Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

Robert Hass

Categorized in : Ideas Believe Russia

It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.

Robert Hass

hell poetry writing

Take the time to write. You can do your life's work in half an hour a day.

Robert Hass

hours half writing

Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances.

Robert Hass

longing distance desire

It's clear that there has to be some play between the vitality of invention in economic life and some regulation of it, and in some ways the great ideological wars of the 20th century that cost so many lives had to do with whether to have managed economies directed by government or economies directed by the free movement of capital, which is only partially subject to government regulation.

Robert Hass

government play war

The birds are silent in the woods. / Just wait: soon enough / You will be quiet too

Robert Hass

soon-enough waiting bird

A word is elegy to what it signifies.

Robert Hass

elegy silence

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.

Robert Hass

distance silly hands

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.

Robert Hass

metaphor stories ideas

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Robert Hass

incessant writing discovery

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

trios buttons school

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

taken art thinking

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.

Robert Hass

land running water

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

poet wish thinking

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

Robert Hass

fans summer winter

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

people art thinking

The Earth forgives the previous year every year.

Robert Hass

forgiving earth years

Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free.

Robert Hass

repetition variation feels

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.

Robert Hass

jobs ideas thinking

I think that my responsibility to my art is to try to get it right or to push the boundaries of what I'm able to do in any way.

Robert Hass

responsibility art thinking

A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write.

Robert Hass

movement writing school