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John Haag (1926-2008) was an American poet and university professor. Born in Sandpoint, Idaho, he spent seven years on the high seas, serving in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II and the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. He entered college in his later twenties, having circled the globe twice. Life in the water — and on the water, and near the water — remained a source of fascination for him and a hallmark of his poems.

His writing life began inauspiciously in Theodore Roethke’s poetry seminar at the University of Washington. Haag recalled handing his teacher a poem and Roethke's reading “as far as the fourth line, which he slashed away with a great green stroke” from his fountain pen. Haag’s next attempt went a little better, as Roethke made it halfway through the poem.

At Washington, Haag benefited from the mentorship of Roethke and James Wright. His classmates there included Carolyn Kizer, Richard Hugo, and David Waggoner. While still an undergraduate, he placed more than a dozen poems in notable national periodicals. Less than two years after his first failed attempt at writing, his poem “The Recluse” appeared in The New Yorker (December 14, 1957).

His publications brought fellowships. He went to England in 1959-60 as a Fulbright Scholar, studying at Reading University. There his first collection, The Mirrored Man: Twenty-Three Poems, appeared in 1961. In 1962, he played the lead part of Bartleby in a film adaptation of Herman Melville's story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street.” Returning to the United States with a master's degree, he accepted a position in the English Department at Penn State University. He was, as he put it, “moving inland.”

He continued to publish as he taught. His second collection, and his best known, The Brine-Breather, appeared from Kayak Books in 1971. The poems are mostly metaphysical meditations on the curiosities of marine biology, bringing the sea cucumber, queen conch, and others to light. Mariners in their ships he treats with searching, Roethke-like precision and quirky scientific observation. One of the finest poems in the collection is a first-person narrative by the biblical Jonah.

Haag’s later poems reflect the experience of his life “inland.” He lived in rural Milesburg, ten miles from the University where he taught. He raised orchids and cultivated mushrooms, and these appeared increasingly in his poems. His range extended to powerful works about rural life, domestic exchanges, and sexual desire.

On campus, John Haag cut an eccentric figure, wearing broad-brimmed black hats, shoulder-length white hair, and leather pants. He set himself unusual goals, such as appearing in periodicals representative of every letter of the alphabet (Scientific American was his entry under S).

His final collection, Stones Don’t Float: Poems Selected and New appeared in 1996 from Ohio State University Press, having won the Press’s Journal Award in Poetry. The volume shows his life’s work as he moved from an early formalism to open forms, though always sounding “serious music,” as one critic put it.

Books

 * (1961) The Mirrored Man, Reading, UK: School of Fine Arts,
 * (1971) The Brine Breather, Santa Cruz: Kayak Books
 * (1997) Stones Don’t Float: Poems Selected and New, ISBN 978-0-8142-0717-8