Saturday 6 June 2009

Time and Materials by Robert Hass

Title: Time and Materials: Poems 1997 - 2005
Author: Robert Hass

Paperback: 96 pages

Publisher: Ecco Press

ISBN-10: 0061350281
ISBN-13: 978-0061350283


Is Robert Hass the Great American Poet?


Multi-award winner, critic, Professor of English at Berkeley, translator of Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz and himself US Poet Laureate between 1995-97, Robert Hass is one of the most lauded of contemporary American poets. And yet he seems to be little known in the UK. As far as I understand, unlike, say, John Ashbery, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, August Kleinzahler and Mary Oliver among others, Hass has never had a UK publisher (unless you count his contribution to
Five American Poets from Carcanet in 1979). This is somewhat remiss, to say the least, as Rober Hass is quite simply one of the best poets writing in English today and his work demands to be better known this side of the pond. (Digression: interestingly, Robert Hass is almost the opposite to American poet Frederick Seidel published by Faber who is better known here than in his own back yard, or perhaps more it is more apposite to say ‘roof terrace’. The contrasts poetically between Hass and 'laureate of the louche' Seidel are, however, truly Atlantic!)

Born in San Francisco in 1941, Hass's poetry career began in 1973 when he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award with
Field Guide. Drawing for inspiration on the Californian countryside and his background in Eastern European studies, it established his reputation immediately. This was enhanced further in his next collection, Praise, which won the William Carlos Willians award in 1979 and, according to Robert Miklitsch, marked "the emergence of a major American poet".

In 1984 Hass published,
Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, a collection of essays and reviews exploring American stallwarts such as Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley and James Wright as well as European and Japanese poets (including Milosz, Transtromer and Rilke). The collection won him a National Book Critics Circle award though it incurred the wrath of Helen Vendler who, in an article for The New York Review of Books, found its social, informal and seductive style ('Californian manner') so stylised as to be 'unsettling' and Hass's criticism 'interesting, learned, and deft' while at the same time 'sentimental'. (Digression: Vendler asks some pretty fundamental questions in this article about the nature of criticism, the 'subject' of poetry and the uncertainty of audience which is still pertinent today. See, for instance, Magma Poetry online's discussion about the purpose of poetry reviews and blogs such as this one. )

Hass's third collection of poetry,
Human Wishes, came out in 1990 again to critical acclaim. Japanese poetry had always been an important influence and in 1995 he published The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His translations pays tribute to a linguistic clarity and an 'aesthetic ideal' that informs Hass' own poetry:
in which one could use language as a clear mirror of the seeing of the world, which of course only happens through work. You don't get to see that way if your head is full of brainless chatter... At some level the common world has to be earned over and over again.
Another collection of poetry, Sun under Wood, appeared in 1996 to relatively mixed reviews but nevertheless garnered Hass another National Book Critics Circle award.

Hass's latest collection,
Time and Materials: Poems 1997 - 2005, and his first for 11 years was published in 2007 by Ecco Press (and available in UK bookshops). It won Hass further critical acclaim as well as another clutch of prizes including the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. It is a virtuoso performance and covers typical Hassian themes: the nature of art, the natural world and what humans are doing to it, the nature of desire and the erotic, the violence of history and histories of violence. There are the familiar North Californian landscapes as well as visits to and visions of Berlin, the DMZ between the Koreas, Mexico and Paris. Tributes are paid to poets and painters: Gerhard Richter, Vermeer, Milosz, Transtromer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, Trakl, Goethe and Lucretius. Stylistically, the collection ranges from the short haiku-like clarity of 'Three Dawn Songs in Summer':
The first long shadows in the fields
Are like mortal difficulty.
The first birdsong is not like that at all.
to longer blank verse narratives, from the intimate exchanges of lovers in 'Then Time' and the long Lucretius-inspired eco-poem 'State of the Planet' to the violence and dignified, almost detached, rage of 'A Poem' and 'Bush's War':
The young arab depiliated himself as an act
Of purification before he drove the plane
Into the office building. It's not just
The violence, it's a taste for power
That amounts to contempt for the body.
Although not the best poem in the collection, it nevertheless demonstrates clarity and formal skill: how Hass' very matter-of-fact statements turn around carefully worked enjambements so that the final stress of the sound works the eye as well as the sound so that abstract nouns and concepts are infused with the personal and concrete : act/plane, power/body. These are very public poems imbued with a subtle moral force and touched with tenderness and clarity that is almost the opposite of the grave bombastic persona of one of Hass's great influences: Robert Lowell.

In his earlier essay 'Lowell's Graveyard' Hass makes the distinction between history and nostalgia:
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly. History is the antidote to this.
Nostalgia is lost in its own hermetically-sealed past, history (in poetry at least) should be open, dialectical, dialogic, it should induce a gap between the actual and the possible, providing a 'vision of an alternative world'. This vision is the product of the poetic imagination; and it was Hass' great revelation through reading Lowell's 'The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket' poem that history was not so much a place in time 'but a place in imagination' (my emphasis). This Romantic-Modernist faith in imagination is central to Hass' poetic and political creed (note: his well-known mantra is 'capitalism makes networks, imagination makes communities') and as the 'Time' part of the collection's title suggests, it is one of the main threads weaving its way through this latest collection.

