Robert Haas Speech

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Posted on November 14, 2007 
Filed Under National Book Awards

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.’”

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