Blaise Zerega: Hey, hello everyone, and welcome to Alta Journal's California Book Club. It's a thrill to be here tonight. We're gonna celebrate Robert Hass and his acclaimed poetry collection, Praise, along with poet Jesse Nathan, and of course, our host, your host, John Freeman. My name is Blaise Zerega, I'm the editorial director of Alta Journal.
We've got a big, big crowd tonight, so I encourage everyone to please reach out, like we always do, and say hello, and let us know where you're zooming in from. Tonight, I'm coming from San Francisco. And while you're doing that, I'm going to go through some housekeeping. If you're new to the California Book Club, the program begins with John Freeman introducing Bob Hass. We'll talk a bit.
Bob will do a reading and then Jesse Nathan will come on and ask a few questions. Then he'll come back on again, probably at the end, and rejoin the conversation. So it's pretty dynamic. It should be a lot of fun, and the California Book Club is Alta's free monthly gathering. We celebrate books that produce a guide to understanding life in California and the West. You know, this is, you know, the most dynamic region of the country, and there's so much great, great writing going on here, and we want to celebrate that.
In the weeks leading up to each meeting, Altaonline.com publishes excerpts, interviews, essays about that month's pick. You can check out fantastic write-ups by your host, John Freeman, an excellent piece by our special guest tonight, called "Why I Write." Check it out, highly recommend this. As well as an essay by, David Ulin called, you know, Why You Should Read This.
Moreover, if you follow us on social, there's so much good stuff. There's some videos of Bob Hass showing where he works, talking about his process, and so on. Check us out, wherever you find great, great, great information.
We have other newsletters, so sign up for the California Book Club. You'll get a weekly newsletter, as well as you can sign up for the Monday Book Review, our weekly newsletter, so forth, they're all free. And we have more than 5 years' worth of California Book Club gatherings all recorded, they're on our site, you can go back and look up anyone you want and watch and enjoy that.
I need to give a shout out to our amazing partners, so it would not be possible without the likes of the Los Angeles Public Library, who's turning 100 this year. Oh, and sorry, I want to interrupt for a moment to say that we've put up a reward of $10,000. Alta Journal has put up a reward of $10,000 for anyone who can help recover some of the missing pieces of this famous sculpture called the Well of the Scribes. You can find that on our site.
All right, so L.A. Public Library, San Francisco Public Library, the Huntington USC Institute on California and the West, Book Passage, Book Soup, Camino Books, Vromans, Books, Inc, Green Apple Books, Bookshop West Portal. I'm told what… I know Bookshop West Portal has a great book club every Sunday morning, so check that out if you're in the Bay. And then, of course, Narrative Magazine and Zyzzyva. So please support our partners, please support our authors, you know, visit, visit the stores, pick up a copy of Praise.
I know Jesse Nathan's got a book coming out, and I know Bob Hass also a book coming out in May. So look for those. But we have a special treat tonight in asking for your support. Our normal subscription price is $60 a year, but tonight we're doing a 25% off the regular price, so $45, and you would receive our award-winning quarterly journal with just fantastic coverage. And this issue, if you love books, you know, this is spot on for you.
It also comes with John Freeman's collection of essays. Each one is drawn from the California Book Club selection, so essays about Percival Everett, Rebecca Solnit, Tommy Orange, Michael Connelly, they're all in here. It's fantastic. It's called California Rewritten. It's published by Heyday. The price is $30. And the magazine is normally priced at $60, but we're doing it for $45, so you gotta try us.
And if not, get a single copy. Check this out. Visit a bookstore, or buy a copy at altaonline.com. It's free shipping and no tax. And so finally, if you're gonna be in Los Angeles area this weekend, stop by USC, the LA Times Book Festival's happening. It's just an amazing weekend. We're gonna be at booth #111. We're right across from Tommy Trojan. It's easy to find us, so come by and say hello. You know, there's nothing that we like more than being able to say, hi and speak with our readers. I look forward to seeing as many of you as who are in the area. All right, that's it. I've gone on too long, so without further ado, please let me turn this over to the host of tonight's California Book Club, John Freeman.
