About
Robert Letters is an American author, educator, poet, artist, and songwriter.
Robert Letters was my great grandfather. He ran away to sea from County Antrim in Ireland when he was 14 years old. He settled in Pittsburgh’s Strip District, where he worked as a puddler in an iron foundry, a civil servant, and a teamster (a horse bit off one of his fingers and swallowed it.) He was fond of pipe and banjo. My father and I were both named after him.
I have held many jobs, including shining shoes, sweeping floors, loading trailers, fixing roads, coding, and teaching. Alongside those jobs, many years of work, songs and poems steadily accumulated. Where does the lifelong drive to make these things come from?
I was first introduced to song as a child when my father taught me 1-4-5 on an old upright piano and told me those three chords were all I needed to play most songs. But his favorite song was Yankee Doodle, which threw in a 2, 2-minor, 2-seventh, and 6-seventh.
In high school I played keyboard for two rock and roll bands. I had a good friend then, still my best friend, who was the first person I knew who actually wrote songs and poems. He made me believe that maybe I could write songs and poems too.
I taught myself to play 1-4-5 on the guitar during a long bus ride that took me away from everything I knew. I fingered the chords silently in the back of the bus, and when I arrived in my next life, I started to play out loud.
I taught my little brother three chords, and he soon played, sang, and wrote songs far better than I ever could. Then I learned from him.
In college at the Wharton School an English professor read “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” out loud to the class. I changed my major that day to English Literature and started to write poems.
My roommate in those days awakened me to the spirit and art of Asia. All my poems have had the scent of Asian forms in them, and lately I have gone back to the source, focusing on simple haiku and tanka.
The seeds of my work were sown by those five people: father, best friend, brother, professor, roommate.