The first task, the oldest one of poetry, has been to praise. Even in a fallen world. (Maybe there’s no other kind.) The first recorded author in human kind was a woman, Enheduanna, an Akkadian priestess, daughter of King Sargon I, who ruled a region in what is now modern-day Iraq. Enheduanna was also a religious ecstatic. Among the 40-some hymns she left behind, many sing praises to the goddess Inanna, whom she addresses, in Jane Hirshfield’s translation from the Sumerian, as
Lady of all powers
In whom light appears,
Radiant one
Beloved of Heaven and Earth,
Tiara-crowned
Priestess of the Highest God,
My Lady, you are the guardian
Of all greatness.
Forty-three centuries later, Robert Hass began a book of poems that set out to praise the world, too, but he obviously lived in different times. Not only were the temples and goddesses different, but the entire history of Western art had happened in between. The history of English poetry (which also begins with praise, if you count “Caedmon’s Hymn” as the first poem in the language: “Now we must praise the Keeper of Heaven’s Kingdom”) had arisen, too. As had nations, like the United States.
In those 43 centuries, the world was also transformed by humans, especially with the rise of exploration, trade, and colonization, which led to population collapse, the spread of invasive species, and by the 19th century, large-scale deforestation and mining. During this time, California became a state as well, and by the 1960s, awareness of the great acceleration—the rise in greenhouse gases, the drop in biodiversity, and their causes—was commonly known, especially in the Bay Area, where Hass grew up and was educated and taught.
Praise then proceeds (it is hard to imagine) 50 years back—as the writing of a poet at work in an age aware of endings. Of risk. Of the colossal damage already done to the world by our attempts to exploit it. The book takes its first axe swing at the concepts of the hero, of working and making a life on a frontier. Echoing Gary Snyder’s great poem “Hay for the Horses,” the first poem of Praise, “Heroic Simile,” sets a scene of two men working within a vision of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, before magically evolving into a scene of logging:
They stacked logs in the resinous air
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw’s tooth.
It is astonishing how many of Hass’s gifts as a poet already operated within him by the time his second book was written. What relishing in the physicality of language. The hacking and slabs, the risky use of an adverb (“awkwardly”) that calls back with such sonic pleasure to “stacked” and forward to “halved.” And, of course, you don’t merely look at this scene he has sketched for us; the reader is made to smell the great piles of fragrant wood, to feel their texture against the saw’s tooth. And just like that, Hass wrests this moment from Kurosawa and makes it his own.
The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days’ work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.
Hass catches us up to the world—to the temple of praise—he will operate within in this book. There will be no pilgrimage to a temple; he will not be praising an abstract or a near god or goddess. He accepts from the outset that, even if he is describing a scene that he has seen, he will, in essence, be its maker. When he gazes upon made things—objects or artworks or landscapes themselves, even a deck at sunset with a view or Botticelli’s painting—they come with the assumptions of the frame maker as well. To which his interpretation will be undeniable.
This is an astonishing leap forward for any poet to make between his first and second books, stepping back—as Charles Wright would in his poems of the late 1970s, or as Wallace Stevens did before Wright in “The Idea of Order at Key West”—to consider how much seeing is not just an aesthetic act but a mythopoeic one. In Stevens’s poem, the speaker imagines or recounts an encounter with a woman singing by the sea. “She was the single artificer of the world / In which she sang,” he wrote in 1934. “And when she sang, the sea, / Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.”
Praise can, to some degree, be read as Hass’s response to Stevens’s vision, one expressed less in “The Idea of Order at Key West” than in “The River of Rivers in Connecticut.” In the second poem, Stevens comes much closer to taking the natural world out of the realm of the symbolic, the humanly created—even if altered—and allows it simply to exist, with all its plunging force. We do not sing it into being. It exists:
It is the third commonness with light and air,
A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction…
Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,
Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore
Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,
The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.
