By YVONNE FRENCH
Robert Hass, the new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, likes to talk about swimming, California zinfandel and women's tummies in his poems. The first two also make their way into his lectures.
Mr. Hass, a native of San Francisco and a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, also likes to talk about narcissism: "Self love is the one stalk of every human blossom," he read from one of his poems in the first of two readings he will give at the Library during the 1995-1996 literary season, which he opened Oct. 12.
Mr. Hass, the eighth Poet Laureate and the first from a Western state, is the author of several books of poems, including Field Guide, Praise, and Human Wishes, and a collection of essays, Twentieth Century Pleasures.
"He is a master of the image, and images of California figure prominently in his work," said Prosser Gifford, director of scholarly programs for the Library, in introducing Mr. Hass (rhymes with mass) to the audience of 250 people, from elderly patrons, some of whom have attended the Library's poetry readings since they began in the 1940s, to a flock of college students who looked like they were members of angst-ridden garage bands.
As Mr. Hass continued reading, it became clear that he is more than just a California dreamer. He has the true poet's burden: he feels the pain of the world.
For example, one poem he read was about his "friend's story about the time he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him. Bees in the heart, then scorpions, then maggots and then ash. ... I have the idea that the world's so full of pain that it makes a kind of singing."
During the 1 1/2-hour reading, Mr. Hass described his love of translation of both the haiku master Matsuo Bashþ and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz.
Bashþ wrote in the late 17th century and was the most simple of the poets Mr. Hass translated in his latest book, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashþ, Buson & Issa (Ecco Press: 1994, $15). He shared some of Bashþ's subtlety in the three-line, allusion-rich poems.
Mr. Hass explained that the following poem was written in hiragana, one of the three Japanese alphabets, except for the word road, which was in kanji, and was therefore the same as the Chinese word for Tao, literally, "the way."
This road --
no one goes down it,
autumn evening.
He also read:
The oak tree:
not interested
in cherry blossoms.
Then Mr. Hass subtly made his own haiku verse. "It made me so happy, doing these poems. I can't tell you." He moved so smoothly from addressing the audience to recitation that it was unclear whether this haiku was composed extemporaneously or simply part of his talk.
He continued: "I would come home, go for a swim or whatever I do at the end of the day and look up the characters I didn't understand. I would get out the dictionary, and slowly this thing would emerge, and I would get in touch with this man at a hermitage."
Mr. Hass doesn't know Japanese and did not know Polish when he began translating Mr. Milosz's poems. However, he appreciated them on many levels, he said, perhaps because of similarities the poets share. Mr. Milosz and Mr. Hass are both realists, both write in free verse and neither is a formalist, he said. They also live six blocks from each other in Berkeley, and were both brought up in the Roman Catholic Church.
Said Mr. Hass: "We were having dinner sitting in a bar drinking white California wine and we realized we were altar boys. ... We had this same ... prayerful language of praise and supplication. The Catholic church is magical and polytheistic. ... My cousin even prays to the carburetor god. One model for poetry is that each poem was a temple to a different god. 'Hail mother of mercy' could be a song to the muse."
Mr. Hass has translated several volumes of Mr. Milosz's poems, including The Collected Poems, Unattainable Earth, Provinces and Facing the River.
About halfway through the reading Mr. Hass couldn't find the poem by Mr. Milosz that he had wanted to read and so recited it from memory.
"He says that if it turns out that this world is just the world and that's it and everyone dies and that's it, and a sparrow is just a sparrow and it doesn't stand for anything and all these people who've been praying, wearing out their knees for centuries and centuries are wrong and there's nothing afterward, there's going to be something afterward. Because there's going to be one soul tearing into the void, screaming, howling, protesting," recalled Mr. Hass.
Then he found the page.
"His version is much more subtle. I said there was going to be one soul out there screaming. Listen to what he says: 'Even if that is so there will remain a word, wakened by lips that perish, a tireless messenger who runs and runs through interstellar fields in the revolving galaxy and screams, howls, protests.' I agonized for months over the order of "screams," "howls" and "protests." If anyone has a better idea, please write to me care of the Library of Congress."
Until he accepted the post of Poet Laureate, Mr. Hass had been dividing his time between Berkeley and the town of Inverness on the Point Reyes peninsula, where it is said that the most exciting daily event is the fog burning off around noon. Mr. Hass is the father of three children and the stepfather of one. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman, who teaches at St. Mary's College in California.
Mr. Hass got his B.A. in 1963 at St. Mary's and his M.A. in 1965 and Ph.D. in 1974 at Stanford University. He was an assistant professor from 1967 to 1971 at State University of New York in Buffalo, which, according to the Oct. 8 San Jose Mercury News, was then a haven for the beat poets.
"It was hugely fun. There were great parties," Mr. Hass told a reporter for the newspaper. He then became an associate and soon a full professor at St. Mary's and went to Berkeley, where he has been a professor since 1989.
Asked for his impression of Washington at a news conference, held the day after the reading in the recently renovated Poetry Office, located in the attic of the Jefferson Building, Mr. Hass said he was riding the subway when he overheard a conversation between two men "dressed in expensive, muted gray suits. One said to the other, 'When he was focused, he wouldn't even have dreamed of considering that.'" Mr. Hass said he didn't know what they were talking about, but got the idea that Washingtonians trade in access to power, and "people who have it are harried and always in motion."
