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 More Quotes by Robert Hass More Quotes From Robert Hass It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books. Robert Hass book people ideas The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up. Robert Hass teenager people years At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction. Robert Hass alive tasks ideas As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out. Robert Hass work-out artist jobs When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged. Robert Hass creative ambition writing 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 political skills special If you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed. Robert Hass watersheds places-you-live responsible Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected. Robert Hass class kids school Our history doesn't look at our own violence, the violence in our own past, and we go out and repeat it someplace else. Robert Hass violence looks past 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. Robert Hass day myself pain yellow When I was younger, I was so crazy about poetry that I didn't notice who was noticing. It seemed to me so tremendous and large. Robert Hass who me crazy poetry 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. Robert Hass words saying good moments I would say Gary Snyder, who is from my part of the world as a poet and environmental thinker, will be read just as Henry Thoreau as John Muir will continue to be read. Robert Hass say will environmental world The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I'm very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that. Robert Hass feel me poetry war
