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Articles by Robert Hass
A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry, Poetics, and the Natural World
This is, by my count, my third gathering of essays and reviews.
Event Recap: Robert Hass’s ‘Praise’
Of all the laws / that bind us to the past / the names of things are / stubbornest,” host John Freeman said to kick off the hour, quoting Robert Hass’s poem “Maps” as he introduced Hass, whose book Praise was the April selection of the California Book Club. Freeman asked Hass to speak about what he was thinking about as he began to write the poems in Praise.
Praise in a Fallen World
The first task, the oldest one of poetry, has been to praise. Even in a fallen world. (Maybe there’s no other kind.) The first recorded author in human kind was a woman, Enheduanna, an Akkadian priestess, daughter of King Sargon I, who ruled a region in what is now modern-day Iraq. Enheduanna was also a religious ecstatic.
Robert Hass on Language, Loss, and Memory
“Meditation at Lagunitas” All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light.
Why You Should Read This: ‘Praise’
All the new thinking is about loss,” Robert Hass opens his poem “Meditation at Lagunitas,” an anchor to his second collection, Praise, published in 1979. “In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Here, we have a pair of lines that resonate as much as when they were first composed. What Hass is telling us is that the most fundamental things do not change, for good or ill, that loss is—as it must be—the necessary corollary, or even the cause, of joy.
Why I Write: To Catch the World’s Movements
I have a memory of sitting on my front porch in Palo Alto. It was probably the spring of 1965. There was a large walnut tree in our small front yard. I was keeping sane in graduate school by learning the neighborhood birds. Mockingbirds were easy to identify because of their elaborate and ventriloquial songs and because, as they took off, their wing feathers flashed white.
‘Reflections’ - The Atlantic Original
An ant trampled, and above it clouds. A trampled ant and above it a column of azure sky. And in the distance, marking its blue steps, The Vistula or the Dnieper on its bed of granite. This is the image reflected in the water: A city ruined, and above it clouds. A ruined city and above it a column of azure sky. And in the distance, stepping over blue thresholds, The remains of History or the Spring of myth. A dead field mouse, and beetle gravediggers. On the footpath, running, a seven-year-old joy.
“A Sunset,” by Robert Hass
The sky tonight on the top of the ridge Was bruise-colored, a yellow-brown That is one definition of the word “sordid,” Which, I think, used to describe That color, carries neither a moral Nor an aesthetic judgment. The sky At dusk was sordid and then brightened And softened to a glowing peach Of brief but astonishing beauty, If you happened to be paying attention.
Joel Plaskett shares 4 book collections that he picks up again and again
Books·My Life in Books The Juno Award-winning Nova Scotia musician spoke with CBC Books about his favourite reads. Plaskett's new single, Rainy Day Janey, is out now.
Spirituality & Practice
• The end of spring lingers in the cherry blossoms. — Buson • Summer night- even the stars are whispering to each other. — Issa • Goes out, comes back - the loves of a cat. — Issa • The wren — looking here, looking there. You lose something? — Issa • I'm going to roll over, so please move, cricket. — Issa • Even with insects- some can sing, some can't. — Issa • The flies in the temple imitate the hands of the people with prayer beads.
Styles of Eating
spring greens She’d gathered ramps in the woods, although she found them A hyperbole of the food world, an over-priced scallion With a finish of garlic scapes. But finding them in the forest, He thought, and picking them with her strong hands, Improved their allure. He found fiddlehead ferns In the market and skinny, hopeful stalks of asparagus.
The Metaphysics of Your Presence
A fragment. To be followed by an infinitive phrase. Your hipster cynical voice. One. Then two. Then three words. In sequence. Subject without predicate. Running to passion (Predicate without subject). The obligatory foreign phrase And obscure allusion. The Sprachspiele pregnant With mandrakes. And these interstices! The spaces Between letters, between words, the distance between You and me, the god of the gaps. The present Absence so rich in irony. The clever puns on the “to be” Infinitive are infinite.