John Freeman: Hi, everybody! It's so nice to see the names of where you are running down the chat screen, like a sort of found poem. Fairfax, Berkeley, Cleveland Heights, Seattle. Iowa City. I start there because the poet who's going to join us tonight is one of the most singular poets of place, of language, of nature. He has been described by Elizabeth Hardwick as being in possession of a singular brightness, a freshness of mind. I'll get out of the way quickly, because when someone uses language the way he does, writing lines like, "the night they bombed Hanoi, we had been drinking red Pinot." Or: "Of all the laws that bind us to the past, the names of things are stubbornness." Or even as a critic, writing things like, "Miłosz's power as a poet of witness comes from the fact that he despairs of its possibility."
He was a great and generous friend to Miłosz's work, and he's written so many books — seven books of poetry, of which we're going to talk about the second tonight. He was born in San Francisco in 1941, and grew up there remembering the blackout drills of World War II, just a mile from Golden Gate Bridge. He graduated from St. Mary's in 1963, and as he wrote in a "Why Write?" essay he contributed to Alta, he discovered, watching a mockingbird, that he thought one could make an occupation of catching the movements of the world and making a music of that language.
From that moment on, he dedicated himself to poetry, and as I mentioned, wrote seven books, of which we're going to be talking about the second tonight, Praise. Other books, which I'm sure some of you know: Sun Under Wood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Summer Snow, his most recent work; The Apple Trees at Olema, a collection from all of his work, including the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning Time and Materials. He wrote five books of criticism and prose, including, most recently, A Third Commonness — a phrase from Wallace Stevens — which is coming out in just a month from Copper Canyon. He's a friend to the environment, an amazing thinker, one of the most eloquent pacifists and writers about our natural world. It's such a treat and honor to have him with us tonight. Please join us at the California Book Club — Robert Hass.
Robert Hass: Thank you, John. Hello, everyone.
Freeman: It's so nice to have you here. Let's start with the badminton racket behind you.
Hass: Yes, it's my father's. We were talking about California and San Francisco before. My father went to Lowell High School in San Francisco and was singles and doubles champion in 1933 to '35, I think. He had a few years of being a tennis pro at the California Tennis Club before he went to work — in a gray flannel suit, after the war — for an insurance company in San Francisco.
Freeman: So many of those memories come back in Sun Under Wood, and I was struck going back to Praise, which begins further back, almost in your mind, in that first poem. I wonder if you could take us back — it's your second book, it's been a few years after you won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for Field Guide, your first. What's on your mind? Where are you? What are you thinking about as you begin to write these poems?
Hass: I was trying to remember that. When you first write poems, you think: are these poems? Are these really poems? I think I'm right. Maybe I've written a poem. Later in my life, sitting in a professor's chair in office hours at UC Berkeley, I found that when young people came to bring their work, it was partly that they were asking that same question — is this a poem or not? And I remembered very well what that felt like.
So, I had published Field Guide, and it seemed like poetry was a path. It's interesting, growing up in California, how poetry could seem like a path. In those years — John, where did you go to high school?
Freeman: I went to high school in Sacramento, at Del Campo. So poetry didn't feel much like a path at all. I planned to be the smallest forward in NBA history.
Hass: The poet of San Francisco in those years was the newspaper columnist Herb Caen, who called himself the Sacramento Kid. He grew up in that world and was one of the writers that made me think about being a writer. He was the gossip columnist for the San Francisco newspapers.
The poems that I was writing immediately after Field Guide felt to me like imitations of the poems in that book. And something shifted in me. It had to do with complicated things — psychological things that may be boring to anyone but me. The impulse of the poems in Field Guide, or many of them, was to render the physical world. And I think part of my influence was Hemingway, and a kind of male aesthetic, in which the proposition was: I'll describe what I'm seeing, and you guess what I'm feeling and thinking.
