What they’re saying about Paper Anniversary

“Much of the best American poetry is local in origin but national or international in significance. Think of Frank O’Hara’s New York, James Wright’s Ohio, Ted Kooser’s Nebraska. Bobby Rogers says in a poem ‘all art is folk art, made with whatever is at hand,’ and his poems are set mostly in Memphis and elsewhere in the Middle South. Like all good poems, though, they travel to large subjects: the limits of language, love and its absence, joy.”—Ed Ochester, 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize judge

“There is something in American poetry that might be called the book of the small town or, equally, the tale of the good family; or, if you like, the American Grafitti Suite. Poems that discover life’s bonuses in new love, wise parents, old books, venerable nature, and the mysteries of all that endures in the face of the viciousness no life escapes—are, well, worth the wait. That’s how I feel about Paper Anniversary. His poems are full of the best news, the kind the soul, as W. C. Williams attested, can get nowhere better than in the life of the lively mind. I think any reader will find this an auspicious, welcome arrival.” —Dave Smith

“In his superb Paper Anniversary, Bobby Rogers is a near mystic of the domestic because love of family and landscape is connected to the eternal—and if not the eternal, our longing for love to last. Rogers is a meditative poet, then, one who knows language and memory are inadequate to hold love in an abiding present: ‘But ownership is the last lie/we tell ourselves—nothing goes unshared.’ So his moving, widely thoughtful, and commodious poems are full of joy tinged with elegy.”—Andrew Hudgins

“Combining a sprawling contemporary colloquialism with the aesthetic yearnings of a consciousness that seeks to understand itself through poetry, Paper Anniversary reminds us of the enduring power of narrative. In this postmillennial era when meaningful human voices grow increasingly less audible and more frustratingly inarticulate, can there be anything more important than that?” —Kate Daniels

“In ‘Paper Anniversary’s’ dense texture of memories, there isn’t a cheap epiphany or false moral, no matter how deeply you probe.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“[Rogers’] lines unroll into the ear with the music of a storyteller and the rhythms of a finely crafted bentwood rocking chair.”—Book Punch Reviews

 

Winning Ways, Introducing Bobby C. Rogers: poet; craftsman by Leonard Gill

 

It's been a long time in the making," Bobby C. Rogers, age 45, says. "Good to finally get the book out. And the call I got from Ed? That was the phone call you want to get."

" "Ed" is poet Ed Ochester, and he was calling Rogers to say he had good news: Rogers' manuscript, Paper Anniversary, had been awarded the prestigious Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for 2009 — a prize given annually by the University of Pittsburgh to a first full-length book of poetry, with publication of that winning manuscript by the university's press.

Which puts us where things stand now: official publication this week of Rogers' debut collection of 35 poems, most of them set in West Tennessee or Memphis, every one of them signaling a talent in our midst — a talent at home observing (and enlarging upon) the lunchtime scene inside the Barksdale or a Jerry Lee Lewis show inside Bad Bob's Vapors Club; hearing the nighttime sirens of Memphis and the strain of FedEx engines overhead; or reflecting on the uneven sidewalks of Midtown underfoot and the darkened four-squares lining Carr.

At home too: recalling the natural sights and sounds and the very air associated with small-town West Tennessee or recalling a Christmas day spent, during Rogers' student days, in Marseilles; another day spent "burning" a house of its exterior paint; the look of snowfall, sunlight, and shadow. And then the following: doubts as to language's ability to capture the things of this world or to adequately convey the innermost self.

"What we do is collect and assemble, dosed up with caffeine and whatever else/ might nerve us/ to shape the world into something orderly and tellable. It's all artifice," Rogers writes in "Anagnorisis." It all depends on words. (Or when words fail us, silence.) But small comfort there, because, as Rogers observes in "Winter": "Words go corrupt and settle and/ shift/ from the plumb meanings you once nailed them to." And so, as the poet wishes they could: if only language could share in the certainties of sound carpentry — the tools of carpentry recurring throughout Paper Anniversary: a surform tool, a chalk line, a whetstone, fluting gouges and mortise chisels, a jack plane. The object, in carpentry as in poetry: craftsmanship and accuracy.

"I've always seen the world in terms of words," Rogers answers to the question of when he began writing. "I grew up in the town of McKenzie in West Tennessee, and I spent a lot of time on front porches, among extended family, listening to stories. That's how time passed. That's how time was given meaning."

But as Rogers puts it in his acknowledgments, it was Marilyn Kallet who's "to blame for all this."

It was as an undergraduate at UT-Knoxville that Rogers worked with Kallet, a poet who gave him the freedom to take his work less seriously. And yet, it was Rogers' time in Knoxville followed by the MFA program at the University of Virginia (learning from Charles Wright and others) that was seriously important — "important," he says, "to be around serious poets, serious minds thinking about poetry."

Rogers' poems have appeared in numerous literary reviews over the past 15 years. He is the recipient of the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. And he today commutes from Memphis to Jackson, Tennessee, to teach at Union University. But he's not a "poetry scene kind of guy," he admits, though he makes a point of attending local readings.

After earning his master's at Virginia, Rogers headed not to New York or Boston, as many of his classmates did, but to Memphis. It's where he and his wife Rebecca Courtney, an architect, and their children call home. It's, he says, a good place for him to be.

"I've always wanted not to be considered a regionalist, but it seems I am," Rogers says. "Ed Ochester in his blurb on the back of my book comments on that, tries to defuse the charge, expand my reach. But I'm happy to be one — a regionalist — now that I think about it."

And now that I have the opportunity, I'd like, in one respect, to prove the poet wrong — wrong that Rogers should write in "In Season" that: "I'm not sure I shape a damn thing, the concussions of the hammer/ more noise/ than ringing." The poems in Paper Anniversary do indeed "ring" — clear, strong, and true.