United States, (b. 1941)
SEPARATION
- Well my Cadillac now that the hog herding has begun
- big ones spray-gunned
- is this the permission we long for
- not in prose or stone but in action?
- electric-prodded out of the pen backed into the bloody aisle
- pigs chew pigs’ tails
- whack the metal feeders charge the gate
- so it’s beauty in the end we were after or serenity?
- slapped on the rump shoved at the truck
- who shall not ever again find anchorage
- never feared July never feared June
- every one with an inconsolable mother…
- My ballast
- I’ve scratched a key along the side of a white Camaro
- in hog heaven the place one finds
- community possible desirable
- •
- my legendary embankment
- I will never get over you
- I cruise the high-pitched scream of the engine
- my tenderloin my tetracycline
- I want only to illuminate a tiny thing in a coat
- woolen cap and rubber boots
- marked by a spray of red paint
- just where our lovers die.
About the Poet:
Robert Hass, United States, (b. 1941), is a poet and educator. He graduated from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California in 1963, and received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1965 and 1971 respectively. Hass’s poems tend to vary in structure as he alternates between prose-like blocks and free verse. His poems have been said to have a stylistic clarity, seen in his simple, clear language and precise imagery.
Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Hass taught literature and writing at the University at Buffalo in 1967. From 1971 to 1989, he taught at his alma mater St. Mary’s, at which time he transferred to the faculty of University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting faculty member in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa on several occasions, and was a panelist at the Workshop’s 75th anniversary celebration in June 2011. Hass is married to the poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, who is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California. [DES-05/22]