Howard W. Robertson (born September 19, 1947) is an American poet.
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Robertson was born in Eugene, Oregon.[1] He married Margaret Collins on August 10, 1991, and has two daughters and two sons.[1] He received a B.A. in Russian (1970) and an M.A. in Comparative Literature (1978) from the University of Oregon as well as an M.S.L.S. in Library Science (1975) from the University of Southern California.[1] He was the Slavic Catalog Librarian and Bibliographer at the University of Oregon Library during 1975-1993.[1] He is a past President of the Lane Literary Guild.[1] He has been a full-time poet since 1993.[1]
Robertson was a long-haul truck driver in the American West during 1994-1995.[2][3] He is a 2007 Jack Straw Writer with Jack Straw Productions in Seattle, Washington.[4] Biographical information about Howard W. Robertson is included in an interview by American Book Award winner Matt Briggs, available in a podcast on the Jack Straw Productions website.[5] Robertson read his poems at the 2007 Burning Word Festival.[6] Robertson was the Poet-in-Residence at the Henry Art Gallery on the University of Washington campus in Seattle during April 2010.[7] Robertson is part-Cherokee and gave a reading together with other Native American authors at Tsunami Books in Eugene, Oregon, during November, 2010.[8]
Howard W. Robertson is a poet, novelist, librarian, and father. Three of his great-great-grandfathers arrived in Eugene City, Oregon, in 1853, two by covered wagon and the other by undetermined means. Mr. Robertson was born in Eugene in 1947 and by some pleasant oversight of destiny has ended up living most of his adult life there. He began writing poetry at the age of seventeen while teaching himself to type, though that was the first and last time he has ever successfully composed on a typewriter. Over the years, he has made many apparently foolish decisions motivated by the need to find his own poetic voice. Receiving two degrees from the University of Oregon and one from USC has failed to open his eyes to the palpably misguided nature of his existence; he persists in believing he is following a straight course of steady development as a writer. Visits to Mexico, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union, and time spent in Colorado and Southern California, have been important experiences for him, but the Oregon experience remains central to his work. His poems are not actually his but rather those of Lee Douglas, who resides in New Geneva, Oregon, together with a number of personages about whom Mr. Robertson and he write. The essential theme of their work is that living is a beautiful and terrible mystery that is best faced with humor, endurance, and love.[9]
Robertson defines poetry broadly as a very inclusive genre, referring to the archaic meaning of "poem": a made thing, ποίημα.[10] He consequently considers each of his poems to be an ode, a fiction, an essay, an abstract painting, and a jazz improvisation.[10] He describes his poetry as a mimesis of the streaming of Being through Nonbeing.[10] He intends a continuous poetic flow that pauses at times but seldom stops, so that his line-breaks become purely visual and do not halt the forward progress of the poetic line when spoken.[10] He means for his poetry to affirm with Aristotle that truth is most universally told through a blend of the fictional and the factual.[10] He conceives each poem as an essay of existential discovery, an enterprising foray into the discursive wilderness.[10] He maintains that his poetry portrays visually the drift and swirl of the things themselves and the interconnected chiaroscuro of shadowy essence and shimmering everydayness.[10] He bases his work on the belief that reality never fails and that the phenomenal revelatory streaming of its representation in his poetry is authentic.[10] He credits Heidegger, Whitman, Pushkin, Bashō, Cervantes, Montaigne, and Ovid as the major influences on his writing.[10]
His first book of poems was titled to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon and was published by Ahsahta Press at Boise State University in 1987.[11] His second book of poems was titled Ode to certain interstates and Other Poems and was published by Clear Cut Press in 2003.[12] His third book of poems was titled The Bricolage of Kotegaeshi and was published by The Backwaters Press in 2007.[13] His fourth book of poems, The Gaian Odes, won the Sinclair Poetry Prize and was published by Evening Street Press in 2009.[14] His fifth book of poems, Two Odes of Quiddity and Nil, was published in 2010 by Publication Studio.[15]
Robertson's poetry has won the Tor House Robinson Jeffers Prize in 2003,[16] the Elizabeth R. Curry Poetry Prize at Slippery Rock University in 2006,[17] and the Sinclair Poetry Prize from Evening Street Press in 2009.[18] He has also won the Bumbershoot Writers-in-Performance Award in 1993, the Pacifica Award in 1995, and the Literal Latte Award in 1997.[1]