About Bill Roberts
About Bill Roberts, Poet
Why is old Bill Roberts (pictured here in the fall of 2007, about to vacuum up a wine-pear masterpiece of a dessert in a quaint restaurant in Sauternes, France) initiating this blog*, especially so late in life? Fair question. The answer, my friends, is simple: he’s eternally hungry. And probably because he likes to try new things, including stand-up recitations of his poetry in coffee houses, often to musical accompaniment an example. Maybe a CD or two will come out of that enterprise. Also, he’s putting together – nearly finished! – an e-book titled, “Sneaking Out On the Rent,” also the title of a poem published by Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century.
* Because I’m something of a wordsmith, I’m going to discontinue using the word blog, if you don’t mind. Will instead substitute website. For some reason, blog sounds like something unpleasant you step in, have trouble removing from your shoe.
Bill is retired again, for the 13th and possibly last time, though doubtful. He’s a nuclear weapons contractor who dreams of the day when all WMD (weapons of mass destruction) will be negotiated into extinction. Yes, he’s not fond of war, thinks of it only in terms of last-resort. When you consider that today’s nukes are a thousand and more times more powerful than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War Two, it’s easy to see why a nuclear conflagration would be disastrous. So, old Bill writes poetry about such things, as well as humor, nature (but mainly human nature), nostalgia harking back to his upbringing in Washington, D.C., animals, sports, characters he’s rubbed elbows with (JFK, LBJ, RFK, Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Nikita K., Dame Margot Fonteyn, even Bert Sugar (who’s he? – read the poem “Floored” to find out) and numerous others across the globe. He offers a free seminar on how to write a poem a day in fifteen minutes, then find the route to getting it published. He had 89 poems accepted for publication in 2008, plus 101 so far for 2009 (and still counting on February 10, 2010 since over a hundred poems are still out being considered).
His poems, about a thousand or so, have appeared in nearly two hundred online and small press magazines over the past fifteen years. There will be more added to this description in future editions. Please stay tuned. And do read poetry!
Some updated news. One of Bill’s poems (“Applying the Scientific Method”) has been nominated for online poem of the year (i.e., Best of the Net), courtesy of the editors of Thick With Conviction. And another (“Cruising On the Hudson”) has been nominated by Juanita Torrence-Thompson, Editor/Publisher of MOBIUS, The Poetry Magazine, for a 2009 Pushcart Prize. That said, I now know how Horatio Hornblower must have felt. Both nominated poems have been posted.
