Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 10, 1992 TAG: 9203100030
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Kevin Kittredge
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That was 1907 - the year of her birth and the Jamestown Exposition, she says in her 1979 book "The Way It Was."
Claude Swanson was governor. Virginia's best colleges were still pushing Greek, Latin, moral philosophy and theology.
Roberts' grandmother took up Virginia's poet laureate-to-be in her arms and started to weep. "Poor little thing, born into a world of darkness and trouble," she said.
More than eighty years later, Ruby Altizer Roberts can still light up the dark.
She is a poet, Christiansburg's own. In 1950 she became the first woman ever named poet laureate in Virginia.
Last Wednesday, Roberts chalked up another first as the General Assembly named her Virginia's only poet laureate emeritus. Carleton Drewry, who had succeeded Roberts as poet laureate, died in 1991. A new poet laureate has not been named.
The resolution's sponsors - Sen. Madison Marye, D-Shawsville, and Del. Joan Munford, D-Blacksburg - say Roberts earned the "emeritus" title through her continued writing and community activities.
Roberts said her head was in the clouds after getting the news last week.
"That's a first," she said of the honor. A poet and journalist, she has published two volumes of poetry and her traditional poems grace postcards and post office walls. Her writing also has appeared in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Now, in addition to being the first female poet laureate in Virginia, she is the first poet laureate emeritus as well.
"I'm No. 1 on the hit parade," she joked.
She's spent plenty of time at fame's elbow. In her eight decades she has known Robert Frost and Lady Nancy Astor, rubbed elbows with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. She attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in Vermont along with novelist Wallace Stegner and the then-little-known Truman Capote.
At Bread Loaf, Frost confided to the Virginia-born Roberts - she is a native of Montgomery County - that he was named for Robert E. Lee.
"In retrospect I am amazed at the doors that open in response to the birth of a talent, be it great or small," Roberts writes in "The Way It Was."
In person, Roberts is witty and cagey - at 84 she still uses "off the record."
In an interview last week, she said modern life is like holding down the fast-forward button. "You have to take it. I don't especially enjoy it."
Not that she's ready to go. "We've got enough corpses," she told a Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter recently.
She is nothing if not entertaining.
On the day she was named poet laureate emeritus, Roberts gave an interview laced with one-liners that somehow touched on everything but writing.
On Bill Clinton and the Democrats, she said:
"I wouldn't judge this early in the game. I don't like to give the verdict until all the evidence is in. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of evidence."
And on writing poems:
"They come to me or they don't. I don't sit down and figure it out."
On religion and science:
"It's all the same. We just haven't noticed it yet."
On how to live:
"Do all things in moderation. Do not think more highly of yourself than you should.
"I do try to do that," Roberts added of her own advice. "And goodness, it does pay off."
by CNB