Poetry for Fall - BG Authors
By Jay Grummel Poetry has a way of connecting us to the external and internal world. In poetry it is easier to feel a season and truly feel a piece due to this. Poetry has a subtle way of making the readers immersed into the world of the poem. With the air getting colder and leaves starting to change, it feels like fall is already fast approaching. Here are some poets and collections to connect you with the season.
One Poem by Danusha Laméris
Working in the Garden, I Think of My Son Who is nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash dissolves and is taken into the bodies of plants, or swept into the air on the wind. He’s so very fine he slips undetected through a whale’s baleen, or a beetle’s gullet. He can even rise through a stalk of grass with the upward pull of phloem, in these first green days of spring.
Jesse Nathan’s Eggtooth: Making It New
Home > Poems & Essays > In Their Own Words > Jesse Nathan’s Eggtooth: Making It New By Robert Hass SHARE What Ruth May Have Wondered by Jesse Nathan Silence in the countryside gets so dense and so deep it amasses body, untellable shape, heavy, larger in its nothingness. On windless evenings it would wrap around us like a vast comforter. Your ears can ring from it, it seems a witness listening, swallowing itself. And if your mood is gentle, it is the gentlest cradle.
Highway Department Long Range Planning
Highway Department Long Range Planning By ohtadmin | on February 10, 2023 Robert HassCook County Highway Engineer Long range planning is an important tool to provide reliable services and dependable infrastructure to Cook County. While this concept is applied to many facets in our operation, two that are the most visible are equipment and infrastructure.
Read By: Robert Hass and Jorie Graham
Apr 14, 2020 Jorie Graham on Linda Gregg: Reading Linda Gregg’s poems is a unique experience because not only does one hear Linda’s voice in one’s head—if one ever heard her read it was unforgettable—but the voice is actually inscribed into the lines, the syntax, the rhythm, tone, tempo. This is the sign of tremendous formal skill—that one controls the audible voice of the poem right down to its minutest modulations.
Ariel - Robert Bernard Hass - Literary Matters
(for Emma Giering) ……………………………………………………..I come To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly, To Swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl’d clouds—to thy strong bidding task So many years ingrained by Sycorax, I lost my voice, abandoned all desire To ride the clouds or dive into the fire, Where, light as ashes, I would ply my tricks Of music to make all creation sing. Coy birds and sunsets mocked me with their art.
The Government Lake
It was dark and I could hear the cicada out the window, where there is a lawn, several very large pine trees, and a pond, and it was going like crazy—dur-rip, dur-rip. Sometimes dur-rip-a-rip, but in no particular sequence.
The Best Reviewed Poetry Collections of 2020
Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, Danez Smith’s Homie, Jorie Graham’s Runaway, and Margaret Atwood’s Dearly all feature among the best reviewed poetry collections of 2020. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.” * 1.
The Nature of Gary Snyder
Robert Hass The Paris Review September 14, 2020 Where to begin? I am sitting at a desk, looking at a first edition ofGary Snyder’sThe Practice of the Wild, and looking out the window at San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the West Coast of the North American continent.
The Nature of Gary Snyder
By Robert Hass September 10, 2020 Arts & Culture Where to begin? I am sitting at a desk, looking at a first edition of Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild, and looking out the window at San Francisco Bay. San Francisco Bay is the largest estuary on the West Coast of the North American continent.
Poetry: “Walking in the Neighborhood”
Blue of the sky, blue of the bay, deep blue-green Of the mountain, and the city across the bay Gleaming in the morning sun. The streets are empty, So the first thing to notice is what a street is: Roadbed, two gutters, two curbs, a planting strip, Sidewalks on either side. Item: paths lead to doors. Stairs are vertical paths. Driveways are car paths. People paint doors to the lives they are waking to Various colors: red, green, brown. Two crows Fly by with twigs in their beaks. It’s April.