In relation to what was going on in American poetry, that wasn't so unusual — it was either deep image, imagism, or various forms of what were then new experiments in free verse. But as I got into my 30s — Field Guide was the book of my 20s — I was 32 years old, the book had been published, people were saying, "Oh, you're the poet," and I was trying that out. And I was trying to write poems, in love with the kind of radiance in poetry, and I wanted to get at what I was feeling and thinking more directly. That was the only thing I knew for sure, in the second book.
Freeman: That really helps. I want to go back into the book. I read somewhere that you took a class in college about nature and observation that was formative. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, because you're already so good at observing in Field Guide, and that's even sharper in this book — but you're also observing yourself in this book.
Hass: It was in college. St. Mary's had, as one way to not be a major in anything in the humanities, the St. John's of Annapolis curriculum — four years of great books. You did Greek mathematics in the freshman year, Greek philosophy and literature, then in the sophomore year, Roman and medieval philosophy and literature, and so on. In the junior year, they invented a science course for humanities students. A young, recently Ph.D.'d Swedish professor, Perfielf, a wonderful man, taught this class in which they loaned us a pair of binoculars, told us to order Roger Tory Peterson's A Field Guide to Western Birds, and to spend at least three hours a week looking at birds and keeping a journal. They also gave us Darwin to read, and we were supposed to write an essay — and turn in our bird journal — at the end, on whether classification was knowledge. It was the liberal arts way of doing it, but it really worked. I was already pretty interested in the natural world, but I grew up in a fishing and hunting culture in Marin County. By the time I got to college I knew what the birds were, but I didn't know what their names were. And that opened a world of observation to me.
A few years later, in graduate school at Stanford, in the middle '60s, I came across Gary Snyder's poems, and he gave me a language to talk about my own world.
The other thing about being a California writer is that the population of Northern California doubled between 1945 and 1960. It was partly because people who had passed through San Francisco to fight in the war in the Pacific saw the city, came back, and stayed. It was in those years, also, that Lawrence Ferlinghetti — who was one of those, he'd been a naval officer — came to teach at the University of San Francisco and to start City Lights bookstore, which started a whole culture between 1950 and 1955.
Hass: California was transformed. This place that had mountains and a coast, deserts in the south, forests in the north, rivers running through it — a third or more of it was federal property, mostly because the immigration in the 19th century had killed off the Indigenous peoples who didn't have resistance to European diseases. It was in California, through John Muir, that the notion of preserving the wilderness — meaning places where people have not totally transformed for economic reasons — took hold. I grew up watching that change happen. You become an environmentalist, without much choice, if you grew up in California in those years. What was your experience of Sacramento, John?
Freeman: It felt like a very controlled environment — it had been developed and become largely suburbanized — but you very quickly, if you left the city, were back into farmland. You could almost travel into the past by driving 10 miles. That feeling is very much less now, because this was 40 years ago. And I was struck reading Praise — a book written partially in the early '70s — that it already has such a tone of elegy. And you've just explained why, describing the context. Can you read "Meditation at Lagunitas" to take us into the book?
Hass: Sure. Before I read the poem — it begins with a couple of sentences from a conversation I was having about deconstruction. A friend who had been studying in Paris came back very excited about the very new ideas of Roland Barthes and Derrida, including the idea that language, because it symbolizes things, is noticing the absence of their reality. And at some point I sat down and wrote it.
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead, sculpted branch
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands, sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkin seed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed.
There are moments when the body is as numinous as words,
days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Freeman: Wow. This is one of the great poems of the last 50 years, and as a Californian, I think so many of us read this poem and find in its associative descriptions a path that we have taken ourselves — from a place into an association of memory, and a resistance against the idea that language is somehow ultimately pointless. Because if you can name pleasure, if you can name grief, if you can name places that signify and are meaningful to you, then language does have a purpose. Can you talk a little bit about the making of this poem? Do you remember writing it?
Hass: Yes, I do remember writing it. I think it was something about the "clarity of a general idea" — when I read that phrase back, after having had this experience of talking to my friend about deconstruction when it was the very newest idea, and when Roland Barthes was talking about the disappearance of the author — something in me both assented and resisted.
