Robert Hass: Online Interviews

A: When I came into the job, funding for the humanities at the federal level was being drastically cut. This was the high tide of the new Republican Congress. Environmental regulation looked like it was going to be under serious attack, and they were giving all of those speeches about getting government off people's backs.

I was aware that a quarter of the children in the country are born in poverty, and that the condition of public schools in California was disastrous. I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn't teach people to read. You begin to see that all of these things are connected: The kind of cuts that mean less environmental protection are also the kind of cuts that mean less musical education for the schools and that also mean more overcrowded schools.

A: They are the kinds of things that make us a community: attachment to place, attachment to local arts traditions, the ability to read literature, the ability to look at paintings, the sense of connectedness to the land, the sense of community that comes from people taking care of their own. The market doesn't make communities. Markets make networks of self-interested individuals, and they work as long as there's more than enough to go around.

As poet laureate, I was asked to be a spokesman for literature. Then what I decided is I am a spokesman for this other imagination of community -- not the one showing up in the market. Nobody was tending to the way we're imaginatively connected to each other.

A: I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels. Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else -- in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

As I started reading about it, I saw that at the beginning of the 19th century, outside of New England -- which was an unusually literate place -- practically no one could read or write. And even in New England, the overall rate was only about 60 percent. That still means four out of 10 people couldn't put their name to a will.

The ideal of universal literacy, in the West anyway, was first of all a Protestant idea -- that everybody had to be able to read to save their soul. That idea got transposed into an idea of the importance of literacy for democratic citizenship. A movement got started for common schools, and by the end of the 19th century, 91 percent of Americans could read and write. It was one of the great mass achievements of American civilization, and we did it because we thought if you were going to have a democratic form of government, people had to be able to read and understand complicated ideas on their own.

So then in California we froze property taxes, school size increased, test scores declined, and there was a massive middle-class white flight to private schools. We're turning into Victorian England at a very rapid rate. If we want to have a two-class society and an unemployed, welfare-crippled lower class that has no access to equality and educational opportunity and no access to jobs and is resentful and furiously angry, we can have it -- that's what we've been willing to pay for so far.

Q: You've also emphasized environmental connections in your work as poet laureate.

A: There isn't a river or creek in the country -- or there are very few -- that doesn't have some small group of people working on a restoration or creek cleanup project. Let me give you one example that's a great metaphor: In Washington, D.C., there is a group called the Anacostia Watershed Society. Two rivers converge and define Washington -- one which everybody knows about, the Potomac, and the Anacostia, which they don't. The Anacostia is one of the most polluted urban rivers in the country.

It turns out -- this is a metaphor out of Dickens -- that the raw sewage emptied into the Anacostia comes from the Federal Triangle. I have a sewer map, and on it you can see the pipe from which congressional wastes empty into the river that then flows through the black neighborhoods of Washington, D.C. It is very expensive to do anything about the river, but somebody's working on it.

I just kept having these "only connect" moments straight out of E.M. Forster. That is to say, if you're imaginatively responsible to the place you live in, you understand the watershed. Once you figure out something about the watershed, you'll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren't learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues were all connected.

Q: People presumably think that, as a poet laureate, you were hired to talk about poetry.

A: I am talking about poetry. It's like that line from Yeats: I go back to "where all the ladders start/ In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart." If you're going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you've got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage. To do that you have to talk about how they're being taught, and the imagination of community the people who are running our government have.

A: There are instances: Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks. It took a century for this to happen, for artistic values to percolate down to where honoring the relation of people's imagination to the land, or beauty, or to wild things, was issued in legislation.

Q: In your poem "English: An Ode," from your current volume, you write, "There are those who think it's in fairly bad taste/ to make habitual reference to social and political problems/ in poems. To these people it seems a form of melodrama/ or self-aggrandizement, which it no doubt partly is." It seems you're railing against certain constraints about being political in your work.