Mr. Hass likes to incorporate bits of overheard conversations in his poems. He was in the produce section in a California market when he heard two women talking. One said to the other, "'He didn't think she ought to and she thought she should.' I didn't know what they were talking about but thought that was the poem I wanted to write," he said at the reading. The conversation made its way into "The Beginning of September" (see page TKK), a poem of fragments and impressions in Praise (Ecco Press: 1979, $11).
Mr. Hass, 54, explained at the news conference that when he was younger, he wrote a lot of poetry about the natural world in short, descriptive lines. "I was the quintessential American male -- I'll tell you what I'm seeing and you tell me what I'm feeling. The men in my family answered questions with 'yup' and 'nope.'"
Later he adopted a longer line. He has a habit of "sketching" long lines in the air, as if writing quickly, his pinky raised. "A longer line is more breath for me. It's also a matter of growing up, an accumulation of karma, the stuff that can't be fixed. It's deeply mysterious."
In recent years, Mr. Hass had explained at the poetry reading, he has been writing about pain by way of middle age and ruin. He recited the next, unpublished poem, "Forty Something" from memory, with the disclaimer that it is neither about him, nor is it something his wife said to him. "I have an imagination, I can think like other people," he said.
"She says to him, musing, 'If you ever leave me, and marry a younger woman and have another baby, I'll put a knife in your heart.' They are in bed, so she climbs onto his chest, and looks directly down into his eyes. 'You understand? Your heart.'"
When he finished, laughter slowly filled the Montpelier Room.
The last poem he read, Shame, an Aria was about a man picking his nose in an elevator and how he feels when everybody looks at him. Essentially a meditation on why we are taught that bodily fluids are nasty, he went into each one in detail, and intoned that "the core of the self is where shame lives," before hopping down off the stage and being shuffled off, surrounded by family and friends to a reception in the Mumford Room, where it took two hours for him to sign books for readers and well wishers.
The day after the reading Mr. Hass was feted at a luncheon during which Dr. Billington asked him to discuss his translations.
Afterward, Mr. Hass said that he accepted the post of Poet Laureate to be an advocate for American writing. "If nobody stood up and said that the life of the imagination in this country matters, it would be a shame."
He had said at the reading it was "an honor to be here in this place in this circumstance. ... What we lobby for is the mind and the heart. They're not at all in danger in this country, but I think the country is in danger in relation to them." His comment, which came early in the reading, was greeted with immediate and loud clapping.
He elaborated at a news conference, which was taped by C- SPAN. "American poetry is at a state of tremendous vitality. ... Three books of poetry are published a day; there are 400 poetry journals on the Internet. ... Whole areas -- Native American, Chinese, Asian, African American, Latino -- that have been mute, who have gotten their world spoken for them by others, are writing." He mentioned rap by way of example and added, "A lot of poetry is being recited in bookstores and coffeehouses. Every time the politics get really bad, the poetry gets really good," he said.
"I think it has to do with the demoralization of what people perceive as the shrinking of the American economy. ... One economic trend everyone agrees to in the country is the consolidation of wealth and the increase of poverty. The arts get active when reality needs realigning."
He also weighed in on violence. "The one thing we've succeeded at in this country is these ballet-like violent films. They're our best export except for weapons. Why are we so good at it? I was raised on it." He grabbed his heart and leaned sharply sideways. "You know, and you fall into a ravine. ... Think of the cop who sets the world straight and then he's not included in it. ... The climax is violent and the individual is isolated and not connected to families and communities. It is a purging violence, and loneliness comes out of it. ... I could think of things I'd rather have a culture be famous for."
Robert Hass may be in a position to see his ideal cultural milieu take shape as the leading advocate for American writing for one year, for which he will receive a stipend of $35,000. Although his official responsibilities are kept to a minimum, Mr. Hass said he has a few ideas. He wants to hold a weeklong conference in the spring on bioregionalism and environmental values in the United States.
He also wants to raise enough money to make the jazz and poetry reading initiated by his predecessor, Rita Dove, into an annual event for at least 10 years.
He also said he would work to syndicate poets and put their work back into newspapers. "We need to give the richness of our language and the richness of our culture back to the people. What gives language depth is common quotation," he said.
Mr. Hass would also like the Poetry and Literature Office at the Library of Congress to raise money to endow an award, "a medal perhaps," he said, for people who publish, edit, review and criticize poetry.
Mr. Hass has received a few awards himself, including the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Williams Carlos Williams Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism in 1984, an award of merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Fellowship and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.
Since his May appointment by the Librarian, who worked with Ms. Dove to choose a successor, Mr. Hass has received a half dozen calls to act as an advocate for causes both literary and nonliterary and was leaning toward choosing adult literacy. Finally, he said, he would like to see more books in public places, an initiative of former Poet Laureate Joseph Brodsky that enjoyed some success.
Mr. Hass, like Ms. Dove, who served two terms, said that his initial fear when he accepted the post was that it would interfere with his writing life. However, during his trips back and forth from California to Washington and points between, he plans to write every time he is on any form of public transportation.
In closing, Mr. Hass recalled that the first time he came to Washington was to "'levitate' the Pentagon" during a peace rally. "I consider that and this to be acts of citizenship."