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
propose solutions
Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
imagination artistic relation
There are instances: [Henry David] Thoreau read [John] Wordsworth, [John] Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.
imagination community literature
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.
educational opportunity resentful
If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it - that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.
answered everyday guess life order poetry questions suppress
I guess a lot of the questions in poetry can only be answered by poetry. That is they can only be answered by dramatizing and intensifying the contradictions which we suppress in everyday life in order to get on with it.
teenager people waiting
The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.
soon-enough bird waiting
The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
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.
vivid firsts twenties
Ko Un is a crucial poet for the twenty-first century, and this is an enormously fresh and vivid translation.
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.
golf games people
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
summer winter fans
Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.
variation repetition feels
Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.
american-poet body days flesh good saying
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.