A: I thought a long time about whether to cut that from the poem. It's myself I'm arguing with -- the part of me that thinks it's just in bad taste because, finally, you're preaching to the converted. I suppose there's something to be said for the sheer reinforcement of our beliefs, but really I think poetry is more useful as disenchantment than enchantment. And the record of poetry in the 20th century isn't all that great anyway. Most of the poets who weren't fascists were Stalinists.

The poem that comes closest to saying what I think is the one in Human Wishes called "Rusia en 1931." This poem is about Mandelstam, who was a great poet and an anti-Stalinist, and Vallejo, who was a great poet and a Stalinist. Mandelstam was killed by Stalinist forces. Vallejo was at least metaphorically killed by fascist forces, in the sense that he wore himself out raising funds for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and got sick and died. Poetry, when it takes sides, when it proposes solutions, isn't any smarter than anybody else.

But Mandelstam, who wasn't a political thinker, loved the idea of the city-state. One of the emblems in his poetry of the politics he imagined, over and against the universalizing politics of Marx, was the medieval city of Novgorod, which had in its center a public well where the water was free to everyone. That became for him a figure of justice. So I say, "Poetry proposes no solutions: it says justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and sweet," because I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.

As an artist, you have the job of working out whatever is given you to work out. In Sun Under Wood, I found myself realizing that I had to write the poems of middle age, which were to me poems of what's irreparable in the world, the ways you've fucked up in your own life, things you can't change. Yet compared to the scale of injustice in the world, how do I write about this? At some level, you have to be able to say, "This is my task." It's in small, local ways that you keep yourself alive and refresh ideas that are always going into dead abstraction.

Q: How possible is it to be as public as you've been in this position and also be as private as you need to be to do your work?

A: I guess it wasn't, because I chose to do it. The thing I learned is that the work is getting done by people who dig in and work on a particular project: the people who spend 20 years sustaining a theater for black teenagers in Chicago; the people who reintroduce sticklebacks into Strawberry Creek in Berkeley and then wait patiently for the first egrets to show up.

It's the same with this idea of a literate public, and also of a democracy in which people have access to and really read the best books. It turns out that even when you create this kind of environment, maybe only 10 percent of the people want to read those books. What does it mean? It means to me what Simone Weil said politics has meant all along, which means that you fight for 11 percent, 12 percent, 13 percent, that you avoid golden-age thinking and romantic melancholy and you just keep pushing.

