Robert Hass

Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate & UC Berkeley professor won the 2008 Pulitzer prize for Poetry for his latest book, Time and Materials.

You may be wondering why I am telling you this. There are a couple of reasons. First, if you recall, this is National Poetry Month so it seems appropriate. Second, many years ago when Jill was attending Berkeley she took a poetry class he taught. She said he is a nice guy & offered to buy her a drink in the cafeteria. She wasn't overly impressed when I told her he had won a Pulitzer prize, but I thought it was pretty cool.

While I didn't get to take a class w/a former Poet Laureate and future Pulitzer prize winner, I did work with his son. His son is a doctor who used to (actually for all I know he still does), work at LMC, the clinic where I worked. He was a pretty nice guy also, although a little odd. Anyway I thought you'd all like to know about these connections to an actual poet.

Not to overwhelm you with poems, but it seems appropriate that I put one on by Robert Hass, so here you go!

Ezra Pound's Proposition

Beauty is sexual, and sexuality
Is the fertility of the earth and the fertility
Of the earth is economics. Though he is no recommendation
For poets on the subject of finance,
I thought of him in the thick heat
Of the Bangkok night. Not more than fourteen, she saunters up to you
Outside the Shangri-la Hotel
And says, in plausible English,
'How about a party, big guy?"

Here is more or less how it works:
The World Bank arranges the credit and the dam
Floods three hundred villages, and the villagers find their way
To the city where their daughters melt into the teeming streets,
And the dam's great turbines, beautifully tooled
in Lund or Dresden or Detroit, financed
by Lazard Frères in Paris or the Morgan Bank in New York,
enabled by judicious gifts from Bechtel of San Francisco
or Halliburton of Houston to the local political elite,
Spun by the force of rushing water,
Have become hives of shimmering silver
And, down river, they throw that bluish throb of light
Across her cheekbones and her lovely skin.