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Pound described poetry as original research in language, and just as formal experiment in poetry has to try things and has to go too far, so does experiment with writing about politics in poetry and what the politics of poetry is.

Robert Hass

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Robert Hass
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 1
Literary Critic
Poet
Teacher
Translator
University Teacher
Writer
San Francisco County
California
Robert L. Hass
Research
Pound
Poetry
Described
Politics
Experiment
Language
Formal
Doe
Pounds
Experiments
Writing
Originals
Trying
Original
Things

More quotes by Robert Hass

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Do poets have any insight into what's the right ratio? I doubt it, but I think that they can be awake to what the ends are.
Robert Hass
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The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called Rusia en 1931. This poem is about [Osip] Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and [Cesar] Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist.
Robert Hass
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I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read.
Robert Hass
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Haiku is an art that seems dedicated to making people pay attention to the preciousness and particularity of every moment of existence. I think that poetry can do that.
Robert Hass
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I think that what art can do is refresh our sense of justice, wake us up to what we've taken for granted in the political realm, as in the other realms.
Robert Hass
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It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Robert Hass
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The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too
Robert Hass
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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.
Robert Hass
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Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.
Robert Hass
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Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass
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Where politics is concerned, I think poets have to be pragmatists, philosophical pragmatists.
Robert Hass
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If you ask me if I have this or that principle, tell me what its consequences are, and then I'll tell you whether I have that principle or not.
Robert Hass
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The problem with describing poets as legislators is that at that level of politics - politics as political invention - poets have no special skills and are not apt to.
Robert Hass
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Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.
Robert Hass
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The first book that really knocked me out was the 'Brothers Karamazov.' I read it when I was a senior in high school.
Robert Hass
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There are either poems about sex/love or God.
Robert Hass
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As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community - not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.
Robert Hass
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In California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate.
Robert Hass
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Poetry had in the hands of various people become a place for inconvenient knowledge insofar as it was a place for knowledge at all. But it was a place where you could talk about other kinds of experience than the official version.
Robert Hass
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Fiction writers have their own world, and poets have their own world, and literary criticism has sort of passed over into cultural studies in the university, and so on. They seem more disconnected from each other than they did when I first began to write.
Robert Hass