I guess a lot of the questions in poetry can only be answered by poetry. That is they can only be answered by dramatizing and intensifying the contradictions which we suppress in everyday life in order to get on with it–Robert Hass
Marin Catholic grad; Stanford Ph.d; MacArthur Fellowship; Pulitzer Prize; National Book Award; former U.S. Poet laureate–this partial list of awards and accomplishments only hint at the intellect and profound engagement with the world of San Francisco native/California poet Robert Hass.
From his Midwest Iowan perch, Michael Judge describes a recent dinner with Hass at “a fancy joint called Yoshi’s” (excertped from the Wall Street Journal Online).
“One benefit of being a poet — as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host — is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.
“The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city’s finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi’s) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.
“Still, for the life of me, I can’t remember what he looks like. So, after approaching a few slightly startled gentlemen in his age bracket, I’m relieved when a pleasant man with a warm countenance, wearing blue jeans and a black windbreaker, extends his hand and says simply, ‘I’m Bob.’
“After snuffing out my cigarette, I tell him my wife Masae awaits us inside and is holding what we hope will be a quiet booth where we can talk. Alas, there’s a speaker above us blaring jazz, and adjacent diners are shouting above the din. Undaunted, we peruse the wine list. ‘Buttery and oaky is the classic California chardonnay that everyone’s gotten sick of,’ says the poet, with a slight grin. ‘But I haven’t!’ And with that we order a bottle from California’s Santa Rita Hills and begin.
“He’s just flown in from Toronto, he tells us, where he attended the Griffin Poetry Prize ceremony, and asks that we please forgive him if he ‘fades early. …But before I can ask him for details, he’s on to another topic: a Berkeley-based nonprofit called the International Rivers Network. ‘I’m the only poet on the board,’ he says. ‘It’s an environmental organization that thinks about the ecological consequences of big dams’ and provides ‘real life estimates of the damage done by these big boondoggle projects to the people who are trying to resist them.’ The group has worked in some 60 countries, he says, to help prevent the kind of cultural and environmental devastation caused by projects like the Three Gorges dam on China’s Yangtze River.
“Suddenly, like a guest who feels he’s gone on too long, Mr. Hass apologizes and peppers us with questions. ‘How long are we here?’ ‘Where are we from?’ ‘How did we meet?’ When he discovers my wife is from Japan and we met in Tokyo the conversation turns to his love for haiku, particularly the poems of the 17th century master Matsuo Basho.
“In the early 1970s, he says, ‘I tried to teach myself something about how to make images from working on haiku . . . I had this real paradisiacal period in my life where I would teach, come home, get out the Japanese dictionary, work on haiku, then go swim laps for an hour, then have dinner and put my kids to bed. . . .’
Just then our waitress brings the ‘Fisherman Carpaccio,’ a flower-like assemblage of raw fish marinated in soy with a dash of karashi hot mustard and sesame oil. We order another bottle of chardonnay, and I attempt to ask another question. ‘That’s a really pretty presentation, don’t you think?’ says Mr. Hass, admiring the dish that’s just arrived. ‘Can we stop?’ He then turns to my wife, who’s a potter and chef, and asks, ‘What do you think about this presentation? And about saying this is carpaccio rather than sashimi?’
“Right about now I begin to feel as if we’re inside a Robert Hass poem. They are known for their playfulness with language, love of long, sprawling sentences, and, above all, a kind of unquenchable honesty, a wrestling with memory and the world as it is. Yet listening to him talk it strikes me that he isn’t self-absorbed. He is, in fact, other-absorbed. His conversation, like his poetry, is full of wonder and horror, two wholly appropriate reactions to human history — or a plate of sashimi-cum-carpaccio…
“In a poem for his friend and longtime collaborator, Czeslaw Milosz (became Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UC Berkeley in 1961)– who died in Krakow in 2005 at the age of 93 after living through the Nazi occupation of Poland and the rise and fall of communism — Mr. Hass writes how Milosz ‘never accepted the cruelty in the frame / Of things, brooded on your century, and God the Monster, / And the smell of summer grasses in the world / That can hardly be named or remembered / Past the moment of our wading through them, / And the world’s poor salvation in the word.’
“This idea, this lament–‘the world’s poor salvation in the word,’ that language often fails us, yet it’s our only hope for redemption — permeates Mr. Hass’s latest book, which was completed in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war. In a poem titled ‘Bush’s War,’ he conflates 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with the brutal history of the 20th century, when the slaughter of civilians and the “firebombing” of entire cities was commonplace. ‘Forty-five million, all told, in World War II,’ he writes. ‘Why do we do it?Certainly there’s a rage / To injure what’s injured us.’…
