Robert Hayden Quotes

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstraction police and threaten us. Reclaim now, now renew the vision of a human world where godliness is possible and man is neither gook nigger honkey wop nor kike but man permitted to be man.

Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

I will no longer ask for more than you have freely given or can give.

The trees themselves, as in winters past, will survive their burdening, broken thrive.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house, Speaking indifferently to him, Who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know Of love's austere and lonely offices?

What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?

I grieve. Yet know the vanity of grief.

Unable to sleep, or pray, I stand by the window looking out at moonstruck trees a December storm has bowed with ice. Maple and mountain ash bend under its glassy weight, their cracked branches falling upon the frozen snow. The trees themselves, as in winters past, will survive their burdening, broken thrive. And am I less to You, my God, than they?

The trees themselves, as in winters past, will survive their burdening, broken thrive. And am I less to You, my God, than they?

O Jesus burning on the lily cross... O night, rawhead and bloodybones night... O night betrayed by darkness not its own.

Know that love has chosen you to live his crucial purposes.

all art is pain suffered and outlived

It was as though you struggled against fierce current jagged with debris to save me then. I am desperate still.

This summer, a lot of what I was teaching was against Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, very broadly speaking, this anxiety of sounding too much like another poet, especially a firmly established poet, for fear of not sounding original. I kept telling my students, “Why wouldn’t you want to be influence by these poets! Why wouldn’t you want to sound like Keats or Robert Hayden?” Pound and Eliot were influenced by Browning, and they influenced one another. James Wright—when he came on the scene, many of us were consciously imitating him, trying to do do what he so gloriously did.... I tell them not to worry about influence or imitation as long as you’re emulating the best work, the work you love. How much imitation is too much? You’ll know it when you see it. . . .And that’s just a huge problem in general, especially in America. We’re individuals. we’re the one, not the many. We want to stand out from the crowd. Everyone is trying to differentiate themselves. The fact is we are one big organism. We belong together. We are a tribe. Not one of us can do something that doesn’t affect the other, past or present.

Oh, what a world we make, oppressor and oppressed. Our world-- this violent ghetto, slum of the spirit raging against itself. We hate kill destroy in the name of human good our killing and our hate destroy.

Monet’s “Waterlilies” (for Bill and Sonja) Today as the news from Selma and Saigon poisons the air like fallout, I come again to see the serene great picture that I love. Here space and time exist in light the eye like the eye of faith believes. The seen, the known dissolve in iridescence, become illusive flesh of light that was not, was, forever is. O light beheld as through refracting tears. Here is the aura of that world each of us has lost. Here is the shadow of its joy.

Although it has become the most visible of American suburban landscapes, the edge node has few architectural defenders. Even developers despair: 'Shopping centers built only in the 1960s are already being abandoned. Their abandonment brings down the values of nearby neighbourhoods. Wal-Marts built five years ago are already being abandoned for superstores. We have built a world of junk, a degraded environment. It may be profitable for a short-term, but its long-term economic prognosis is bleak.' -Dolores Hayden quoting Robert Davis, 'Postscript,' in Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism, 2002.

confess i am curiously drawn unmentionable to the americans doubt i could exist among them for long however psychic demands far too severe much violence much that repels i am attracted none the less their variousness their ingenuity their elan vital and that some thing essence quiddity i cannot penetrate or name

NIGHT, DEATH, MISSISSIPPI By Robert Hayden 1. A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs – One of them, I bet – and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Have us a bottle, Boy and me – he’s earned him a bottle – when he gets home. 2 Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so’s he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own CHAPTER FOUR THE LYNCHING OF JESSE WASHINGTON: "Haven't I one friend in this crowd?

NIGHT, DEATH, MISSISSIPPI By Robert Hayden 1. A quavering cry. Screech-owl? Or one of them? The old man in his reek and gauntness laughs – One of them, I bet – and turns out the kitchen lamp, limping to the porch to listen in the windowless night. Be there with Boy and the rest if I was well again. Time was. Time was. White robes like moonlight In the sweetgum dark. Unbucked that one then and him squealing bloody Jesus as we cut it off. Time was. A cry? A cry all right. He hawks and spits, fevered as by groinfire. Have us a bottle, Boy and me – he’s earned him a bottle – when he gets home. 2 Then we beat them, he said, beat them till our arms was tired and the big old chains messy and red. O Jesus burning on the lily cross Christ, it was better than hunting bear which don’t know why you want him dead. O night, rawhead and bloodybones night You kids fetch Paw some water now so’s he can wash that blood off him, she said. O night betrayed by darkness not its own

Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage.

Not sunflowers, not roses, but rocks in patterned    sand grow here. And bloom. —ROBERT HAYDEN, “Approximations

AND SLOWLY I WOULD RISE AND DRESS, FEARING THE CHRONIC ANGERS OF THAT HOUSE. —ROBERT HAYDEN

We fight our wish to die.

