Of all the laws / that bind us to the past / the names of things are / stubbornest,” host John Freeman said to kick off the hour, quoting Robert Hass’s poem “Maps” as he introduced Hass, whose book Praise was the April selection of the California Book Club. Freeman asked Hass to speak about what he was thinking about as he began to write the poems in Praise.
Hass noted that the poems that he wrote for a period felt like imitations of the poems in his first collection, Field Guide, but then something in him shifted. The impulse of the poems was to render the physical world. When writing Praise, he was in love with a kind of radiance in poetry, and he wanted to get at what he was feeling and thinking more directly.
Freeman asked Hass to read the poem “Meditation at Lagunitas.” Before reading, Hass explained that at the time he was writing the poems in Praise, a friend who had been studying in Paris had come back excited about the ideas of Roland Barthes and Derrida, which were then new, including “the idea that language, because it symbolizes things, is noticing the absence of their reality.” At some point, Hass sat down and wrote the first lines of “Meditation”: “All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking.” Hass segued into reading the poem, and when he stopped, Freeman noted that it was one of the great poems of the past 50 years and asked Hass if he could talk a bit about the making of it.
Hass said that when Barthes talked about the disappearance of the author, something in him both “ascended and resisted.” As he wrote a draft of “Meditation,” he thought, This is way too talky. This is not the kind of poem I want to be writing. Even so, he finished the poem and then set it aside. Later, the editor of Antaeus magazine, the poet Daniel Halpern, who had started Ecco Press, asked him to send poems for the magazine. Hass sent “Meditation” as merely an afterthought; he had started to translate haiku and thought that poems should go like that. But after reading “Meditation,” Halpern wrote back on a postcard saying, “Oh, my God, this poem is amazing.” Hass looked at the poem again. There had been a last philosophical line after what became the poem’s final words: “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.” His friend, the poet Louise Glück, told him to cut that last line.
Special guest Jesse Nathan, a Bay Area poet, joined the conversation. He brought the discussion back to haiku. He called attention to “Songs to Survive the Summer,” a long poem that ends the book. It’s built from three-line stanzas, tercets that look a bit like haiku, and, Nathan said, “there’s even some haiku in there, folded into that poem.” Nathan asked Hass about the relationship between Praise and the haiku form. At the time he was writing Praise, Hass said, he had begun to take night-school Japanese so he could figure out what was going on in haiku. He explained that the poems that the book begins with, however, were written after “Songs to Survive the Summer” when he became interested in the sentence and the radiance of made sentences. He said that he “went from the kind of poem that was trying to do a dance in the present moment to poems in which the rhythms of the language just flowed out.”
Nathan commented that as Hass was writing these poems, he was also parenting. How one makes art in the midst of domestic life is of personal interest to Nathan. He reflected about something that Hass had said previously, that there was a magic to spending time with small human beings as a parent, but what Hass was worried about at the time was whether it was too ordinary. “Songs to Survive the Summer” starts, “These are the dog days, / unvaried / except by accident.” Nathan observed that as Hass moved from Field Guide into the work of Praise, he made a journey from the longing for transcendence to a recognition of immanence.
Hass noted that it was interesting to revisit Praise, to feel how much it is shot through with the complicated and conflicted feelings he was having about that choice: “Married in my early 20s and a father very early was magical to me. Something I deeply loved.” In his 20s, he was celebrating that in relation to the violence of the surrounding world at that time, such as the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement. “There was so much that needed doing,” he said. But, Hass continued, “Reading now, a man in his 80s looking back at this young man in his 30s: ‘These are the dog days, / unvaried / except by accident. // mist rising from soaked lawns / gone world, everything / rises and dissolves in air. // whatever it is would / clear the air / dissolves in air And the knot // of days unties / invisibly like a shoelace’—that’s the mood with which the poem opens. And me now, the old man, wants to yell back to him, ‘You were so lucky to be alive! Your children were so beautiful!’”
The subject of the poem is his daughter’s bout of early-childhood anxiety when a neighbor’s mother dies, and the poem was to the gray-eyed child who’d said to his child, “Let’s play in my yard. It’s OK, my mother’s dead.” The poem was written to comfort the child who was having trouble sleeping. In the course of writing the poem, however, he was comforting himself, and he thought, You should be grateful. It’s never boring. Life is never boring.•
Join us on May 21 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Dagoberto Gilb will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss The Flowers. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
