Gilchrist Haas is an American poet and was born near Valley Forge, PA in the 1960s. After studying music and philosophy in his early adulthood, he traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, where he completed his first six books of poetry. Haas lived for many years in Taipei, where he taught English and worked in children's theater. He currently resides with his family in Honolulu.
Haas's works include five collections of poems: Pages in a Second Round, Molly's Song (and Other Poems), Baron, All Too Baron, and Opus Seven: Two Small Books in the Major and Minor Modes, The Emerald Gong (and Other Poems), as well as three book-length poems: Chronicling the Era of Common Fun (a verse novella), The Stage with No True North (a verse play in five acts), and Finding the Hole at the Bottom of Emmelle Sea: Reading Adorno, Book One (a long verse-essay on Adorno's philosophy of language). The Man in the Poem: The (Self-) Selected Poems of Gilchrist Haas was compiled in 2008, anthologizes short and middle-length poems from the four collections listed above, and is available in its entirety on this website. More recently, Haas has published a new "best of" in the form of The Era of Common Fun: Selected Shorter Poems, which includes an autobiographical essay, "Haas at Sixty." In addition, two of the aforementioned books (Opus Seven and The Emerald Gong) are also now available in print, and the remaining six are now collected in two volumes (Third Nature: The First Three Books of Gilchrist Haas and No True North: Three Book-length Poems).
Haas is currently working on a sixth poetry collection (And Dragons in the Crease) and hopes to complete a second verse play, Tiger's Leap, about the last days in the life of German essayist Walter Benjamin, as well as The Untimely Baron - a book-length retelling of Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat. He has also written a book of prose essays, A Lehusa Be (AH-lay-HOO-zuh-BAY).
Gilchrist Haas is the penname of Andy Jones. He may be contacted at jonesbaron23@gmail.com.
Chronological List of Books:
Pages in a Second Round (begun 1992, completed 1997, revised 2004]
Baron, All Too Baron (begun 1997, completed 2003)
Molly's Song (and Other Poems) (2003)
A Lehusa Be (AH-lay-HOO-zuh-BAY): The Prose Writings of Gilchrist Haas (2003)
Chronicling the Era of Common Fun (2004)
Finding the Hole at the Bottom of Emmelle Sea: Reading Adorno, Part One (2004)
The Stage with No True North (2004)
Opus Seven (begun 2005, completed 2007) (published version)
The Man in the Poem: The (Self-) Selected Poems of Gilchrist Haas (compiled 2005, revised 2008)
The Emerald Gong (and Other Poems) (begun 2008, completed 2016) (published version)
And Dragons in the Crease (begun 2016, ongoing)
The Era of Common Fun: Selected Shorter Poems (compiled and published 2024)