I remember sitting down and writing a draft of it and thinking, as I was writing it, this is way too talky, this is not the kind of poem I want to be writing. But I saw it through to the end, and then set it aside for that reason. Sometime later, the editor of Antaeus magazine — and the poet Daniel Halpern had also started the Ecco Press — asked me to send him some poems for the magazine. I sent a batch of poems, and as an afterthought I put in "Meditation at Lagunitas," half-thinking it wasn't working. I got a postcard from him back, in the days before email, saying, "Oh my god, this poem is amazing." And that was my first sense that I should look at it again. So I did. I made some changes in it.
I think I had another last line after "Blackberry, blackberry, blackberry" — one that addressed the philosophical thing more directly. Something like, "such something in the wild, violent presence of the word." And my friend Louise Glück said, cut the last line. So I cut the last line.
Freeman: What an editor to have. She had some sharp knives. I wonder — this book, in the letter section, there's a letter to Dan, which I assume is Dan Halpern?
Hass: Yes, that's right.
Freeman: And there are other forms that are so various — it makes me want to ask a question that someone has already posed from the chat, which is quite simple: what is a poem?
Hass: Once you publish a book or two, you sometimes get invited to read on radio and get interviewed. I was on a talk show in Portland, Oregon, and someone asked, "What is poetry?" This was a guy who said, "I was at Iwo Jima in World War II. I was lying on my back, looking at the sky one day, and I wrote the only poem I ever wrote in my life — can I read it to you?" And he read the poem, which was interesting.
And then someone called from Newport — which is the San Quentin of Oregon — said he was a prisoner and he wrote poetry, and he had a definition of poetry. He said, "If you say anything and pay attention to the fact that this is the only time these words are going to pass in your breath through your mortal body, that's poetry."
So I thought: poetry is where it comes from — it comes from prayer, or song. I don't know whether people sang before they spoke, or spoke and then turned what they spoke into song, but somewhere in that territory. And the ancient association, going back to early Greek poetry, early Etruscan, before Roman poetry — poetry was always associated with memory. It was a mnemonic device, saying things in a musical way so that they stayed with you. Do you have a definition of poetry, John?
Freeman: I think it's words made into music, arranged for the pleasure of the listener.
Hass: I like that a lot.
Freeman: I love thinking of the fact that poetry was sung, and that lyrics were always accompanied by a musical instrument. But I want to bring in someone who has probably had this conversation with you before, who teaches with you — a San Franciscan and Bay Area native, poet himself, author of Eggtooth, creator and launcher of the McSweeney's Poetry Series, and author of the forthcoming book, San Francisco Poem. That's Jesse Nathan. Jesse, join us at the California Book Club.
Jesse Nathan: Hi, Bob. Hi, John. So nice to see you both.
I just had the pleasure, over the last few days, of rereading Praise, and it is all over again so delicious and wonderful and thrilling — every page, every line. And I was remembering, as I was reading it, when I first encountered Praise — it must have been almost 20 years ago. I was a young poet, at a summer workshop in Iowa with a friend, and we couldn't afford lodging, so we were staying in a tent outside of Iowa City. I was starting the book, and it started to rain, and there was a thunderstorm — one of those humid Midwestern experiences. And I remember the poems reminding me that I was from California. The way this book sees a place, sees California, or any place — it shows us how to see a place. It reminded me that I had a California soul. And that anyone can have a California soul, even if you're not from there. That it is, in many ways, a project about seeing.
You were just talking about how you were starting to get interested in haiku around the same time you were working on these poems. And even "Songs to Survive the Summer," which the book ends with, is a wonderful long poem built out of three-line stanzas — tercets that look a little bit like haiku, with some haiku even folded into it. Looking back, what can you say about the relationship between Praise and the haiku form?
