Robert Hass

This article is about the 20th-century American poet. For the 21st-century and literary critic, see Robert Bernard Hass.

Courtesy Library of Congress.

Robert L. Hass (born March 1, 1941) is an American poet and academic, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States, and has won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Life

Youth and education

Hass was born in San Francisco and grew up in San Rafael, California. 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 graduated from St. Mary's College in Moraga, California in 1963, and earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1965 and 1971 respectively. At Stanford he studied with poet and critic Yvor Winters, whose ideas influenced his later writing and thinking. His Stanford classmates included poets Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, and James McMichael.

Career

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.

While at Berkeley, Hass spent 15 to 20 years translating the poetry of his fellow Berkeley professor and neighbor Czesław Miłosz as part of a team with Robert Pinsky and Miłosz.

From 1995 to 1997, during Hass's 2 terms as the U.S. 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 wrote a weekly column on poetry in the Washington Post, until 2000. 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.

Hass is married to poet and antiwar activist Brenda Hillman, who is a professor at Saint Mary's College of California.

Writing

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. He has also named Chilean Pablo Neruda, Peruvian Cesar Vallejo, and Polish poets Zbigniew Herbert, Wislawa Szymborska, and Czesław Miłosz, whom he regards as the 5 most important poets of the last 50 years. Of the 5, Neruda, Szymborska and Milosz are Nobel Prize winners.

Recognition

Awards

• Yale Series of Younger Poets Award]], 1972, for Field Guide
• The Frost Place poet in residence (1978)
• William Carlos Williams Award, 1979, for Praise
• National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, 1984, for Twentieth Century Pleasures
• MacArthur Fellowship , 1984
• Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1995-1997
• National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, 1996, for Sun Under Wood
• National Book Award for Poetry winner, 2007, for Time and Materials.
• Pulitzer Prize in Poetry co-winner, 2008, for Time and Materials.
• Manhae Prize co-winner, 2009

In popular culture

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.

Publications

Poetry

• Field Guide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets), 1973.
• Winter Morning in Charlottesville. Knotting, Bedfordshire, UK: Sceptre Press, 1977.
• Praise. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1979.
• (Contributor) Phrases After Noon. Frankfort Arts Foundation, Larkspur Press, 1985.
• The Apple Trees at Olema. New York: Ecco, 1989.
• Human Wishes. New York: Ecco, 1989.
• Sun Under Wood: New Poems. New York: Ecco, 1996.
• Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. New York: Ecco, 2007.

Non-fiction

• Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on poetry. New York: Ecco, 1984.
• Views by Robert Adams of the Los Angeles basin, 1978-1983. (essayist). San Francisco: Mathew Marks Gallery / New York: Fraenkel Gallery, 2000.

Translated

• Czeslaw Milosz, The Separate Notebooks (with Robert Pinsky). New York: Ecco, 1983.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth (with Milosz). New York: Ecco, 1986.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Collected Poems, 1931-1987 (with Louis Iribarne & Peter Scott). New York: Ecco, 1988.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Provinces. New York: Ecco, 1993.
• The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (translator, editor, and author of introduction). New York: Press, 1994.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River: New Poems (With Milosz). New York: Ecco, 1995.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Road-Side Dog (With Milosz). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Treatise on Poetry (with Milosz). New York: Ecco / HarperCollins, 2001.
• Czeslaw Milosz, Second Space: New Poems (with Milosz). New York: Ecco, 2004.
• (Contributing Translator) The Essential Neruda: Selected poems. San Francisco: City Lights, 2004.

Edited

• Robinson Jeffers, Rock and Hawk: A selection of shorter poems. New York: Random House, 1987.
• The Pushcart Prize XII (edited with Bill Henderson and Jorie Graham). Wainscott, NY: Pushcart, 1987.
• Tomaz Salamun, Selected Poems (translations from the Slovene; edited with Charles Simic)).New York: Ecco, 1988.
• Tomas Transtroemer, Selected Poems of Tomas Transtroemer, 1954-1986 (translated by May Swenson and others). New York: Ecco, 1989.
• Into the Garden: A wedding anthology, poetry and prose on love and marriage (edited with Stephen Mitchell). New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
• Poet’s Choice: Poems for everyday life. New York: Ecco, 1998.
• American Poetry: The Twentieth Century (edited with John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff). (2 volumes), New York: Library of America, 2000.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

Robert Hass reading a poem at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival

My Favorite Poems 1 Privilege of Being (by Robert Hass)

• Robert Hass and Thom Gunn (CD). New York: Academy of American Poets, 1988, 2004.
• An Evening with Robert Hass and Sharon Olds, October 01, 1992. San Francisco: City Arts & Lectures, 1996.
• An Evening with Robert Hass, Jane Hirshfield and Kay Ryan, October 30, 1996. San Francisco: City Arts & Lectures, 1996.
• An Evening with Robert Hass, May 6, 1998. San Francisco: City Arts & Lectures, 1998.
• An Evening with Robert Hass and Jorie Graham, January 31, 2000. San Francisco: City Arts & Lectures, 2000.

Except where noted, discographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• Robert Hass at PoemHunter (1 poem).
• Robert Hass--Online Poems ("Meditations at Lagunitas" and "Misery and Splendor")
• Robert Hass profile & 4 poems at the Academy of American Poets.
• Robert Hass b. 1941 at the Poetry Foundation.

Audio/video

• Robert Hass (b. 1941) at The Poetry Archive
• Robert Hass at YouTube
• Audio: "Hass Speech on Haiku and Czeslaw Milosz"

Books

• Robert Hass at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Robert Hass in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Robert Hass at the Millennium Council
• Robert Hass at NNDB.
• "The Bard of Berkeley," Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2009
• Robert Hass at Modern American Poetry.
• Robert Hass: Online resources, Library of Congress
• 'Nature's Imaginative Beauty', review of The Apple Trees at Olema in the Oxonian Review
• "The Temptations of Art", review of "The Apple Trees at Olema" in The New Republic