Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else. Robert Hass More Quotes by Robert Hass More Quotes From Robert Hass The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around. Robert Hass communityselflong All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking Robert Hass lossthinking Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs. Robert Hass governmentgivingpeople I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous. Robert Hass countrychildrenschool I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read. Robert Hass teachwonderfulpeople You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools. Robert Hass cuttingmeanschool They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own. Robert Hass attachmentlandart Another problem about writing about politics in the "age of globalization" is that so much of the violence in the form of war and also in the forms of institutional violence - sweatshops, child labor, victimization of people economically - happens elsewhere and out of sight. And when we do know about it and need to witness it, it's always mediated by images of one kind or another, so you're kind of stuck trying to write about what it's like trying to be you living your life thinking about and experiencing this stuff in that way. Robert Hass writingwarchildren Like everyone else, I was at least peripherally involved in the antiwar movement. You woke up every morning feeling tormented about what was going on in Vietnam. It seemed to a lot of us like a catastrophe from the very beginning, inflicting immense and needless suffering on not only the American soldiers but on a lot of innocent peasants who were caught in a Cold War proxy battle - two million Vietnamese died during those years, and you woke up every morning knowing that that was going on. Robert Hass morningwartwo Poetry is a man arguing with himself; rhetoric is a man arguing with others. Robert Hass rhetoricarguingmen If you were making poetry out of convictions - trying to convince other people - you were in the territory of rhetoric, and that wasn't the territory of poetry. I think that's pretty smart. I think that it doesn't need to be altogether true, but that was my starting place. Robert Hass smartpeoplethinking One of the interesting things about the history of poetry in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries is that people who read liked getting their information in rhyme just as much as in prose. The genre that we would think of as nonfiction often was written in verse in forms like the Georgic when people thought that one of the tasks of poetry was conveying arguments and information in a pleasant way. Robert Hass peopleinterestingthinking When I began writing poems, it was in the late 60s and early 70s when the literary and cultural atmosphere was very much affected by what was going on in the world, which was, in succession, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and the women's movement in the 60s, 70s, and into the early 80s. And all of those things affected me and affected my thinking, particularly the Vietnam War. Robert Hass writingwarthinking Prose gets divided up into fiction and nonfiction and short fiction and long fiction and autobiographical nonfiction and so on. Poetry can do any of those things except with the added definition of intensified formal pressure. Robert Hass fiction-and-nonfictionpressurelong My first book was published when I was thirty-two, so I think it was basically finished when I was thirty or thirty-one. And so then you think, "Well, what have you failed to do?" And my answer to myself was almost everything. Robert Hass twobookthinking My suspicion is that once you have literacy in place, the readership has not changed very much. Robert Hass suspicionliteracychanged Literature, the study of literature in English in the 19th century, did not belong to literary studies, which had to do with Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but instead with elocution and public speaking. So when people read literature, it was to memorize and to recite it. Robert Hass greeklatinpeople In the beginning of the 19th century, maybe forty percent of women and fifty percent of men could produce a signature, which meant that they'd had at least three years of education because it was in third grade that people started penmanship in the 19th century. And of course black people could get killed if they got caught teaching themselves to read in some parts of the country. Robert Hass teachingmencountry I think one percent of the population attended college when Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and Gertrude Stein were at Harvard. Now I think forty percent of Americans have some college education. That's an astronomical change. Robert Hass frostcollegethinking When Emily Dickinson's poems were published in the 1890s, they were a best-seller; the first book of her poems went through eleven editions of a print run of about 400. So the first print run out of Boston for a first book of poems was 400 for a country that had fifty million people in it. Now a first print run for a first book is maybe 2,000? So that's a five-time increase in the expectation of readership. Probably the audience is almost exactly the same size as it was in 1900, if you just took that one example. Robert Hass runningcountrybook