Hass: One way of talking about it: the book is not organized chronologically. The last poem in the book is "Songs to Survive the Summer," which has haiku-like moments in it. One section describes Wilhelm Steller — a German ornithologist who signed up to explore the Bering Straits on August Bering's Russian expedition from Siberia to Alaska. He named many animals along the way, including the Steller's Jay, which is the black-headed jay so common in Northern California forests. I was working in this short form: "Wilhelm Steller, forms hero, made a healing broth" — I tell the story of how he made a soup that cured people's rickets from the absence of vegetables on this trip. "He sailed with Bering, and the crew despised him. / A mean, impatient man born low enough / to hate the lower class." Anyway, it goes on dancing in this three-line stanza, because I had begun to take night-school Japanese and try to learn a little so I could figure out what was going on in those poems.
The impulse of the poems the book begins with were written after "Songs to Survive the Summer." I got interested in the sentence. And the radiance of made sentences. "The shadows of late afternoon and the odors of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness." There was a kind of — I got to love the way sentences flowed out and formed into lines.
Some poems in Praise still read to me like that accentual music: "Lead skies and gothic traceries of poplar" — that's the beginning of a description in that rhythm. But then there was this other thing you could do: "The child brought blue clay from the creek" — that's the first line of a poem. So I 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: And you were writing this as you were having children, which is a subject of personal interest to me — how you make art in the mix of domestic life. The other day you said that you have this sense now that you were given a magical time with small human beings. But what you were worried about was whether it was too ordinary. Those opening lines in "Songs to Survive the Summer": "These are the dog days, unvaried, / except by accident." There's this tension in the book — a journey, as you moved from Field Guide into the work of Praise, from the longing for transcendence to a kind of recognition of immanence. How we praise — as another line in the book has it — rising to a clean kitchen.
Hass: The fact that the car starts.
Nathan: Exactly. Or elsewhere there's the line: "As if the little song, Transcend, Transcend, / could get you anywhere." This exhaustion with the hunger for transcendence.
Hass: This book was shot through with the complicated and conflicted feelings I was having about that choice. I was married in my early 20s and a father very early — it was magical to me, something I deeply loved. And my 20s had to do with that, and with celebrating that in relation to the violence of the surrounding world at the time: the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement. There was so much that needed doing, and that domestic life felt like a ground.
Reading now, as 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!
In fact, what happens in the poem is that the subject is my daughter's bout of early childhood anxiety when a neighbor's mother dies. The poem goes to the gray-eyed child who said to my child, "Let's play in my yard, it's okay, my mother's dead." My daughter was having trouble sleeping, afraid that every siren, every ambulance sound, was a death. So the poem was written to comfort the child, and in the course of writing the poem, I was also comforting myself. Life is never boring.
Freeman: Jesse, stay on with us. There's a lot of conversation in the chat and some good questions popping up. I think a lot of people listening admire your poetry for the music of the words, for the range of your forms, Bob, but also for your ability to write about what it means to live at the center of an empire that commits such incredible acts of violence, while also seeking these moments of transcendence. You've dedicated part of your life to activism, or at least stepping out onto the street in front of your lines. Someone asked about the role of art in activism. I think it's particularly interesting in the context of this book, which would have been written towards the end of the Vietnam War. There is also lightness here. I wonder how activism was happening, or if it was, for you at the same time.
Hass: I think less so in this book. Field Guide is full of poems whose emotional context is the larger world and the violence going on in it. Managing a life in relation to the goodness of everyday existence seemed like a political act. But I think it's mostly not in Praise.
In my 20s you're setting up a life. In your 30s, you start living it — or you're in the middle of living it. And then all the questions come up: What do I want? Is this satisfying enough? Should I be happier? Should I be less happy? I framed it for myself with the issues of immanence, meaning living in and with daily life, gratefully — which seems like a sane thing to do, insofar as you're able. Versus the hunger. A way I've put it to myself recently is that there are at least a couple of kinds of beauty that poems create. One is a beauty that produces a hunger. The other is a beauty that calms you down and focuses you on what you live in.
