He quoted Emily Dickinson, “Success is counted sweetest / By those who ne’er succeed.”

“Poems have always been rich and plangent.”

He is being very kind towards his fellow nominees, as everybody else is. Indeed, he is spending much of his speech talking about “learning from them.”

“We’ve labored together to make poems that offer new shapes of feeling, new shapes of perception, and to say something about what it’s like to be alive at a given time.”

Apparently, his best friend in high school was Joan Didion’s cousin. “I have a cousin who wants to be a writer. She got a job with a magazine called Vogue.” “What does Vogue mean?” asked the young Haas. “It’s French for ‘fog.'”

Fran Lebowitz: “One down, three to go.”

Charles Simic is now presenting. “This is an amazing time in American poetry, as we found out reading these books. A lot of good poems have been written and published. At least ten to fifteen books would have been on our short list of finalists.”

There is, incidentally, a Powerpoint presentation on the screen which blips up all the book covers for each category.

But the winner is Robert Hass’s Time and Materials.

…can be found here.

“Well, I obviously should have been writing YA all along.”

Nervous, truly awe-struck.

The first book he remembered was Ezra Jack Keats’s The Snowy Day Board Book. He was struck by the gorgeous isolation. His first creative writing teacher handed him a Native American volume. He had never read a book by another Native American before. “I knew right then at that moment when I read that line that I wanted to be a writer. And it’s been a gorgeous and magic and terrifying twenty years since then. And now I stand before you grateful.”

He thanked his editor Jennifer Brown, “even though I could be an arrogant bastard.”