2009 War Poem Prize

I won the War Poetry Prize for 2009, the second time since 2004. It was announced just after Veterans Day at the following link:
http://winningwriters.com/contests/war/2009/wa09_long.php.

I’ve put the 3 poems up on the War Works page here; they’re also easy to find by googling “Robert Hill Long” war poetry. And on YouTube, I’m reading them in my backyard. (I don’t endorse watching the video, but listening may help guide your reading of the texts.) There’s some nice background music–the neighborhood jays and crows, someone firing up a lawnmower. You might faintly hear my pond fountain, where a hummingbird occasionally bathes in mid-air.

In this month of holidays after Veterans Day, let’s consider how war goes on despite the poems, the fall colors, the ordinary music of jays and crows and pond fountains.

About the 3 poems:

“Wolverine and White Crow” is a documentary poem–the story is based on an encounter with a Cheyenne in a Eugene park where I was writing one summer day. Save for Leroy White Crow’s name, which is fictive, and some of the dialogue, 90% of the information in the poem, including the police stop, is factual. I tried to buy him some food (I was there to write, after all), but he kept telling me his story–in part to wear me down to buy him a drink, but in part simply because I was willing to listen, to not judge, to ask questions when invited. Clearly PTSD, but layered onto a personal/cultural history that includes poverty, alcoholism, the rez, the iron road of ‘manifest destiny’ that runs over the bones of many tribes. This poem is now subtitled to add “readability:” http://universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/Oq5epLf6RF4n/info/

“Motivations” is fictive, but I hope a fair representation of what turns a lot of veterans into wards of the VA. In this piece I’m trying to show the paradox of the sound mind/memory, and the cruelty of desire, in a mostly broken body: the callow warrior transformed by paralysis into a weeping philosopher. For a real-world take on this, google “paralyzed vets” or go to Paralyzed Veterans of America here:
http://www.pva.org/site/PageServer?pagename=rights_govrelations.

“Insurrection and Resurrection,” too, is fictive. It concerns a different
sort of paradox–what it must be like to survive into old age in another, mostly benign country/climate that does not contain the place of tragedy and struggle that marked your life forever. Unlike Leroy White Crow, this character is an Ancient Mariner who has no one to tell his story to.

Make peace a daily habit.

 

Paradigm Shift: Posts to Pages

Because this site is more archive than blog, I’ve decided it makes more housekeeping sense to maintain most of of the literary works here as PAGES not POSTS.

So: Flash Prose and Sonnets, like War Works, should be opened via their Page tabs above the banner. (I will radically edit or delete their  Post-versions to avoid redundancy.)

I’ll add/reorganize other Page- categories in the near future–including, very likely, a password-protected page of unpublished works viewable on request by editors–, and reserve this calendar-dated Post area to note additions to Pages.

 

Flash Prose

Two spirits preside over most of what I’ve done in what has been genrified since 1992′s Flash Fiction:

• the short prose of Jean Follain;
• the documentary photography of the Farm Security Administration.

These were my stereoptic lenses for re/viewing the South many years after the Depression/New Deal, and a country/century away from Follain’s childhood. I wrote a bunch of character/cityscape sketches around New Orleans–on Jackson Square park benches, on the Desire/Elysian Field busline, on Royal Street, in the Napolean Bar, in a Rent-a-Wreck car among the projects where the Prytaneum was envisioned, and never built.

In a way it was exorcism: to flush the narcissism of the generational  McPoem diagnosed by Donald Hall. I gave up poetry’s first-person (and much abused)  lyrical spotlight for fiction’s third-person invisible point of view. I  hid my experience, buried my feelings in the blink of perception–tried to ‘blend into the tapestry,’ as Zbigniew Herbert characterized his unfortunate valet. Fundamentally, I wanted to import Barthes’  camera lucida to portray a culture anyone could recognize no matter how far outside it they dwelled.

Funding for this project (finally published as The Effigies) came from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. A fair sample of The Effigies can be gleaned online via the “Robert Hill Long” quote-google; since I no longer have the files in a format my Mac can digest, I won’t post any here for the time being.

However, the documentary character sketch in cityscape–as collected in that book, 50 pieces designed to be coherent in narrative tone and voice and culture –is just one of the ways I have deployed short prose.

