"All the new thinking is about loss, In this it resembles all the old thinking." -- Robert Hass
Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941 San Francisco) is a Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He was awarded the 2007 National Book Award and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Time and Materials.
"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.""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.""Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.""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."
Hass is a California poet whose works are well-known for their West Coast subject and attitude. He was born in San Francisco and grew up in San Rafael. He grew up with an alcoholic mother, a major topic in the 1996 poem collection, Sun Under Wood. It was his older brother who encouraged him to dedicate himself to his writing. Awe-struck by Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, among others in the 1950s Bay Area poetry scene, Hass entertained the idea of becoming a beatnik. He graduated from Marin Catholic High School in 1958. When the area became influenced by East Asian literary techniques, such as haiku, Hass took many of these influences up in his poetry. Hass is married to the poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, who is also a professor at Saint Mary's College of California.
Hass graduated from St. Mary's College in Moraga, California in 1963, and received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1965 and 1971 respectively. At Stanford he studied with the poet and critic Yvor Winters, whose ideas influenced his later writing and thinking. His Stanford classmates included the poets Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, and James McMichael. Hass taught literature and writing at the University at Buffalo in 1967. From 1971 to 1989, he taught at his alma mater St. Mary's, at which time he transferred to the faculty of University of California, Berkeley. He has been a visiting faculty member in the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa on several occasions.
From 1995-1997, during Hass's two terms as the US Poet Laureate (Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress), he became a champion of literacy, poetry, and ecological awareness. He criss-crossed the country lecturing in places as diverse as corporate boardrooms and for civic groups, or as he has said, "places where poets don't go." Since his self-described "act of citizenship," he has written a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post. He serves as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, is a trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize, and works actively for literacy and the environment.
As major influences on his poetry, Hass cites beat poet Lew Welch, whose short poem "Raid Kills Bugs Dead" he praised in an online chat. Besides, he has named Chilean Pablo Neruda, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, and Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert, Wislawa Szymborska, and Czes?aw Mi?osz, whom he regards as the five most important poets of the last 50 years. Of the five, Neruda, Szymborska and Milosz are Nobel Prize winners. While at Berkeley, Hass spent 15 to 20 years translating the poetry of his fellow Berkeley professor and neighbor Czes?aw Mi?osz as part of a team with Robert Pinsky and Mi?osz.
In 1999, Hass appeared in Wildflowers, the debut film by director Melissa Painter. In the film, Hass plays The Poet, a writer who is dying of an unnamed chronic illness. Excerpts from his poetry are included in the script, primarily read by Hass and by actress Darryl Hannah.
His new and collected poems is forthcoming from Ecco Press in 2010.
Field Guide, Robert Hass, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973, ISBN 0-300-01650-6
Praise, Robert Hass, New York: Ecco Press, 1979, ISBN 0-912946-61-X
Human Wishes, Robert Hass, New York: Ecco Press, 1989, ISBN 0-88001-211-0
Sun Under Wood: new poems, Robert Hass, Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1996, ISBN 0-88001-468-7
Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 2007, ISBN 0-06134-960-7
Now and Then: The Poet's Choice Columns, 1997-2000, Robert Hass, Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007, ISBN 1593761465
The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems, Robert Hass, Ecco Press, 2010, ISBN 0061923826
Critical works
"James Wright", Robert Hass, in The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the poetry of James Wright, Dave Smith (editor), Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982, ISBN 0-252-00876-6
Twentieth Century Pleasures: prose on poetry, Robert Hass, New York: Ecco Press, 1984, ISBN 0-88001-045-2
"Edward Taylor: What was he up to?", Robert Hass, in Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Essays by contemporary poets on the early modern lyric, Jonathan F. S. Post (editor), Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, ISBN 0-520-21455-2
Translations
The Separate Notebooks, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky with the author and Renata Gorczynski), New York: Ecco Press, 1984, ISBN 0-88001-031-2
Unattainable Earth, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by author and Robert Hass), New York: Ecco Press, 1986, ISBN 0-88001-098-3
Provinces, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by author and Robert Hass), Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1991, ISBN 0-88001-321-4
The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bash?, Buson, and Issa, Bash? Matsuo, Buson Yosano, Issa Kobayashi (edited with verse translation by Robert Hass), Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1994, ISBN 0-88001-372-9
Facing the River: new poems, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by author and Robert Hass), Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1995, ISBN 0-88001-404-0
Road-Side Dog, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by author and Robert Hass), New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, ISBN 0-374-25129-0
Treatise on Poetry, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by author and Robert Hass), New York: Ecco Press, 2001, ISBN 0-06-018524-4
Second Space: new poems, Czes?aw Mi?osz (translated by author and Robert Hass), New York: Ecco Press, 2004, ISBN 0-06-074566-5
"The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, includes five translations by Robert Hass, San Francisco: City Lights 2004, ISBN 0872864286
