Why Poetry? How Form?

Robert Hass is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including The Apple Trees at Olema, the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning Time and Materials, Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, andField Guide. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. As Poet Laureate he founded the program River of Words, now a part of Saint Mary’s College’s own Center for Environmental Literacy. He is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and his most recent collection of essays is A Little Book on Form.

Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bear and Why Poetry, a book of prose about poetry. He is also the author of three other collections of poetry, American Linden, The Pajamaist, and Come On All You Ghosts. The Pajamaist was selected as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. Come On All You Ghosts was a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and was also selected as the 2010 Booklist Editors’ Choice for poetry, as well as the Northern California Independent Booksellers poetry book of the year. An Associate Professor in the MFA at Saint Mary’s, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books.