Poet Robert Hass, who won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Awards last year from the Academy of American Poets, was one of 14 people interviewed for the January/February 2015 issue of Esquire about their 2014.

Among the many interesting things Hass had to say was this.

My younger brother once said to my mother, “I don’t know why Bob writes poetry. Nobody reads it.” And my mother said to him, “Yes, but they don’t read it for a long time.”

Here’s hoping we all have readers who don’t read us for a long time. Or something like that.

Mothers always put these things in perspective, don’t they?