Writing Place in a Time of Crisis
Tess Taylor’s new poetry collection Rift Zone is published this month. She shares five books about writing place in a time of crisis. Article continues after advertisement Wintering Out by Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney wrote this rich book about place and belonging in the late 60s and early 70s, as the sectarian violence of the Troubles was breaking out all over Northern Ireland, where he then lived. Strangely, he also finished some of the poems during a sabbatical in Berkeley.
The Practice of the Wild
About The Authors Gary Snyder is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992, he has been awarded the Bollingen Poetry Prize and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award.
The Critic’s Notebook
This week: Thomas Cole, Leonard Bernstein, the Yale Series of Younger Poets & more. Nonfiction: The conservative thinker Russell Kirk. Photo: The Russell Kirk Center. “Classic Kirk Essays,” selected by Cecilia Kirk Nelson: Without access to physical bookstores, it may well be time to begin amassing a digital library of your own, if you haven’t done so already.
SUMMER SNOW by Robert Hass Read by Robert Hass
Reading his own poetry in this audiobook, Robert Hass is reminiscent of Robinson Jeffers in his love of the California landscape and, sometimes, his lyricism. The award-winning poet (National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, among others) was Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. His voice is warm and sincere, and occasionally he seems to be overcome with emotion (or to run out of breath).
Dearly - Margaret Atwood - Hardcover
Skip to content Share This Title: New Poems by Margaret Atwood On Sale: 11/10/2020 $27.99 Spend $49 and get FREE shipping on HC.com Quantity: About Product Details In Dearly, Margaret Atwood's first collection of poetry in over a decade, Atwood addresses themes such as love, loss, the passage of time, the nature of nature and - zombies. Her new poetry is introspective and personal in tone, but wide-ranging in topic.
Selected Haiku by Issa
Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. New Year’s Day— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. The snow is melting and the village is flooded with children. Goes out, comes back— the love life of a cat. Mosquito at my ear— does he think I’m deaf? Under the evening moon the snail is stripped to the waist. Even with insects— some can sing, some can’t. All the time I pray to Buddha I keep on killing mosquitoes.
Twenty-five Books That Shaped America
Thomas C. Foster, acclaimed author of the phenomenal bestseller How to Read Literature Like a Professor, returns with a hugely entertaining appreciation of twenty-five works of literature that have greatly influenced the American identity. In a delightfully informative, often wry manner, Twenty-Five Books that Shaped America looks closely at important literary classics that are true national treasures.
Faint Music by Robert Hass
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
Semicolon - Cecelia Watson - Hardcover
Skip to content Share This Title: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson On Sale: 07/30/2019 $19.99 Spend $49 and get FREE shipping on HC.com Quantity: About Product Details Praise “Delightful.” —Mary Norris, The New Yorker A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why?
Talk to Me - Dean Nelson - E-book
From respected journalist, professor, and founder of the Writer's Symposium by the Sea, a book that demystifies the art and science of interviewing, in the vein of On Writing Well or How to Read Literature Like a Professor. “Dean Nelson is one of the best interviewers around.”—Anne Lamott Interviewing is the single most important way journalists (and doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, human resources staff, and, really, all of us) get information.
Tell It Slant by Camille T. Dungy
On the last day of a weeklong writers’ conference last summer, a student spotted me at lunch. She came over to my table, unfolded her cellophane-wrapped arm, and told me to look. New ink read, “The truth must dazzle gradually.” I was dazzled, certainly, as much by the line as by the student’s choice to etch it permanently on her forearm. Perhaps Emily Dickinson would have approved of the tattoo.
How Poetry Captivates Us
Scroll To Top How Poetry Captivates Us Former US poet laureate Robert Hass demonstrates the awe-inspiring power of poetry, in a series of readings that will make you say, "Whoa!" By Robert Hass | July 2016 | TRT 13:57 Bookmark View Comments Comments
After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa
New Year’s morning— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. A huge frog and I staring at each other, neither of us moves. This moth saw brightness in a woman’s chamber— burned to a crisp. Asked how old he was the boy in the new kimono stretched out all five fingers. Blossoms at night, like people moved by music Napped half the day; no one punished me! Fiftieth birthday: From now on, It’s all clear profit, every sky. Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually.
