Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Paul Ebenkamp previously edited the Counterpoint title The Etiquette of Freedom, a conversation with Jim Harrison and Gary Snyder and Song of Myself, a collection of poems from Walt Whitman. He lives and works in Berkeley, California.

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Now and Then

Shoemaker & Hoard

Chapter One

Several weeks ago I found myself participating in a Sunday afternoon symposium on the subject of Poetry and Resistance at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, on the day after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. One of those lucid and sunny fall days-so clear it felt that one ought to have something clear to say about that tragedy, about violence, about the making and unmaking of the world. Then, days later, I came across a new book by Susan Stewart, who lives in Philadelphia. It's called The Forest. The poems deal with many of the ghosts in the forests of the 20th century. It's not an easy book, brutal, mournful, intellectually demanding, but beautifully written. One part of the book, "Cinder," begins with this fierce small poem, which bears no title:

We needed fire to make
the tongs and tongs to hold
us from the flame; we needed
ash to clean the cloth
and cloth to clean the ash's
stain; we needed stars
to find our way, to make
the light that blurred the stars;
we needed death to mark
an end, an end that time
in time would mend.
Born in love, the consequence -
born of love, the need.
Tell me, ravaged singer,
how the cinder bears the seed.

Continues...

Excerpted from Now and Thenby Robert Hass Copyright © 2007 by Robert Hass. Excerpted by permission.
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