Quotes from Robert Hass

Allen Ginsberg had the idea that the image in a blues refrain was the American haiku.

Many of the haiku poets gave their poems brief superscriptions that function like Ginsberg's titles to create a context.

Don't worry, spiders, I keep house casually.

From galactic silence protect us.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter (Creation, Preservation, Destruction, Quiescence).

Principle underlying all of the solutions = question we ask

One line is a form in the sense that any gesture is a form. Two lines introduce the idea of form as the energy of relation.

All things in the sun are sun.

Todo el pensar nuevo es acerca de la pérdida.

It seemed possible to construct notes toward a notion of form that would more accurately reflect the openness and the instinctiveness of formal creation by starting with one line as the basic gesture of a poem, and then looking at two lines and

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. ? Robert Hass, from "Meditation at Lagunitas," Praise ( ? Ecco, July 10, 1999)

It's not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying "And then I realized—," which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world's so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

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

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

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

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.

August is dust here. Drought stuns the road, but juice gathers in the berries.

Imagination runs through the places where we live like water. We need both things-a living knowledge of the land and a live imagination of it and our place in it- if we are going to preserve it.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

The whole difference between the nineteenth century and the twentieth century could be summed up in two words, graveyard and cemetery.

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

When it is bad… I go into the night and the night eats me

Golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism.

What would you do if you were me? she said. If I were you-you, or if I were you-me? If you were me-me. If I were you-you, he said, I'd do exactly what you're doing.