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
country people giving
There isn't a river or creek in the country - or there are very few - that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington - one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.
people achievement complicated
It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of government, people had to be able to read and understand complicated ideas on their own.
art people community
They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own.
running imagination people
If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.
people wonderful teach
I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
book people democracy
It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books.
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.
book long people
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.
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.
golf games people
Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.
poetry seemed tremendous
When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large.
environmental gary poet
I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read.
poet spokesman
As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.
address both doubtful iraq poetry war
The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that.