Folger Poetry Board Reading: Robert Hass (2011)

For the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series 2011's Folger Poetry Board Reading, Robert hass read from his work in the Folger's Elizabethan Theatre on May 16, 2011.

Robert Hass

Robert Hass is one of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated and widely read voices. His poetry reflects his love of the natural world, filled with the landscapes he reveres and language both intimate and vital. Hass served from 1995 to 1997 as U.S. Poet Laureate and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. His Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005was praised by critics as a supremely well-crafted collection and won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Hass has published numerous books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and his most recent work, The Apple Trees at Olema: Selected Poems & Essays, 1985-2009, as well as a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. His essay collection Now & Then, which collects his Washington Post columns, was published in April 2007. Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Book Critics' Circle Award twice, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.

Reviews and Excerpts

“Robert Hass is so intelligent that to read his poetry or prose, or to hear him speak, gives one an almost visceral pleasure.” — New York Times Book Review

From "Palo Alto: the Marshes"

7.

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.