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
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.
reading writing mean
As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England - which was an unusually literate place - practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.
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.
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.
explosive hard names recite
Walking, I recite the hard explosive names of birds: egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.
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.
cutting humanity republican
When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress.
poet 20th-century
The record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.
thinking wish poet
The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.
school kids environmental
Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.
responsible
If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed.