Meet Noah David Roberts

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Noah David Roberts. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Noah David below.

Hi Noah David, thank you so much for making time for us today. Let’s jump right into a question so many in our community are looking for answers to – how to overcome creativity blocks, writer’s block, etc. We’d love to hear your thoughts or any advice you might have.

In the summer of this past year I became really creatively blocked. There’s so much going on — at all times, everywhere — & I became inundated & overwhelmed. Knowing that I’d have a hard time writing, I did something I’ve never done in the past: I set myself up for failure.

Let me explain. Being blocked is not a failure. But if one sets out to write, & one does not, that’s a goal unreached. I knew I could do better at utilizing this non-writing focused time, & instead of frustrating myself at the keyboard constantly, I gave myself permission to ignore it, to procrastinate, to “waste time.” As a dedicated writer who usually produces quite a bit of work in short amounts of time (I wrote GUNK & SWARM in the same timespan — July & August, summer of ‘23), I came to realize the age old adage: sometimes not-working is working. I allowed myself to think about other things.

For the past eight years, I’ve been organizing literary events, if not weekly than monthly, sometimes both at once, featuring at performances, producing books, publishing poems, editing for literary magazines; I went back to school & also have been working in order to support all of this. This brought me directly into burnout, which led to a block. I was a University of the Arts student, & when my school shut down unexpectedly in the early summer, I lost my drive.

If creativity is a sponge, I had wrung mine dry; the best & most tried-&-true tested way of fixing this problem is to immerse oneself in living. The act of writing doesn’t just take place at the keyboard; it happens in the everyday. We all know this, this is day-one stuff. But it’s difficult to remember. This time around, it timed perfectly well with a writing retreat I began organizing in the spring of this year by name of World’s End. I planned this retreat alongside the inimitable Mac Chandler, another poet in Philadelphia who attended the same college as me. The retreat provided me with time to immerse myself in other people’s work, which aided my cause of beating the block.

But this is how I overcame writer’s block this time round; in essence, I set a timer, planned to take time away with intention. Now that time has run out, & again I must write, full-throttle.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I am a poet & literary organizer in the Philadelphia area. Since starting out as a poet in the Hudson Valley at the age of nineteen, I’ve released several collections of poetry, both self-released independently & published through different independent presses, not limited to Kith Books & Querencia Press. I’ve published many poems in many different magazines, not limited to Tinderbox Poetry journal, fifth wheel press, & Anti-Heroin Chic, & founded, hosted, & created poetry readings & poetic spaces as a way to foster creative community, a way to push the creative limits of what writers can do, as a way to lead poets into the experimental & often performance-based realms of what I believe interesting poetry to be doing nowadays. At current, I am the founder of the monthly poetry series Scribes, located at Tattooed Mom’s on the last Sunday of every month. This month features Julia Gwiazdowski & Leila ElManfaa, two wonderful poets in Philadelphia, & takes place on November 24th.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?

It’s difficult to distill an answer to this question into three items; these are in no particular hierarchical order.

I’d say one thing to get in touch with in becoming a creative is one’s tenacity; or, the hunger; or, the imperative obsession with one’s medium. This is what informs one’s creative output in volume, in my experience. The second quality, & arguably the most important, is a genuine love for the art form. I’ve seen poets who boast they don’t read poetry fade into the past; have seen writers dip their feet in &, upon learning that existing as this type of creative requires (yes, requires) a love for the medium, & therefore requires reading, have seen them drop. Painters look at art; filmmakers watch movies; writers must read. It’s naive & ignorant to thing one can be a writer in the modern world without reading & reading widely. The third is a riot-grrl, break-the-rules energy. I’m talking here specifically about poetry. Riot-grrl might have been a punk movement, but that ethos can be imbued anywhere. Poets must be bold. Something that makes good writing is rule breaking. It is resistance to the status quo, to a history of oppression at the hands of systems meant to lock away the compendium of craft with a capital C. I believe that one must break rules — syntax, grammar, diction, punctuation, rhyme, music, meter, syllabics, chime, etc. etc. — in order to be a successful poet in the modern landscape. This comes with its own set of drawbacks, complications, problems. There first must be rules to break.

My advice to folks early in their journey is to do the crazy thing. Release that book you’re nervous to release. Self-print a chapbook from your school’s printer. Publish a poem with typos. Get it out there. Once you rip that band-aid off, you will feel free & powerful enough to pursue deeper the art form. It’s all about putting oneself out there, experimenting, digging, finding one’s voice.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

As a writer who reads as if I’m intellectually starved, there are endless answers to this question, but the one that comes to mind for me is an anthology, not a craft book or novel. The book in question is “We Want It All: an Anthology of Radical Transpoetics,” edited by Andrea Abi-Karam & Kay Gabriel. The collection contains poems with titles like “Piss Sister” (by Hazel Avery; this poem had an especially intense impact upon me), “Abolish the Police,” by Harry Josephine Giles, & my personal favorite title, “harold mouthfucks the Devil” by Cyrée Jarelle Johnson. The anthology is furious, it is absurd, it is queer, it is revolutionary, it is vengeful int its way of looking, it is syntactically dense & thematically heavy while remaining a riveting portal into modern queer poetics & a densely important work politically.

My takeaway from reading this anthology & the work of those writers at large is that queerness & the oppression of queerness have their own personal syntaxes. Queer writing, I’d say, is often prosodic, which is a term that refers to the rise & fall of tonality in a line or, in simpler terms, the music of the stressed / unstressed syllable. Of course, I can’t state this dogmatically, & everybody’s work as different. Generalizations.

I believe that modern queer writing must be revolutionary & break things. One of those things we must break are the rules of language. They are ever-changing anyway, & there is no stasis in that.

Oppression is built into the granular structure of the English language. Much like the gender binary, there’s a socially acceptable “right way” & “wrong way” to approach writing poems. & much like the gender binary, true expression is found in breaking out of this box, busting those chains of those stupid formalities. Break everything that institutionalized poetry has set in stone. That’s what this book taught me to aspire towards: in the words of Abi-Karam, “I HAVE TOOLS TOO.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://noahdavidroberts.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.apocalypse.poet/

Image Credits

Personal photo: c.r. hooker
SCRIBES stamp (original)
Rendezvous reading: Sarah Joy Dunlap
House Poet reading: Mac Chandler
Fergie’s reading: Lindsay Hargrave (sidenote this is the photo with the sweater vest)