"Life is poetry."

Phil Long -- pilot, poet, performer -- at his mountain-home cabin.

Phil Long guides his two-ton Chevy truck up the road that he built himself on his personal mountain in the Cascades north of Washougal. A man of many projects, Long bought the property fifteen years ago, when his three boys and daughter were still in grade school. Since then he's built a road that rises three hundred feet in just under half a mile, constructed two cabins (the second completed mainly by his sons), cleared several lots to sell off, and published two books. All outside of his day job as a pilot with a major airline.

Now, he explains where his newest project - spoken word poetry - fits in.

Long sees all of life, from his family to his construction projects on his expansive property, as poems.

"I look at my life and I see poems everywhere. They're just not written with words. Each of my children is a poem that I have written with my life; poems that they continue to write. This property is a poem. Or a lot of poems actually. The cabin was one of my good poems. That," Long says, gesturing to a pile of haphazardly stacked wood near an excavator, "that's one of my unfinished poems." He laughs.

"So I'd say I've always been a poet. What's different about this phase in my life," he says,"is that my poetry is beginning to take on a more traditional poetic form.  I'm finally writing it now.”

Long says that he had written songs as a hobby for years, but was finding that having to force his thoughts to a tune had become somewhat limiting.  "The words were beginning to pile up," Long says, "but songs weren't the right outlet, and I wasn't wanting to produce material to just be read, which is what I thought all poetry was at the time - just something to be read. I didn't have a category for what I was looking for."

A long-time writer of songs, Long has recently shifted his focus to spoken word poetry.

An evening on layover in New York City changed all that. "I went out with my co-pilot for dinner at a nearby bar,” he says. “You could hear someone on a mic in the back room, and occasional applause. I went back to check it out. It was amazing."

What Long had stumbled upon was a poetry slam. Slams are competitions, typically held in bars and coffee houses, in which poets recite (or "spit", to use the cultural vernacular) their work and are judged on a numerical scale by preselected members of the audience. The creation of the poetry slam is generally credited to Marc Smith of Chicago in 1984, and has since spread all over the world.

A new category was opened for Long. A venue for his poetry. Not merely written down for others to read, and not set to music. Just the words, and the life they came from, on stage for everyone to experience.

Six months after that fateful night in New York, Long registered for an empty spot at the National Individual Poetry Slam competition in Charlotte, North Carolina. There, he spent four days listening to some of the best spoken-word artists in the country. It was an experience that was formative in two ways.

Studying the Bible is part of the creative process for Long

Long says that the talent and craftsmanship on display opened his eyes to how satisfying the medium could be as both a poet and an audience member, and he was inspired to concentrate even more time into developing his new craft. But beyond inspiration to continue in his craft, Long says the event helped form much of his new content.

"In four days, I heard some truly great poetry. What was interesting to me about it, though, was how much of it was focused on God. And, how angry everyone was about him."

A man of faith from his early twenties, Long says his early lyrics and later poems already flowed from his relationship with God. But the National Poetry Slam opened his eyes to an interesting irony that began to frame much of his newer work.

"I was hearing people saying on the one hand how angry they were at Jesus," he says. "And at the same time, they were saying that he was just a myth. And I thought, 'how can you be so angry at a God you don't think exists?'”

The experience gave birth to Long's poem Mad at a Myth, in which he examines some of the claims made by and about Jesus and suggests that the visceral reaction that Jesus evokes may indicate that he is, perhaps, who the Bible claims him to be. After all, spits Long, "No one holds grudges against Santa and the Tooth Fairy / Or mythical beings like Thor and Zeus / When it comes to personal insult and injury, fictional hallucinations are never abused."

Over the next two years, Long would perform his work around the country, finding open mics and competing in competitions while on layover.  Eventually, his body of work grew sizable, and a new vision began to take shape.

"I love the slams," he says. "The raw emotion and the amazing talent. I love being a counterpoint to so much anger. I think that having that balance in life is important. Life is tension. It's not black or white. It's black and white, pulling against each other. If you spend all of your time listening to one perspective, you swing too far in that direction."

"Which,” continues Long, “is what happens in a lot of churches. Only the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. I find that a lot of my fellow church folk are trying to pretend that life is something that it's not. I think they fear that admitting that life hurts and is complicated is somehow saying that their faith is not strong enough. And with that kind of personal dishonesty, it's no wonder they can't meaningfully communicate their hope to people who don't already share their faith."

"So the idea," says Long, "that I might also provide a counterpoint to that church culture - with the same material I was using at the slams - was kind of exciting. That's where Mad at a Myth: A Spoken Word Apology comes from."

Phil Long performs Mad at a Myth at River Rock
Church in Camas.

Mad at a Myth: A Spoken Word Apology is a 40 minute presentation that Long put together, initially, for Christian churches and schools. He's performed at more than ten in the last nine months and the requests keep coming in.

"The churches are exciting," Long says, "because there's such a large concentration of people who have never experienced this art form. When they do, and when it's thematically tied to something that they care about, their response is typically enthusiastic."

Long's vision for communicating hasn't stopped with churches and private schools, however. In preparation for taking his message to new venues, he and a colleague created Sacrificial Poet Productions to manage his budding performance career.  The name of the company derives from the tradition at poetry slams to have one poet perform as a test case for the judges, prior to the real competition beginning.

Sacrificial Poet Productions' first event is a joint venture with Campus Crusade for Christ, held on college campuses, where students compete in Jesus-themed poetry slams.  Long performs as the featured poet at the events, another poetry slam tradition.  The first was hosted in February by Portland State University.

"We put out an advertisement about six weeks in advance," explains Long, "and say, 'Hey, come spit your best Jesus poem. Prize to the winner.' We don't say it has to be positive or negative in tone. Just whatever you bring. The point is to facilitate discussion about Jesus, and also to grow the spoken-word art form. These events are doing both."

So much so, says Long, that the project may end up becoming a full time job.

"You know, that would be great. I've been a pilot and loved it for thirty years. It's one of the most poetic things you can do. Exciting, beautiful. But I think my life may be entering a different stanza now, and that's an exciting prospect on its own."

A calendar of performances can be found on Long's website at www.sacrificialpoet.com.

Phil Long at the Portland State University Student Union building, where he hosted a poetry slam recently.