2018 National Book Festival Poetry and Prose Stage
WHAT: The National Endowment for the Arts will sponsor the Poetry and Prose Stage at the 2018 National Book Festival on Saturday, September 1 in Washington, DC. This year’s pavilion will feature: 11:00 am—12:15 pm Panel discussion: Native American Poets with Heid E. Erdrich, editor of New Poets of Native Nations, and contributors to the book Natalie Diaz and Jennifer Elise Foerster.
National Endowment for the Arts Sponsors the 2018 National Book Festival Poetry and Prose Stage
WHAT: The National Endowment for the Arts will sponsor the Poetry and Prose Stage at the 2018 National Book Festival on Saturday, September 1 in Washington, DC. This year’s pavilion will feature: 11:00 am—12:15 pm Panel discussion: Native American Poets with Heid E. Erdrich, editor of New Poets of Native Nations, and contributors to the book Natalie Diaz and Jennifer Elise Foerster.
Poetic Variations on An American Theme
he United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem." Thus Walt Whitman, in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, expressed what has been the American poet's struggle from the beginning - to wrest from the land a separate work of art. In honor of the Academy of American Poets, which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year, Harper's publishes fifteen poems reflecting this passion to explore the American text. No other country's history offers so dramatic a parallel to.
Iowa City: Early April by Robert Hass
This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves. And last night the sapphire of the raccoon's eyes in the beam of the flashlight. He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we'd left out for the birds.
Blog
“I spent all my loneliness with you here,” the speaker of Jake Rose’s JOAN opens, drawing us into a thrilling homage to Joan of Arc: one as sorrowful as it is vulnerable,…
3quarksdaily: Friday Poem
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Book Review Search Article
HOW does a writer like Cormac McCarthy -- if there is any writer like Cormac McCarthy -- follow up on the immense critical and popular success of his novel "All the Pretty Horses," which won a National Book Award for 1992 and accumulated extraordinary praise? Mr. McCarthy got compared to William Faulkner -- he has often been compared to Faulkner -- Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Shakespeare.
American Poetry Review - Poems
Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not A man who kills fifty people in five minutes With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists Are mentally ill.
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies.
100 Must-Read, Best Books On Writing And The Writer's Life
If you’re a working or aspiring writer, you already likely know about the classic best books on writing–King’s On Writing, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style–but for a craft as varied and personal as writing, you’ll always benefit from learning from more voices, with more techniques.
100 Must-Read, Best Books On Writing And The Writer's Life
If you’re a working or aspiring writer, you already likely know about the classic best books on writing–King’s On Writing, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style–but for a craft as varied and personal as writing, you’ll always benefit from learning from more voices, with more techniques.
Keats and King Lear by Adam Plunkett
Early in the winter of 1818, in December, John Keats wrote to his brother George about their younger brother, who had died two weeks before. “The last days of poor Tom were of the most distressing nature”—Tom, the boy whom Keats had nursed through his tuberculosis in Hampstead after George had left with his wife for Kentucky. John and Tom had kept to the house that fall while John worked on his second epic poem and read Shakespeare, writing “Sunday evening, Oct.
All the Books Seen in 'Orange Is the New Black' Season 5
I just finished binge-watching the fifth season of Orange Is the New Black. I won’t spoil anything for you but I will say that I did not think it could get any crazier than season four–and I was dead wrong. Season five was not only crazier but also more booktastic than any season prior. Season five takes place over the course of a three-day riot at Litchfield.
Poet Robert Hass on the Chords’ ‘Sh-Boom’
Robert Hass, 76, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former U.S. poet laureate who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of “A Little Book on Form” (Ecco). He spoke with Marc Myers. Pop music was a bit sappy in 1954, but...
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