Translating — learning to translate Bashō. "Late fall, getting dinner, we peeled eggplants, cucumbers." And saying, wow, that's a poem. The whole point of life is to be able to say a poem like that. If you can't, what are you doing? He has another poem: "Winter morning by myself" — and the last line, the kigo, the seasonal word — "eating salmon jerky." It means absolutely ordinary breakfast food. Where am I in the world? On a winter morning, by myself, doing this.
There's a place in the Bashō commentaries produced by his followers where someone comes to him and says, about one poem, "Is that a poem?" And he says, "If it's not a poem, you should change your life." To be able to say, getting dinner, we peeled lake plants, cucumbers. So there was that invitation to do a poetry of naming that was also a poetry of blessing. And that was quite apart from how violent or evil the surround was.
And then there was the part of me that said no — what do you do with absolute hunger? Botticelli became the figure for me of beauty that filled you with longing: the hunger for transcendence, not just this world, not just this life, but what? This other thing. And of course the literature — particularly the literature about sexuality in the early part of the 20th century — was all about some kind of transforming magic. And poetry is a transforming magic in the same verses in which you do "calm down, pay attention, treat things tenderly, be in this world."
It was a swirl of those kinds of emotions that I was dealing with in Praise, which didn't directly address the stuff going on in politics. I think I returned to it in the next book — there were about 10 years between Praise and Human Wishes. In the years I was writing Praise, I remember my daughter, by the time she was in junior high in Berkeley, said to me as I was driving her to school one day, "How come you've lost your commitment, Dad?" And I thought, my commitment? I'm driving you to school — that's my commitment!
In my later work, part of the relation to politics is that my wife, Brenda Hillman — who I think will be talking to the California Book Club later on — has written beautifully about the relationship between poetry and activism. My later poems include, for example, a journal of going to Creech Air Force Base in Nevada to stand outside the fence where young men and women are going in to pilot drones in Afghanistan. We stand there holding signs saying, "Violence is always wrong except ours." Or the kind of witness that Brenda has organized — having her young poet friends go with her to a hardware store that sells poisons, wearing gas masks and reciting botanical poetry. There are a whole bunch of ways of making the conversation about justice and poetry that I partly learned from watching her, and from reading her.
Freeman: Bob, I had a question about contemporaries. I visited W.S. Merwin's farmhouse in France with your publisher, Michael Wiegers, who has been publishing him for a very long time. I was sifting through the bookcase, finding drafts of poems stuck in galleys he'd been sent, and then I pulled out a journal, and there in it were poems by him, and by you, and also Lucille Clifton. It smashed together eras that I had always assumed, to some degree, were separate — because these were all poems from the '70s. It was such an amazing period for poetry, and so many different poets were coming of age. Did you draw energy from that?
Hass: Yes, that was exactly my experience. I'd never visited the place in France, but I visited Merwin's place in Hawaii and also saw bookcases jammed with notes, thinking, oh my god, who's going to see to all this — I hope Michael will. My first teaching job came after I did graduate work at Stanford, where the presiding presence was Yvor Winters — an amazing man, an amazing poet, extremely conservative in his poetics, ironic and distrustful of romantic poetry and its gestures. So my first teaching job was at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Robert Creeley was on the faculty. Charles Olson — who was not around that year — was on the faculty. John Logan, the poet. Irving — anyway, it was a place full of poetry. Bob Creeley was going to take a semester off, go on sabbatical, and come to California. He was in Bolinas, and I, wanting to be in Bolinas, was stuck in Buffalo. I said, can I use your salary to teach a course while you're away, by inviting — I could do a course on contemporary poetry, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, teach on Monday, then have the poet teach on Wednesday and read Thursday night, and we could teach together on Friday? He said yes, went to the chair and the dean, and we got the money.
I invited Allen Ginsberg, Denise Levertov, William Merwin, Gregory Corso, Robert Bly, James Wright — a bunch of what were, to me, the exciting new poets. One of the poets I invited was William Merwin, who had just published The Lice, which I had reviewed in The Nation. An amazing book. "New shadow, is that what you are, / Standing on the stairs of water, no longer afraid. / Hope and fear are still our wings. Why / we cannot fly." My head was full of these rhythms, these unpunctuated poems full of strange metaphorical turns. I invited him to come. This was at the height of the Vietnam War escalation under Nixon.
