From 1995-96, poet Howard W. Robertson worked as a long-haul truck driver in the American West and British Columbia. This experience inspired "Ode to certain interstates," the thirteen-part title poem of this collection. In between pauses at truck stops and rest areas, the author meditates on (among other matters) Kant, the Kalapuyans, Basho, and the "best buffet in the West." The eight additional poems in the book, such as "Ode to this small stick" and "The transcendental laughter of Eleanor," use a refined intelligence to probe the daily intersections of the sacred and banal.
Robertson's ability with Russian, French, Spanish, German, Latin, Greek, and numerous other languages, together with the tremendous breadth and eclecticism of his reading, combine to make his poems an astonishing confluence of histories and cultures. To this density of sources, Robertson brings a voice as colloquial and chatty as Frank O'Hara's. If O'Hara had been a straight, married librarian in Eugene, Oregon, Clear Cut's editor Matthew Stadler once remarked, he would have written exactly these poems.
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Excerpt:
One thing I noticed was how pushing an eighteen-
wheeler over the open road essentially seemed to
me not different from sitting in a clearing by my
grandfather's mountain in the Coast Range when I
was a boy, which surprised me as a middle-aged
man that it was so easy in the truck to be at the still
center of a field as described by Denise Levertov, to
view all phenomena as hollow as instructed by the
Lotus Sutra, to infer the noumenal inaccessibility of
things-in-themselves as posited by Immanuel Kant,
and often to experience out there those ineffable
intuitions of ultimate entities as bravely believed in
by me, such as the late-summer run out Interstate 90
from Seattle to Sheboygan where the full moon
shone on the loading dock at the Piggly Wiggly
warehouse and the seagulls by the sandy shore of
Lake Michigan at the Kohler Dunes State Natural
Area strolled along the beach as if with hands held
behind their backs pensively as I did too during a
brief layover there and was surprised by the inland
immensity of the freshwater sea with deer tracks
from the woods to the water and orange and red
ladybugs on the wet sand among the long wing-
feathers and dark polished stones . . .
—from "Ode to certain interstates"
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Author Bio:
A retired research librarian and a former area studies director, Howard W. Robertson lives at the edge of the woods in Eugene, Oregon. In 1993, he left his position at the University of Oregon to write poetry full-time, and in 1995-96 he worked as a long-haul truck driver in the eleven Western states and British Columbia, an experience that led to the writing of Ode to certain interstates and Other Poems. His poems (a note in his first collection tells us) "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."
An earlier chapbook of Robertson's poems, to the fierce guard in the Assyrian Saloon, was published by Ahsahta Press in 1987, and his poetry is included in The Ahsahta Anthology: Poetry of the American West. Robertson's poems have appeared in Nest magazine, Nimrod, Fireweed, Literal Latté, and various other publications. In 2003, he was awarded the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry.
More about Robertson and his work can be read online.
