writing and stimulate more subconscious ideas. Robertson also intentionally thinks about where a poem is heading or work on a metaphor as she is drifting off to sleep, trusting that the right word or phrase will come to her in the early morning. “It’s a magical period between dreamtime and waking up—it’s a very creative time,” she said.

Her daily walks also provide endless material. “I’ll see or hear something and it just makes a little mark on me—for example, that tree. Usually I’ll come up with the first line of a poem—that’s where it starts. It’s telling stories about the land. I think that the land holds stories in footprints, scat, snake prints,” she said.

One can see her deep identification with these stories in “Entreaty”:

Let me be the tree
that stands outside your window
transformed:
skin to bark, arms to branches.

Robertson has taught creative writing in schools for a decade. “Young people write incredible poems,” she said. “I love to give them the experience of words, the opportunity to create a world. I believe in the power of encouragement. For kids who think they don’t like to write poetry, I show them they can write about a subject like basketball.”

Robertson has gone back to school herself, for a Master of Fine Arts program in poetry at Chatham University, where most work is done remotely but involves intensive interaction with other students and teachers, as well as short stints on the Pittsburgh campus.

She finds her writing is already evolving through critiques with teachers and students and the exposure to hundreds of pages of poetry each week. It has also brought urban scenes and vocabulary into her writing, although the images that emerge are still the sensory ones—reflections on glass or the vivid crimson plumage of a cardinal.

While Robertson’s imagery is drawn from the natural world, her poetry has also always encompassed personal and family experiences. In “The Summer I Was Ten,” Robertson wrote about the 56 days she spent in the hospital recovering from a severe leg fracture. The intimacy of the account made it the first of her poems to resonate with her father, who had lived through the Depression and initially questioned the economic wisdom of her avocation as a poet. “He loved the poem,” she said. “It brought back memories and details for him.”

“You never know the impact a poem can have on somebody—it can provide solace, inspiration,” she said. “Poetry is really condensed, essential language. You can say a lot in a few words.” “One of my mentors says, ‘Writers should be looking for—and creating—luminous moments.’”

Other themes that Robertson has started to explore through her poetry are loss and afterlife. Robertson’s son, Evan, died in an avalanche four years ago at the age of 20, and she finds herself beginning to grapple with the loss in a more public way, through her writing. One recent poem describes the raptors that hover in trees and soar on thermals above her house, a reminder that Evan is always present. “You have to have a lot of courage if you’re going to write about this,” she said. “You have to tell the truth.”

“Some people can’t ever write about these things,” she acknowledged. “I need to be able to look at how life goes on and how the world offers itself to me in beautiful ways. It’s a solace and inspiration that I’m trying to be open to.”

Robertson published a book of 21 poems, Reply of Leaves, in 2002, which focused on seasonal rhythms, the natural world, and reflections on family, but she sees her next project, which will come out of her graduate program, as much broader. “My themes are changing and getting bigger. It’s very personal,” she said. “I’m not just sitting down to write a poem. There’s no point in writing without a level of intention or involvement.”

Still, poetry is fundamentally extremely intimate for her. “I’m really the only one who cares if I write this poem,” she said. “That’s reason enough. It’s not for an audience or to be published. I love to write poetry—it’s really the language of my life.”

CLICK HERE for a PDF of the Methow Valley Arts WINTER Magazine

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