Quotes from Robert Hass

Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: 'How do you see the world, and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?'

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.

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Poetry is a fireplace in summer or a fan in winter.

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking

Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.

Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others.

I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.

Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.

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.

I teach a lecture course on American poetry to as many as 150 students. For a lot of them, it's their only elective, so this is their one shot. They'll take the Russian Novel or American Poetry, so I want to give them the high points, the inescapable poets.

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

All the new thinking is about loss.In this it resembles the old thinking.The idea, for example, that each particular erasesthe luminous clarity of a general idea.

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.

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables and the beginnings of beauty.

After Goethe" In all the mountains, Stillness; In the treetops Not a breath of wind. The birds are silent in the woods. Just wait: soon enough You will be quiet too.

The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever On their rocky waste of island by their imagination Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.

Sometimes it is good and sometimes it is dangerous like the ignorance of particulars, but our words are clear and our movements give off light.

I had the idea that the world's so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. — Robert Hass, from "Faint Music," Sun Under Wood (HarperCollins, 1996)

the haiku. It has, of course, a three-part prosodic structure, five syllables–seven syllables–five syllables. But, as written in Japanese, it is usually represented in a single line and there is a long controversy about whether it should be translated as a one-line or a three-line poem.

you'll also notice that inside what is apparently a single line, there is a play of one, two, or three elements, balanced or unbalanced in various ways that are expressive in relation to what the poem is saying.

In Buffalo, Buffalo she was praying, the night sticks together like pages in an old book