Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Corman-Roberts.

Hi Paul, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
I came to be a poet through a boatload of reluctance. I had always wanted to be a playwright, or a screenwriter, or a novelist; and I could never be too proud that the first poems I ever wrote were meant more to impress others I wanted to seduce. Cursed with what some might call “beginner’s luck” after a couple of years of doing this, and that the “method” didn’t always work so well, I I began wanting to write poems for myself as a short term means to relieve the need for self-expression that the long form mediums did not provide in the short term.

Yet I still didn’t learn from that. I was stubborn and continued to see myself either as a screenwriter and ultimately a filmmaker. But I could not banish poetry from my life, hard as I might try. Again and again my pen and paper were continually drawn to the short form. And being stubborn I never saw myself being anything more than an artist who constantly producing art as a commodity, art as a piece of myself I was willing to put on the market thinking that it would be a path forward to fame and “independence.”

What I did possess naturally, along with “the gift of gab” was a compulsive need to organize. One might think this would complement the task of commericializing one’s creativity…but one would be wrong.

Over time it was other people that I was close to, family and friends that I wish were family (and obviously in their way are) who insisted I was one who absolutely needed to embrace the role and path of being a poet. I was blessed to have people who loved me who could seem for who I was more clearly than I could.

I eventually acquired a double masters degree (MA/MFA) in the field of Poetics (“how is that ever going to help me become financially independent?”) and began organizing live reading events, as the enabling of the live performance medium has proven to me to be more and more of a place where the dynamic of poetry can lead to immediate, nay even revolutionary action. This is not a task for the faint of heart. You must be willing to embrace the notion that art, and particularly poetry, is only democratic for those who have the privilege of literacy, and even then, that literacy is not necessarily itself a guarantee of inspiration or motivation. But you can’t get to inspiration or motivation without literacy either.

The event that most allowed me to embrace, and find unmitigated joy in the tedious process of becoming a person of poetic letters, was becoming a teacher, and learning how to communicate with large groups of people who don’t necessarily wish to be communicated with. So, so many young teachers and young artists are discouraged by the hard work and ego death that go along with doing work that earns money, while seeming to stifle creativity. But for those who are truly bitten by the flame of creativity, regardless of “ability” the work is always worth it. Persistence and stubbornness, when properly applied, are every bit as valuable as being “gifted.”

Learning to be a teacher, something I never saw myself as being good at or destined for, is now as much a part of my later stages of life as being a poet. I’m not in a place where I will ever be able to disentangle the two fields. And yes, I will have to work very, very hard for the rest of my life. But it could be so much worse, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I don’t know that it can ever be a smooth road. The smoother the road, the fewer the lessons learned, and the fewer the lessons learned, the less wisdom one has stored up in their “experience bank.”

Who can count the struggles along the way? My mid-life crisis in my forties was definitely a crisis…I almost stopped writing altogether while losing myself in a dead end job that caused long term damage to my family life. The inevitable long term unemployment and crushing debt of a mortgage that forced us to sell our home and likely prevent us from “owning” property ever again.

And of course, rejection, after rejection, after rejection, in both the academic and grassroots communities of literature and poetry. Not everyone can steel themselves for a life of constant rejection. It may be that we have to kill some part of our souls to be able to endure that. But it also leads to growth in new and unexpected ways that lead us into other worlds we never thought we would get to see. I know it sounds pollyanna-ish to say these things in a hard scrabble world, but I AM a true believer in the persistence.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Beast Crawl Literary Festival?
The one thing I’m really known for, and extremely proud of, is organizing Oakland California’s only continuous literary festival, The Beast Crawl Literary Festival, which has been called “the wildest lit fest West of the Mississippi.” (beastcrawl.org)

I co-founded the festival in 2012 with other like minded writers and poets at a private writing retreat in Morro Bay CA (a true getaway from folks all from the Bay Area.) Many of those original founders are still involved with the festival, but over time I’ve become the primary project manager for the event, which in all honesty, I should not be doing because while I have some gifts for organizing cultural events, not on a scale where we are producing 45-50 individual (and absolutely free) pop up literary readings in one weekend in a city that has the most undeserved reputation as a haven for criminals. To the contrary, I’ve inherited this job because the tedium of the work of organizing is grueling, and should not be done for free, but it has also led me to discover that Oakland is one of the most beautiful cities’ with the most beautiful people in this entire nation, particularly the independent business owners who share the deepest core values of spiritual and personal liberation, and their welcoming of a festival of creative poets and storytellers further attests to this commitment.

Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
Instagram and Substack have been very, very good to me. Like anything, you get out of them what you are able to put into them. Once upon a time, this used to be Facebook, but that has become more tedium than the other two networks.

Contact Info:

• Website: beastcrawl.org
• Instagram: thechapbookwhisperer
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paul.cormanroberts
• Other: https://cormanroberts.substack.com/