William arrived, and in order to get him paid, I had to have him sign a statement created by the New York legislature that he would not do anything to overthrow the authority of the trustees of the university. He arrived, read it, and said, "I can't sign this." So he taught, read, taught again, gave a cash donation to draft-resisting students, and was gone. He'd turned down a lot of money — it was like $2,000, which was enormous at the time, since poets were getting paid $50 to give readings.
When Allen Ginsberg arrived, I said, here's this thing you have to sign. I told him William didn't sign it, and he said, "If Merwin won't sign it, I can't sign it." And so then each of the poets I was so excited to invite had to forego their $2,000 stipend in order to imitate his principled stand.
But the writing that was being done was so exciting, because there was so much of it and so many different kinds. What was happening in the New York school, what was happening with the poets associated with Black Mountain, people who came out of Williams, people who came out of Stevens, people who came out of French Surrealism. Gary Snyder is now 90 years old — he was born in 1930, probably the youngest of that generation. Almost all those poets were born in the '20s, in high school during the Depression, started writing poetry after the war, partly in a situation dominated by T.S. Eliot. There was a certain rebellion against the impersonal elegance of his critical thinking, not so much of the poems. Anyway, it was a very exciting time to be figuring out how to write poetry.
Freeman: There's a poem in Praise dedicated "for Louise" — is that for Louise Glück?
Hass: Yes. We met in 1968 because Paul Carroll edited a book of new and up-and-coming poets called The Young American Poets. To publicize it, he set up a series of readings in the houses of writers and artists in New York. I met Louise because we were assigned to read an evening at Norman Mailer's house in Brooklyn.
I was reading her poems, particularly the poems in her second book, The House on Marshland, and they were very elegant. There was this beautiful poem about roses. And I was still politically preoccupied. The poem is called "Emblems of a Prior Order, for Louise."
Patient cultivation, as the white petals of the climbing rose
were to some men a lifetime's careful work,
the mess of petals on the lawn was bred
to fall there as a dog is bred to stand.
My idea for this poem was: yes, there's a kind of beauty. But the culture that produced that beauty also produced the Doberman Pinscher. The guy who bred the Doberman Pinscher happened to be one of the leading anti-Semites in the early stages of Hitler's movement. "Gardens are a history of art, the Fandisian flower and Doberman's Pinscher, / all deadly sleekness in the neighbor's yard, were born, Brennendes Liebe, under the lindens that bear the morning TARDIS on his silver tray." Her poem was also called Brennendes Liebe — Burning Love. I just thought, you can't talk about this kind of beauty without also talking about the violence of the world. It was a sort of rejoinder to her poems.
Nathan: All of this — the conversation about the political and where this book shows up — leads to a question that keeps coming up for me, which is maybe silly and simple, Bob: why praise? Why should we? Why ought we? Why might we praise?
Hass: Because you should give back.
Nathan: There's the anecdote at the beginning of the book that I love — that's your writing, right? The little epigraph?
Hass: Yes. I thought "praise" was going to sound stupid — naïve, to praise the world, which is so full of suffering. So I wanted to explain myself. I wrote, as an epigraph, a little piece that I passed off as a fake quotation from some ancient source. And this is interesting: Praise has been translated into many languages, and all of the translators assumed this epigraph was a poem I had written, when it's prose I wrote to explain the title. "We asked the captain what course of action he proposed to take toward a beast so large, terrifying, and unpredictable. He hesitated to answer, and then said, judiciously, I think I shall praise him." What else to do with the world but to praise it?
Freeman: It feels like a connection to the first poem of your previous book, in which you catch a fish — what is it?
Hass: It's a species of scorpion fish — a sculpin, yes.
Freeman: It's a terrifying thing, because until that moment you're in this sort of outdoor idyll, and then suddenly you have this thing speared through its mouth on a line, looking back at you. Like: how did we get here?
