Visitors to this blog site know that I often use the title-lead, “Capturing the Moment.” I also use the title-lead, “Capturing the Word,” but have been neglectful in using this lead-in of late. Last July 9th, I posted, “Capturing the Word — Robert Hass.” For the most part, the “Capture the Word” series was my way of featuring writers presented at the “Writers In Performance” series, at Lone Star College – Montgomery, over the years. The series, started by my friend Dave Parsons (Texas State Poet Laureate, 2011) and under the guidance of the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council (MCLAC), has attracted many outstanding writers, including Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Hass and his wife, Brenda Hillman. They appeared in the early days of the series, March 10, 1996, only three years after the series began. (The series is still going strong, with the next event being the 19th Annual Emily Dickinson Birthday Celebration with Nationally acclaimed Dickinson scholar, author and educator, Brenda Wineapple, who will discuss her book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson — and as always the “Gathering of Poets” at Conroe’s Corner Pub.)
Robert Hass is one of contemporary poetry’s most celebrated and widely-read voices, so I was surprised to read of his being clubbed recently during an Occupy Wall Street protest in Berkley, California. Hass and his wife had gone on campus to see what was happening and how the police and students behaved. “If there was trouble, we wanted to do what we could to protect the students,” Hass wrote in today’s New York Times — “Poet-Bashing Police.” Trying to protect Brenda, after a cop shoved her to the ground, Hass was clubbed. Click here to read the opinion piece.
“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.”
— from MEDITATIONS AT LAGUNITAS by Robert Hass
kenne
Montgomery County Literary Arts Council (MCLAC), 1996 post-card flyer — Scanned Image
Related articles
- Former Poet Laureate Robert Hass Clubbed By Police At UC Berkeley (crooksandliars.com)
- OPINION: Poet-Bashing Police By ROBERT HASS (jhaines6.wordpress.com)
- Between The Wars by Robert Hass (underpaidgenius.com)
- Emily Dickinson Exhibit at Poets House (thenightlypoem.com)
- Bob Hass on Being Beaten by Police (batterrier.com)
- Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi | UCDavis Bicycle Barricade (worldwright.wordpress.com)
- Robert Hass – U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995-1997 6/19/2011 (thenightlypoem.com)
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Reblogged this on Becoming is Superior to Being and commented:
After waking each day and before exercising and going out for a walk or hike, I listen and read about our day. Sometimes the happenings you least expect garnered my attention. This coming week is the 37th Miami Book Fair; the nation’s largest literary gathering is being presented online for the first time featuring more than 300 authors. One of the authors will be Robert Hass in a conversation with Campbell Mcgrath on his new book of poems, “Summer Snow.” I first listen to and read his poetry when he and his wife, Brenda Hillman, presented in March 1996 at the Montgomery County Literary Arts Council, Writers in Performance Series.
This is a Reblog from November 20, 2011. Also, Robert Hass reads for UC Berkley Lunch Poems on 2/6/2020. — kenne