Robert A.B. Sawyer — Poet & Copywriter
You have used up the years and they have used you / And still, and still, you have not written the poem.
Mine is a career that has been described as: Haphazard but not indiscriminate.
I was agnostic as to the media in which my words appeared—advertising, articles, stories or poems—and now, not so much.
Once upon a time, working for advertising agencies and with graphic design firms, as well as directly for local, national, and global corporations, I helped build brands, develop positionings, and create communications, executed across various and sundry media. But that was then; today, I write poetry.
Regarding Poetry.
I am a poet, the author of American Lullaby: Poems by Robert A.B. Sawyer. I was a winner of the 2003 Discovery/The Nation Poetry Competition. My poem, "How I Know She's Coming Home," was chosen by Natasha Trethewey, then Poet Laureate of the United States, to be included in Meridian Best New Poets 2007. In 2017, I was invited to read at the Festival Internacional de Poesía en el Caribe, PoeMaRío, in Barranquilla, Colombia. Following my visit, an English-Spanish bilingual edition of American Lullaby (translated by Tallulah Flores Prieto), was published by Isla Negra Editores in 2019. Now and then, over the years, I've been invited to read here and there, in small venues and inconspicuous spaces, around New York. Today, I write mostly at night, in the hours between 11:00 PM and 2:00 AM.
Seduction is not simply a strategy for conquest; it is the form taken by an inescapable reversibility — that of the feminine — in a world of masculine production.
Beauty is the most tender point of cruelty.
We have geared the machines and locked all / Together into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now / There is no escape.