Hass: How do we get here, and what's to say about this? I look back at that poem and say, I don't know — I think it ends "creature and creature, we stared down centuries." That's true. But is that enough? It makes me think of Joseph Campbell saying that all mythological thinking is a result of the shock of the food chain.
Freeman: Someone asked quite early on about the third poem in the book, "The Yellow Bicycle," and wanted to know about the combination of the object and the color, and how that came to you.
Hass: I like this poem. The poem came to me because my wife, I think, had said at some point — when I asked her what she wanted — "A yellow bicycle." And that set me off with the idea of writing a poem in a series of short sections, all of which included the phrase "the yellow bicycle." I had in mind imitating Kenneth Koch's imitation of playful French poetry, like Apollinaire.
The first part goes: "The woman I love is greedy, but she refuses greed. She walks so straightly. When I ask her what she wants, she says, a yellow bicycle." Then the next section is a list of yellow things: sunflower, sun's sun, colt's foot on the roadside, a goldfish, the sign that says yield. California yellow. Her hair, cat's eyes, his hunger, and a yellow bicycle. Then another section said, "After García Lorca died, and they broke into the oldest horror house in Madrid, they found it was full of broken yellow bicycles." And another: when the closet was opened, she picked out this, and this, and this, and a yellow bicycle.
After a while, it seemed corny to do that. And the poem ended with her song to the yellow bicycle: "The boats on the bay have nothing on you, my swan, my sleek one." I thought, how could I write anything so foolishly romantic? I was thinking: every poem that says yes has to be backed up by some serious no, to be given credibility. So then I wrote this little prose thing: once, when they had made love in the middle of the night and it was very sweet, they decided they were hungry, so they got dressed and drove downtown to an all-night donut shop.
What happens is they go in, come out, and they offer their donuts to an old woman standing outside in the Mission District in San Francisco. They say, "Would you like some?" And she says, "No, I don't want any of your sweets. Don't give me your sweetness." That was what was fun for me — playing with prose and verse, with lyricism and a sobriety that's not lyrical.
Freeman: Very few prose writers have written prose as beautiful as yours. I would quote it back to you for the rest of the night, but we should let people get on to their evenings. It has been such an honor to talk to you. You're one of the most knowledgeable people I've ever encountered about poetry, and you travel with a lot of lightness. It's been wonderful to spend this hour with you, and with you too, Jesse. Congratulations on the new book. You can also pick up Bob Hass's new book, A Third Commonness: Essays on Poetry and the Natural World, coming out in about a month. If you would like someone to give you lectures on the history of eco-poetics, Barry Lopez, or the poetry he's written, give you definitions from his own personal lexicon — it's a lot like this hour, but in book form.
I have to say, someone in this chat went to your reading with Merwin in the '60s in Buffalo — a Greg Margolis. So the times are coming back in happy ways, not just bad ones, as this chat has made clear. Thank you, Bob, for joining us, and you too, Jesse.
Hass: Thank you both.
Zerega: Thank you so much, and thank you to everyone who joined us tonight. This was a really lively chat, with really good questions and just great conversation. Big thank you to Bob, and to Jesse, and to John. If you're in Northern California this weekend, the Sierra Poetry Festival — Bob and Brenda are going to be the keynote speakers there. And if you're in Southern California, please come to the LA Times Book Festival. Alta Journal will have a booth.
Everyone who joined us today is going to get an email tomorrow with links to all the different topics and books discussed. At altaonline.com, you can also find poems by Brenda Hillman, or our California Book Club with Gary Snyder — a lot of the same people in this orbit are on our site, and I'd encourage you to visit.
We have a final appeal to please consider joining. If you love book clubs and books, like California Rewritten, we have a special offer — a link was in the chat and will be in tomorrow's email. On May 21st, we'll welcome Dagoberto Gilb to discuss The Flowers, a really amazing novel. Mark your calendars, please. And we'd be grateful if you'd participate in a one-minute survey that's going to pop up at the end. Again, Bob, thank you so much. Warriors won last night, so we've got to get through Phoenix. Take care, everybody. See you next month.•