 

Sonnet projects 1996-2009

Formally speaking ::

I’ve always liked making a conscious game of form, if only to let the rest of the poem remain beneath the surface, sounding whatever obscure subconscious depths, until it emerges–until story merges with form, verbal music  with metaphor, premonition with memory. I treat form as the motion of emotion–its pace, its pauses–throughout the poem, and as a structure the poem’s story inhabits: its walls, doors, windows, hidden wiring, its hidden but regular beams and joists. Form is musical, choreographic, and architectural. It’s a tangible, gradual, building pleasure–unlike other work of poetry, the restless, associative, obsessive, elusive grasping after shapeshifting images/phrasings: the attempts to embrace a ghost in elysium.

 

RHL Books : : Links

–> Selections from RHL books <–

Web del Sol :: 20 pieces from The Work of the Bow and The Effigies back in the 90s.  Bow‘s short narrative poems, mostly concerning family, fatherhood, love and loss, differ in form if not tone from the elegiac flash fiction sketches of New Orleans neighborhoods and characters in The Effigies.

Both books are findable via Amazon, ABEbooks, etc., and in libraries around the country via WorldCat. Much of The Work of the Bow can be read as a Googlebooks preview. (I’m still the best source for either of these books–signed, sealed, delivered, they’re your$.)

::  ::   ::   ::   ::

The Power to Die (1987), took its title from the last stanza of Emily Dickinson’s #754 (“My Life had stood–a Loaded Gun”). The only poem from that book on the web is the final, 5-part elegy for McKendree Robbins Long: “Grandfather Long the Last Time”. Have a look at his best-known painting, “Apocalyptic Scene with Philosophers,” at the North Carolina Museum of Art.

 

UOregon digital scholar resources

While the University of Oregon has a fair number of faculty using digital tools to build research projects online, it’s not easy to locate those projects unless you already know about them, or are willing to slog through departmental directories and faculty links. Everyone who talks about digital scholarship and research centers knows the silo cliche: individual researchers and research institutions erecting digital structures that are separate, closed off, more or less identical in appearance/function. They store data like grain you can’t get at, and they proliferate, replicate, are competitively redundant. Yet the paradigm is shifting toward open access, open source (the White House using a Creative Commons license, Library of Congress using Flickr).

We decided to have a UO roundtable conversation about this. A couple dozen faculty and staff showed up at the McKenzie Collaboration Center to discuss, ostensibly, digital humanities. Funny thing: humanists were in the minority. Yes, we had folks from English, Philosophy and Romance Languages, but most were from all over–Journalism/ Communication, Music, Arts & Administration, Computer & Information Sciences, Architecture, the Infographics Lab, Anthropology, Art History, the Yamada Language Center, Clark Honors College. We had several deans and associate deans. We had a bunch of librarians (thank goodness).

 

Hello Ciao Aloha etcetera

The first thing I type here will be the last thing any visitor sees–a parting glance from the bedraggled tail of a mechanical dragon. By the time you get here, I’m on the other side of sunset, some other ellipse in our solar orbit, but Aloha works at any distance–at the end as well as the beginning, no? Or if you prefer, Ciao! Or You say goodbye/and I say hello/Hello hello/Hello hello/

 

What/Why :: is this :: am I ?

<Hello World>

from one more late immigrant to this space where every island has a name & many build bridges to everywhere:

Here you’ll find literary work & links, worklife links & concerns, space for personal generalizing (or persona for specific personalizing).

Original work published here is to be shared according to CC license (soon to be added–not for commercial reuse, but with proper linktribution) ; opinions are not those of my publishers, editors or academic superiors; any mistakes are my own fingers+eyes.

 

A sonnet about writer’s block

In Arcadia

In his journal of days left to waste, there’s a fly.
Truffling through blank pages past a last-year entry
he found, near the end of the book, this irregular
black period: big-eyed head flattened to profile,
forelegs caught in a stick-figure mime of prayer—
a supplicant, killed in an insect cathedral.
Its wings, vein-leaded windows, insanely tiny.
Who knew how it got trapped there. Almost as though he
had flown into that book—for months unopened—
hoping to land on one page worth saving, one sentence,
one word uninfected by self-pity or pretense.
If the pages fanned like slow wings toward the end
that was because the words were flies on the skin
of something dead. The book caved in on him again.