Out of these expanded poetics, Hass’s “Meditation at Lagunitas” is born. It begins with one of the most fabulously carpentered lines in American poetry:
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The poem then expands, like a lung, to take in the air of centuries of thinking about language and its attempt to capture the ineffable. Perhaps because the word woodpecker—or blackberry—doesn’t correspond to the intensity of those expressions of life, he writes that “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” Rather than contemplate this vortex, Hass then moves in associative circles that at least prove to himself that words may not capture all. They can retrieve some of it—the thin shoulders of a lover; the sound of voices on a pleasure cruise; the memory of what a woman’s father had said to her that hurt her. “There are moments when the body is as numinous / as words,” he writes, “days that are the good flesh continuing. / Such tenderness…”
“Numinous” is a not-often-used but extremely meaningful word in Hass’s spiritual pantheon. It’s a word that his friend Barry Lopez used on occasion, as in Horizon, Lopez’s long-in-the-making final book, wherein he describes the way stones, bark, and other inanimate objects have a deeper meaning, when contemplated patiently. In a talk he gave in Berkeley 27 years ago, Hass described what the word meant to him.
The term that came to me for spirituality…is that certain kinds of experience are “numinous.” And I liked that word because it has philosophical echoes to do with feeling like you’re in the presence of the thing itself, which cannot be named, and also because it’s connected to “luminous,” that there’s a quality of light about that kind of experience.
And numinosity can be connected, on the one hand, to erotic passion; on the other hand, to intense grief; it can be connected to the presence of a liberating and terrifying ignorance, and helplessness. And it’s often accompanied in the spiritual traditions that interest me by an awakened sense of absence.
Praise operates within, but is not limited to, these tensions, situating poems in spaces where eros and grief, helplessness and a desire for connection and a domestic safety pull equally. These dilations lend the book a dynamic pulse, an arresting sense of incompleteness. There is no peace here, but rather the force of a mind against unresolvable tensions. The shock of frankly sexual language crashes through some Hass poems like a satori gong. In other moments, it is the numinous arising as if naturally, a deer showing itself at sundown.
Praise does not repeat this gesture; however, it finds in the naming of things and gardens pleasure and destruction equally. A poem about names sometimes simply stops at the pleasure of language; another one slides toward terrifying memories of childhood. Rescued at the last minute by a towhee scratching in the leaves outside his open door. “He always does.” And just like that the terror has passed. “A moment ago I felt so sick / and so cold / I could hardly move,” the poem ends.
To read Praise today is to be arrested by how often poems interrupt their slide toward the abstract with intimacy. Even the language itself affects this adjustment. “August is dust here,” Hass writes in one poem, “Drought / stuns the road.” What an incredible verb. “Each thing moves its own way / in the wind,” he writes in another poem. But this is how a poet who truly observes writes in “The Beginning of September.” “Bamboo flickers, / the plum tree waves, / and the loquat is shaken.”
This poem is a new form, a kind of lexicon of praise, each segment—there are 16 of them—like a folkloric assembly of beauty. One segment, “X,” is one of the finest lists of things to pray to in San Francisco. It is hanging in so many apartments and homes across the Bay that it can nearly be recited today like liturgy. Another has the spoken wisdom of a grandmother—“the sayings of my grandmother: / they’re the kind of people / who let blackberries rot on the vine.” How many collections of poetry are so linked by fruit?
As the book continues, it cycles through a startling variety of forms. Bashō-like small poems. Poems addressed to and in tribute to the stark poetics of Louise Glück. One poem is even addressed as a letter to Dan, probably the poet’s then-editor, Dan Halpern, who published Hass across numerous books at Ecco Press and in his journal Antaeus, where some of these poems appeared. Hass writes, “Sometimes on an airplane I look down / to snow covering the arroyos on the east side of the Sierra and it’s grandmother’s flesh and I look away.”
There it is again, that interruption when the mind begins an easy slide to the agreed-upon numinous, the greater disruption. Praise attempts to map this instinct alongside a world of true, real comforts, such as a well-made French onion soup (the recipe is dispatched in four stanzas); the memory of being kissed and put to bed; hearing the misunderstood cries of lovemaking in the night. Maybe, in a world where beauty is an idea and the garden of delights is a trap, attending to these chimneys of memory, built by the fired brick of senses and language, is what we have. There is no way out of the elegizing that will happen, whether we try to or not, when we begin to use language. It’s what we have, time and materials, the things with which we make a life. Praise shows what happens when we honor it.•
Join us on April 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Hass will sit down with host John Freeman and special guest Jesse Nathan to discuss Praise. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