A Conversation with Robert Hass

Coyote	Welcome to our little world, Robert. A lot of folks are honored that you have agreed to stop by. Is this your first experience in a graphical chat world like this one?
Bob Hass	Yes it is! I like that phrase "graphical chat world."
Coyote	What are your first impressions, so far?
Bob Hass	I'm waiting to have them.
Coyote	Would you mind if I asked a few questions about your childhood?
Bob Hass	I wouldn't mind.
Coyote	What is your earliest memory?
Bob Hass	The sound of fog horns.
Coyote	Where was it?
Bob Hass	I was born in San Francisco, and I'm told that I used to be put out on the roof to take naps. And when I tried to figure out what my earliest memory was that was what I remembered. I didn't live far from the Golden Gate Bridge and that low moaning sound of fog horns was probably around.
Coyote	Does the sound of fog horns bring any special feelings now?
Bob Hass	There was less radar then, so you heard the fog horns all the time. Every once in awhile I see one of those old movies of San Francisco in the '40s with actors like Bogart and John Garfield running around in trench coats, and the soundtrack is always drenched in that low moan. And I keep hoping that somebody dressed in those tight 1940s skirts with the bright lipstick and the piled up hair will solicit me to carry some secret message onto a Shanghai freighter.
Bob Hass	I'm curious about your logos. Did everyone create their own?
Be A Light	I created my own.
Coyote	I did my own.
Zendog	My own, too.
Coyote	It's become part of my identity.
Bob Hass	Is everyone here satisfied with their logo?
Be A Light	I am.
Coyote	Feels good.
Zendog	It's hard to change the one you use a lot -- almost like changing your name.
Bob Hass	Coyote, where did your logo come from? Coyote Tales? Coyote myths?
Coyote	Coyote myth, very loosely interpreted. I think people tend to represent themselves as the archetype they long to become.
Bob Hass	Have you read Barry Lopez's collection of Native American coyote stories?
Coyote	No, I have not ...
Bob Hass	Coyote, in the stories, is a pretty wild character.
D	My English teacher says that all poets write in "Iambic Spondaic Amphibrachic feet" etc., etc. or else they are wrong and should not be writing poetry at all. Is that true?
Bob Hass	No, that's not true. Your own natural speech and natural breath is all the amphibrac you need.
D	Can I have that in writing?
Bob Hass	Yeah sure :) Write to me at the Library of Congress. Address it to the Poet Laureate's Office and give me your address, and I'll send you a letter on official stationery explaining that your teacher is dead wrong and you are absolutely right.
D	Thanks a lot, Bob. Your a life saver. My whole class will love this.
Zendog	Bob, has being the Poet Laureate of the US changed the way people treat you or respond to your poems?
Bob Hass	Yes, I think that the title sounds so grand that sometimes people suddenly like my poems.
Be A Light	Bob, I was curious how you felt about the bible.
Bob Hass	Are you a reader of the Bible?
Be A Light	I read it everyday.
Bob Hass	What translation do you read?
D	Several but especially New World Trans.
Bob Hass	There's a translation of the Book of Job by my friend Stephen Mitchell, who is a student of Hebrew and a wonderful poet. He thinks that the last part of Job had been misunderstood by previous Hebrew scholars, and he did this new version that's really worth reading.
Be A Light	What do you believe about it?
Bob Hass	What do you believe about some other old book of wisdom? The writings of Lao-Tse or Confucius? What I believe isn't really an issue for me. Do you mean, do I believe it is the inspired word of God?
Be A Light	Right, do you believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that the only way to eternal life is through Him?
Bob Hass	No, I don't think Jesus Christ was divine in any special sense. I was raised a Catholic, but I've come to think that Jesus was a powerful teacher and that it was his followers who made these great claims for him. (What he said was that the kingdom of God is within you.)
Joe	Do you think that suffering creates strong character?
Bob Hass	Sometimes. And sometimes suffering breaks people all-together.
D	Bob, what if I feel all the important poetry has already been written and I have ceased to write?
Bob Hass	The language is always wearing out. Every generation has to make it new. If everybody felt that way, we'd have no poetry since Chaucer. And it'd all be in a language that didn't have the feel of our world in it. There'd certainly be no poem with the phrase "graphical chat" in it.
Spoon	What is the relationship between song lyrics and poetry?
Bob Hass	Song lyrics are poems that have to behave in tandem with the music - like the difference between dancing alone and dancing with a partner.