Traveling through Fog Looking back, we cannot see, except for its blurring lights like underwater stars and moons, our starting-place. Behind us, beyond us now is phantom territory, a world abstract as memories of earth the traveling dead take home. Between obscuring cloud and cloud, the cloudy dark ensphering us seems all we can be certain of. Is Plato’s cave.

A truly wonderful thing happened to me when Lochlann Jain and Jake Kosek invited me to join a new writing group—infinite thanks to Lochlann and Jake and to Joe Dumit, Cori Hayden, Jonathan Metzl, Michelle Murphy, Diane Nelson, Jackie Orr, Elizabeth Roberts, and Miriam Tictin for years of joyful conspiring.

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Ay! you creatures who have walked on seas of money all your foreign lives! Por caridad.

What did I know, what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Fuhrman moved to Coeur d’Alene, just outside of Hayden Lake, Idaho, a notorious mecca for white supremacist militias. He works for Fox News as its “forensic and crime scene expert,” but his principal function these days seems to be acting as an antidote to the Black Lives Matter movement.

We built new houses on the new riverbanks and our abandoned riverbed became, seen from space (we saw pictures), a long, pale line by day, a deep, black slash at night. Ode to Asa Bundy Sheffey, which was Robert Hayden’s birth name, reduced from three trochees to two. It was a family issue, his unhappy mother giving him to unhappy neighbors, the Haydens, who raised him, and called him Robert Hayden, though they never bothered to make it legal. From time to time, he’d see his blood parents—in a blur, his eyes so bad he never knew what they looked like, nor even what he himself looked like, without his glasses, which were so thick sometimes sight got lost inside them. Might he have left, or found, some poems in those dense lenses? An austere militant of reticence: Robert Hayden Asa Bundy Sheffey. Permissionless, I’m adding three more tumbling trochees, making five in a row, to inject into your name even more velocity. They’re all I can give you, in gratitude for some truths you left, in deep-set ink, on the page.

Fed the fires that consume us now, the fire that will save.

In time, you will come to regard my questioning with a certain pained amusement; in time, get so you would hardly find it possible to live without my joke and me.

Know that love has chosen you to live his crucial purposes. Know that love has chosen you. And will not pamper you nor spare; demands obedience to all the rigorous laws of risk, does not pamper, will not spare. Oh, master now love's instruments— complex and not for the fearful, simple and not for the foolish. Master now love's instruments. I who love you tell you this, even as the pitiful killer waits for me, I who love you tell you this.

Ars Longa Which is crueller Vita Brevis life or art?

How shall the mind keep warm save at spectral fires--how thrive but by the light of paradox?

Fury of truth: fury of righteousness become angelic evil demonic good?

World I have loved and loving hated, is it your sickness luxuriating in my body's world?

here among them the americans this baffling multi people extremes and variegations their noise restlessness their almost frightening energy how best describe these aliens in my reports to The Counselors disguise myself in order to study them unobserved adapting their varied pigmentations white black red brown yellow the imprecise and strangering distinctions by which they live by which they justify their cruelties to one another charming savages enlightened primitives brash new comers lately sprung up in our galaxy how describe them do they indeed know what or who they are do not seem to yet no other beings in the universe make more extravagant claims for their importance and identity

something they call the american dream sure we still believe in it i guess an earth man in the tavern said irregardless of the some times night mare facts we always try to double talk our way around and its okay the dreams okay and means whats good could be a damn sight better means every body in the good old u s a should have the chance to get ahead or at least should have three squares a day as for myself i do okay

their vaunted liberty no body pushes me around i have heard them say land of the free they sing what do they fear mistrust betray more than the freedom they boast of in their ignorant pride have seen the squalid ghettoes in their violent cities paradox on paradox how have the americans managed to survive

america as much a problem in metaphysics as it is a nation earthly entity an iota in our galaxy an organism that changes even as i examine it fact and fantasy never twice the same so many variables

Sleepless, I stare from the dark hospital room at shadows of a flower and its leaves the nightlight fixes like a blotto on the corridor wall.

The Department of Justice was charged with enforcing the 1980 Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, but did little. Poor enforcement had led to Congressional investigations in 1983 and 1985; in a 1984 issue of the Nebraska Law Review, Robert Dinerstein wrote that "as a result of …its utter failure to enforce CRIPA, The Department of Justice has manifestly failed to extend to institutionalized disabled persons the rights that are properly theirs." John Kip Cornwell, writing in the November 1987 Yale Law Review, leveled similar charges, as did the University of Minnesota's Mary Hayden in 1998, over a decade later. She said the DOJ relied too much on conciliation, showing "solicitousness for the prerogatives of state officials or parents who support institutionalization" rather than for the people who were being kept in the institutions.

The implementation of liberty/freedom, as Robert Hayden, the U.S. poet laureate in the 1970s, put it, has been the “way we journeyed from Can’t to Can.

Robert Hayden