Robert Hass Quotes

A Faint Music by Robert Hass

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days -
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears -
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one -
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence - can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word "seafood,"
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said "landfood." He thought it was degra

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

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.

We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrifying, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
"I think I shall praise it."

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.

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

Don't imitate me;
it's as boring
as the two halves of a melon.

When you are composing a verse, let there not be a hair's breadth separating your mind from what you write. Quickly say what is in your mind; never hesitate a moment.

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.

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

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

When I was in high school in the '50s you were supposed to be an Elvis Presley, a James Dean, a Marlon Brando or a Kingston Trio type in a button-down shirt headed for the fraternities at Stanford or Cal.

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

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?'

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.

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.

'Paradise Lost' was printed in an edition of no more than 1,500 copies and transformed the English language. Took a while. Wordsworth had new ideas about nature: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and we got a lot of national parks. Took a century. What poetry gives us is an archive, the fullest existent archive of what human beings have thought and felt by the kind of artists who loved language in a way that allowed them to labor over how you make a music of words to render experience exactly and fully.

The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

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.

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

The basis of art is change in the universe.

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.

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

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

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

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature.

After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

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.

The love of books
is for children
who glimpse in them
a life to come, but
I have come
to that life and
feel uneasy
with the love of books.
This is my life,
time islanded
in poems of dwindled time.

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence - can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

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.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

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

The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I'm thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry.

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.

In California in the early Spring, There are pale yellow mornings, when the mist burns slowly into day, The air stings like Autumn, clarifies like pain - Well, I have dreamed this coast myself.