“The foregrounding of artifice—dwelling on the making of the poem, in a poem—seems to go to the core of what poetry is, doesn’t it?”

I woke up thinking abouy my brothr’s body.
That q That was my first bit of early morning typing
So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right.

A dune begins with an obstacle—a stone, a shrub, a log,
anything heavy enough to resist being moved by wind.

The freeway tracks the Han River which flows
west out of the mountains we are heading toward.
This morning it is river-colored, grey-green,

When I sat in the square in Cuernavaca
Outside the church of the conquistador,
Wondering if Malinche had ever loved Cortés

“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia.

On the thirtieth anniversary of the book’s original release, Robert Hass revisits Gary Snyder’s ‘The Practice of the Wild.’

Why should that city, defenseless and pure as the wedding necklace of a forgotten tribe, keep offering itself to me? Like blue and red brown seeds beaded