Andrew Michael Roberts
Andrew Michael Roberts is the author of the poetry collections good beast from Burnside Review Books and something has to happen next, which was awarded the Iowa Poetry Prize, from University of Iowa Press. He lives with his wife Sarah in Portland, Oregon, where he works as a cardiac nurse and frequents the library by bicycle. He has also penned two chapbooks, Dear Wild Abandon and Give Up. He is the recipient of a national chapbook fellowship from the Poetry Society of America and a distinguished teaching award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
What is your creative process? Are you a night owl or an early bird? Are you in a writing group or a lone wolf?
I work nights as a cardiac nurse here in Portland, so I write when I can between 12-hour shifts with the broken-hearted and days of vague sleep. This vampire lifestyle makes me a lone wolf writer. But during my four free days a week, I’m tenacious about the art. I come from the William Stafford school of writing for the love of the creative moment, and I write every day, trying (trying!) to divest myself of judgment and allow the generative process to fulfill itself. My wife, who is an artist, reads my poems, and has wonderful insights. She is my faithful reading group.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Velo, which is my bicycle racing magazine, The Once And Future King by T.H. White, Merwin’s collected translations, an anthology of Japanese death poems, Frank Herbert’s Dune, Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (again), Leaves of Grass (perpetually), and Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You.
What are some of your favorite books of all time?
When I was twelve, I read The Lord of the Rings and was forever changed. When I started writing poetry in earnest, James Tate’s The Lost Pilot guided me, as did Sherman Alexi’s early work. The poems of Tomas Transtromer sustain me of late. But if I were banished to a desert island with the choice of only one book, it would be a difficult choice between the collected poems of Frank O’Hara and those of Emily Dickinson.