In the
New York Times Sunday Book Review, Stephen Burt has said:
Hass's title doubles as a warning about his own book: poets who become public figures may lose both the hours (time) in which to write their poems and the introspective energies (materials) that inspire them.
This is only partially true and it doesn't really do the collection justice. Yes, there are themes of thwarted hopes and outbursts of frustration but all this is part of Hass's exploration into the limits (or at least his limits) of effective artistic utterance. Time and Materials is an enquiry into the meaning of time in poetry - both personal and historical - as well as the limits of the poetical material to hand i.e. language on the page. Gerhard Richter becomes an analagous and exemplary figure here as a painter who has veered from photorealism to severe abstraction.
The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words,
And their disposition on the page.
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and Hass's 'post-modernist' - and often humorous - self-reflexive interpolation is one particularly effective weapon in his rhetorical arsenal. In light vein, 'After The Winds' begins:
My friend's older sister's third husband's daughter -
That's about as long as a line of verse should get -
Karmic debris? A field anthropologist's kinship map?
Just sailed by me on the Berkeley street
This interpolative strategy is especially effective in 'I Am Your Waiter Tonight And My Name Is Dimitri'. Inspired by a poem by John Ashbery, Hass inhabits Ashbery's conceit and makes the poem a family saga of immigrant America via Dostoyevsky and US intervention in war. It sounds clever-clever, high-minded and potentially boorish. It's certainly clever, high-minded with a certain demotic imperative, but it is never dull or pretentious and Hass is a master of concision and narrative drive.
Grushenka got two boys out of her body,
One was born in 1894, the other in 1896,
The elder having dies in the mud at the Battle of the Somme
From a piece of shrapnel manufactured by Alfred Nobel.
Metal traveling at that speed works amazing transformations
On the tissues of the human intestine; the other son worked construction
The year his mother died.
A few lines later we get an extraordinary 14 line paraphrase of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment after which we find this:
I frankly admit the syntax
of that sentence, like the intestines slithering from the hands
of the startled boys clutching their belly wounds
at the Somme, has escaped my grip. I step over it
gingerly. Where were we?
This is, of course, Hass playing Eliot but his 'periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion' functions here, as in other places in this collection, to break up - syntactically - the poetic 'enchantment' of the musical line; it's a way to alienate a nostalgic reading of the poem so that it snaps the reader back into an ironising present thereby giving the reader some kind of critical distance. It's that 'making strange' advocated by the Russian Formalists and exemplified in Brecht. Hass himself has said, in relation to the Formalist critic Eichenbaum:
the function of art is to make the grass grass and the stone stone by freeing us from the automatism of human perception
Hass's interpolations and digressions work as a delimiter to the power of poetic expression while the crafty humour at the same time undercuts and heightens the horrors of a potentially overbearing historical reality (e.g. comparing sloppy syntax to 'slithering' intestines - and let's not forget the allusion to Yossarian's recurrent dream in Heller's Catch 22 thrown in for good measure); all this has the effect of acting as a counterweight to the gravitational pull of, what Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney calls, 'the actual'. Invoking Heaney here seems to me both appropriate and elucidating. Much of what Hass has says about facing history through the poetic imagination echoes Heaney's own preoccupations since The Government of the Tongue and is demonstrated with greatest force in his inaugural Oxford lecture, The Redress of Poetry, where, invoking, among others, Sir Philip Sidney, Wallace Stevens and Simone Weil Heaney stresses poetry's need to redress the balance against our own hostile and violent times, as he puts it: 'the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.'

In the same lecture Heaney (in an acute balancing act of his own) also says that poetry 'cannot afford to lose its fundamentally self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language...' And there is plenty of 'self-delighting inventiveness' in
Time and Materials. In 'A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noons' there is an almost Muldoonian playfulness in the shifting of meanings of words through etymology and excrutiating puns:
Hay
Is the Old English word for
strike. You strike down

Grass, I guess, when it is moan. Mown.
The upshot of Heaney's and Hass's position is that, yes poetry has its limits but one still has to go on redressing the balance as a moral imperative. Hass is best at is precisely pointing out those limits and yet still affirming the joy of the free lyric voice. In 'The Problem of Describing Trees' he writes:
The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.
Hass has an unswerving faith in the imagination and his is a poetry that praises the world yet has that 'immense ballast' he admired so much in his friend Milsoz. He is a Romantic-Modernist with a weather-eye on post-modern scepticism. For post-modernists he may knit together far more than he unpicks but his is a balancing act that will suit many adroit readers. I will end with one of the finest poems in the collection, 'Envy of Other People's Poems':
In one version of the legend the sirens couldn't sing.
It was only a sailor's story that they could.
So, Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn't hear - plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds -
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn't sing.
Well almost the end.

Is Robert Hass the Great American Poet?
Daft question really. Yes he is, along with Ashbery and Gluck and Pinsky and Doty and Baraka and [enter name in here]. There are many Americas and a poet to fit each one. Hass does embrace the Whitmanesque multitudes however: a West Coast poet who looks beyond the New England shores of Stevens and Lowell to the Eastern Europe of Brodsky, Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert; who looks toward the 'other' America of Neruda and East to the Kyoto of Basho. All this informs his attitude to and perception of his homeland and its landscape and people and history. The shame is why we can't have more of him over here.

Other works cited in this article:

Seamus Heaney, The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures, Faber, 1996
Helen Vendler, The Music of What Happens, Harvard University Press, 1988
Robert Hass, 20th Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, Ecco Press, 1984
Stephen Burt, 'The Limits of Influence', New York Times, October 7, 2007
Robert Hass & Grace Cavalieri, 'Robert Hass: An interview by Grace Cavalieri', The American Poetry Review, Mar/Apr 1997