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2/14/11

Carrie Vasios

Warm Thoughts, Having Reread “Robert Frost Shopped at L.L.Bean”

Martin Billmore Hauser, born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1928, was an acclaimed American poet. In his early career, he won such distinguished awards as a DAAD Scholarship to study lyrical German poetry of the 15th century in Leipzig and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for his first book of poems Teabags. He was known for his playfully irreverent adjectival phrases (fusty canoodler, maladroit goose) as well as his obsessive attention to detail (the taste bud on the tip of his tongue/ was as an asteroid/proportionally destructive.)

Hauser’s most popular book of poetry was his fifth, the two volume Quotidian Profanities in which he imagined the daily lives of other famous poets. “Robert Frost Shopped at L.L. Bean” won the Bernard F. Connors Prize for Poetry in 1987. An original copy is signed and framed behind the counter at the title company’s flagship store in Freeport, Maine.

After formally retiring from writing in 2003, Hauser became a spokesperson for the New England Arboricultural Association. He worked tirelessly for the preservation of trees in his home town. Despite recently winning a three year struggle with jugular cancer, Hauser died on Monday, October 3rd from a poisonous spider bite incurred while repossessing acorns from a family of squirrels which was squatting in his prized Royal Oak tree.

We here at Small Pot Press will be reissuing eighty copies of Hauser's anthology of family poems, Avuncular Tie Clips, for the occasion.


 
Carrie Vasios is a writer in New York City. She feels quite fondly about Robert Frost and food. She writes about the latter for Serious Eats, Edible Manhattan, Alimentum, Good Food Stories, and her own blog, http://lessismorbier.blogspot.com.

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