Devil	: What responsibilities go along with being Poet Laureate?
Bob Hass	The Poet Laureate has to give poetry readings and lectures at the Library of Congress, and you become a sort of spokesperson for American letters literacy issues.
Willie	How often is a new poet laureate elected?
Bob Hass	The Poet Laureate is appointed for a year. It's renewable, but nobody's ever wanted to do it for more than a couple of years.
MISS P	Bob, what do you think of Milton's vision of Lucifer vs. traditional concept of the Fall?
Bob Hass	You know I haven't read Milton in so long that I don't really have an opinion. I remember the poet Blake saying that Milton was really of the devil's party.
Peduci	Novels get movie deals, comic books get merchandising dolls, music gets TV commercial retakes, poetry doesn't get much in the way of ancillaries - would increased popularity corrupt the art?
Bob Hass	No, I don't think it would. But there'd probably be a lot more bad poetry. Still, it's good for every art to have live forms from very popular to very complicated.
Coyote	What poetry do you enjoy reading the most?
Bob Hass	I read such a range, from old poets to contemporaries that it's hard to say. Sort of like saying what's your favorite food: one day you want orange juice, another day you have a craving for salads or something.
Arctic Frost	Do you see the tactics of congress to suppress freedom on the Internet frightening?
Bob Hass	Yeah I do. Do you, Arctic Frost? What is it about it that worries you?
Arctic Frost	I'm afraid it will stifle writing, especially on the computer services.
Bob Hass	I'm more worried about the economics of the medium. I'm worried about kids who grow up too poor to have access to this technology.
Zendog	I heard you on an interview say that you admire the modern classic "Raid Kills Bugs Dead". What do you like about it?
Bob Hass	It's to the point. It was written by Lew Welsh, who was one of the beat poets, a friend of Allen Ginsberg. He was doing a gig as an advertising writer in San Francisco. "Raid Kills Bugs Dead" (which is probably redundant, but after all, the subject is overkill).
Coyote	What prompts you to write? Are there any particular events that trigger your writing?
Bob Hass	Different things at different times. I think I try to write about stuff I can't put into words.
Coyote	Ever try painting?
Bob Hass	A little bit. I'm in love with painting and I'm very bad at drawing. But I took a course once in the Chinese brush and really loved it.
MISS P	Do you know/like Steven Sandy's poetry?
Bob Hass	I know Steven Sandy's poetry and I know him a little. I like his work a lot. It's kind of plain and real musical and about ordinary things in subtle ways.
MISS P	Bob, who would you consider to be the 5 most important poets of the last 50 years (so we can run to the bookstore)?
Bob Hass	In Spanish, two: Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo. In Polish, Czeslaw Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert and Wladislaw Symborska, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She's really wonderful- very well translated and quirky original. She's the person I'm pushing these days. I think anybody who can think and read (we all have to feel) will like her a lot! She helps you to live in this century.
pipsqueek	What are your efforts for literacy?
Bob Hass	I'm concerned that kids aren't being taught to read because the schools are so overcrowded and underfunded, so I've spent a lot of time going around talking to business groups trying to get people to realize that we have a crisis on our hands - and that it doesn't have to do with beating Japan economically. It has to do with the idea we had that if you're gonna have a democracy everybody gets a chance to learn how to read.
Arctic Frost	What language would you say is the most poetic?
Bob Hass	When I'm writing, I always feel like any language but the one I'm writing in is VERY poetic :)
Coyote	How do you propose to get kids motivated to read?
Bob Hass	One thing that helps a lot is to motivate the parents. There are reading groups starting up for the parents of inner city kids funded by local groups like rotary and Kiwanis. After dinner, parents can get together at the school, have coffee and cookies and talk about novels and poems and stories their kids are reading. The parents have liked it a lot.
Guest 718	What about kids without parents like me?
Bob Hass	Tough, tough situation. Where are your parents?
Guest 718	In jail, unfortunately.
Bob Hass	Where are you living?
Guest 718	Baltimore. They're in jail in Camden, NJ, though.
Bob Hass	In Baltimore, there's a couple of very good book stores that sponsor reading groups.
Guest 718	Like Louie's? The owner of Louie's almost adopted me, but the stupid government blocked it.
Bob Hass	How did the government block it?
Guest 718	Because I guess he's gay or something. That is so discriminatory.
