Robert Hass Quotes

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.

For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains. “Longing,” says the poet Robert Hass, “because desire is full of endless distances.” Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never arrive in, for the blue world.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The basis of art is change in the universe.

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

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.

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

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

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Sometimes from this hillside just after sunset The rim of the sky takes on a tinge Of the palest green, like the flesh of a cucumber When you peel it carefully.

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

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.

What is older than desire? the bare tree asked. Sorrow, said the sky. Sorrow is a river older than desire. — Robert Hass, from “February: Question” in “February Notebooks: The Rains,” Summer Snow: New Poems (Ecco, 2020)

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.

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."

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 degrading to the rainbow perch he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass, scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs, and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up on the girder like a child—the sun was going down and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing carefully, and drove home to an empty house. There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed. A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick with rage and grief. He knew more or less where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill. They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,” she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights, a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay. “You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?” “Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now, “I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while— Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall— and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more, and go to sleep. And he, he would play that scene once only, once and a half, and tell himself that he was going to carry it for a very long time and that there was nothing he could do but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark cracking and curling as the cold came up. 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

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

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

It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,/rising.

So few things we need to know. And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack. Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark. And the time for cutting furrows and the dance

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.

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.

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.

 ‘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.

But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is....When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making

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 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.

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.

A metaphor for this, and also a fact, which is lovely and also terrible in this case, is the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea, which I got to visit recently. It’s about three miles wide and runs from one end of the peninsula to the other, and it’s the most demilitarized piece of real estate on the earth. There are, as you know, eight species of Asian cranes. All of them are either endangered or nearly endangered, and two of them are making a comeback because they do their winter foraging in the demilitarized zone, which has been made into an unintentional national park. And if North and South Korea ever settle their problems and remove the last nuclear trip wire of the Cold War, that land will probably be developed, and those two species, which are ten million years old, will be gone from the earth.

The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa, edited by Robert Hass.

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)

Aquinas believed in the soul, as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins do not; but one reason he did so was because he thought it yielded the richest possible understanding of the lump of matter known as the body. As Wittgenstein once remarked: if you want an image of the soul, look at the body. The soul for Thomas is not some ghostly extra, as it was for the platonizing Christians of his time; it is not to be seen as a spiritual kidney or spectral pancreas. The question “Whereabouts in the body is the soul?” would to his mind involve a category mistake, as though one were to ask how close to the left armpit one’s envy was located. For Aquinas, the soul is everywhere in the body precisely because it is what he calls, after Aristotle, the “form” of it, meaning the way in which it is uniquely organized to be expressive of meaning. The soul is not some sort of thing, but the distinctive way in which a particular piece of matter is alive. It is quite as visible as a club foot. To claim that a spider has a different sort of soul from a human being is in Thomas’s view simply to say that it has a different form of life. What distinguishes an animal body from a hat or a hosepipe is the fact that it is signifying, communicative, self-transformative stuff, in contrast to the meaninglessly dumb matter of so much contemporary materialism. It is, in Turner’s phrase, “matter articulate.

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

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

Kobayashi Issa 1763–1828 Children imitating cormorants are even more wonderful than cormorants. Translated from the Japanese by Robert Hass.

Her body by the fire Mimicked the light-conferring midnights Of philosophy. Suppose they are dead now. Isn’t “dead now” an odd expression? The sound of the owls outside And the wind soughing in the trees Catches in their ears, is sent out In scouting parties of sensation down their spines. If you say it became language or it was nothing, Who touched whom? In what hurtle of starlight? Poor language, poor theory Of language. The shards of skull In the Egyptian museum looked like maps of the wind-eroded Canyon labyrinths from which, Standing on the verge In the yellow of a dwindling fall, you hear Echo and re-echo the cries of terns Fishing the worked silver of a rapids. And what to say of her wetness? The Anglo-Saxons Had a name for it. They called it silm. They were navigators. It was also Their word for the look of moonlight on the sea. — Robert Hass, “Etymology.” Time and Materials. (Ecco; First Edition edition October 9, 2007)

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

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

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.

Principle underlying all of the solutions = question we ask

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

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

From galactic silence protect us.

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.

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

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. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. 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. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. 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.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye proposes a way of looking at narrative genres based on the seasonal circle of our lives. Comedy is associated with spring and fertility ritual, tragedy with autumn and rituals for allaying the ghosts of harvest. Romance, stories that tend to flatter a culture’s values, belong to high summer, and satire belongs to winter. It is the world stripped bare.

Todo el pensar nuevo es acerca de la pérdida.

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.