Robert Hass
Robert Hass
Robert L. Hassis an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth1 March 1941
CountryUnited States of America
Robert Hass quotes about
thinking belief poetry-is
I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment.
black metaphor empty
It turns out - this is a metaphor out of [Charles] Dickens - that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.
artist work-out
As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out.
distance desire longing
Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
soon-enough bird waiting
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
distance silly islands
After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.
revenge military taken
Someone will always want to mobilize Death on a massive scale for economic Domination or revenge. And the task, taken As a task, appeals to the imagination. The military is an engineering profession.
teacher reading people
Reading is a gymnasium for the imagination where people can work out, get ready for the shocks of existence. For me, the intimate teachers have not only taught me how to make things, they have represented some qualities of mind and mindfulness that I would like to have.
morning pain spring
In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.
evening afternoon numinous
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
vivid firsts twenties
Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.
college years tuition
When I was in college, I lost my scholarship one year. I had enough money for tuition, but not room and board. So I camped in the hills.
senior brother book
The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
summer spring autumn
One may prefer spring and summer to autumn and winter, but preference is hardly to the point. The earth turns, and we live in the grain of nature, turning with it.