Robert Hass - Career

Career

Hass graduated from St. Mary's College in Moraga, California in 1963, and received his MA and Ph.D. in English from Stanford University in 1965 and 1971 respectively. At Stanford he studied with the poet and critic Yvor Winters, whose ideas influenced his later writing and thinking. His Stanford classmates included the poets Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, and James McMichael. 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, and was a panelist at the Workshop's 75th anniversary celebration in June 2011.

From 1995-1997, during Hass's two terms as the US Poet Laureate (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.

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

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.