Bob Hass	This sounds like a long story -- have you tried to write about it?
Guest 718	Yes I tried, but I am a frustrated writer, lots inside but nothing comes out.
Bob Hass	Good. If you're reading and writing... if nothing comes out, it's because you got your own censor looking over your shoulder. Just lower your expectations and write it.
spoon	Patience and persistence, eh?
Bob Hass	Not just patience and persistence. You have to be willing to be awkward and stupid.
Guest 718	Your poem The Gardens of Warsaw brings me to tears every time I read it, in part because it is so beautiful, and in part because I could never create something so beautiful.
Arctic Frost	You never know till you try.
Zendog	Would Josef Brodski make your 50-years list?
Bob Hass	I'm not sure. Josef Brodski is supposed to be a great poet, and he's really hard to translate into English, so the version we get to read isn't always so great. But I love his essays. It's easier to translate prose.
Guest 718	Do you think this new trend of poetry jams in bars and coffee shops is healthy for poetry, or is making it overly pop?
Bob Hass	Oh I think it's healthy.
Arctic Frost	I thought that was an old trend. I'm too old.
Bob Hass	Arctic Frost, it's true... it's not so new, but it's newer some places than others. Where do you live?
Arctic Frost	I'm in Alaska.
Guest 718	Well it's exploded over the last few years, even in my parents jail, believe it or not.
Bob Hass	That's so interesting that there are poetry jams at the jail your parents are in.
Guest 718	I went to one. It was very emotional.
Coyote	Can poetry as we know it survive in a world dominated by fast, disconnected, commercial, images? Or does it need to redefine itself into a new form, like rock and roll lyrics?
Bob Hass	There are so many commercial images that poetry as it is gets to be more important. It's like television and advertising and politics are the teacher droning in front of the classroom, and poetry is the notes the kids are passing back and forth amongst themselves.
Willie	What do you feel about the Internet as a tool for teaching language and reading?
Bob Hass	You won't believe this probably, but this is only my second time on the Internet. I'm a very low tech person though I am working at it. So I really don't have an opinion... I hope it's an effective teacher.
spoon	It's a people's distribution medium.
Bob Hass	It's a people's distribution medium for people who can afford computers. I'm really worried that we're developing a two-class society, like Victorian England. So, it seems important to get them technology in the inner city classrooms and inner city libraries.
Zendog	People with computer access underestimate how many people don't have access.
Bob Hass	That's right!
Coyote	I like your idea of getting the parents together after school. Requires a lot of charisma to draw folks away from our TV sets, though ...
Bob Hass	Less and less charisma. All those people surfing 52 channels and nothing to watch but reruns of 70's rock videos on MTV.
Guest 718	What were you like as a kid?
Bob Hass	I don't know. What were you like as a kid?
Guest 718	Boring, a dreamer. I mean were you a poet-to-be as a kid?
Bob Hass	If you were dreaming, it can't have been so boring. Oh, I read a lot. I also did a lot of sports, though I was never particularly good at them. But I think I had some vague idea that I wanted to be a writer even when I was ten.
Guest 718	But do you think you were a poet-to-be, or that it wasn't predetermined when you were a kid?
Bob Hass	That is an interesting question! Fate and free-will. Do you think things are pre-determined?
Guest 718	To some extent, yes. Like that my parents would be crooks, unfortunately. They said they knew that when they were six.
Bob Hass	I think we have to act as if we had free will since we can't really know whether we do or not.
Arctic Frost	I believe courses are predetermined, not people.
Bob Hass	Interesting idea, say more.
Arctic Frost	Paths lead in directions. They can have some determination of their destination, but the person walks the path and chooses the course, and can turn direction at anytime.
Guest 718	When my mom was 6 she wrote a story saying when she grew up she'd be in jail. Isn't that weird?
Bob Hass	Not so weird. When will your parents be out?
Guest 718	My dad never, and my mom in three years.
pipsqueek	What did they do?
Guest 718	I'd rather not say if that's OK with you. I'm kind of ashamed of them as you can imagine.
Bob Hass	I can understand that -- I've read and taught in prisons and I know that one of the unwritten rules is that you don't ask.
Guest 718	Thanks. I've had a lot of support from my church.
Britta	Do you know the Swedish writer of poems "Gunnar Ekelof" and what do you think of his work?
Bob Hass	I like what I know of Ekelof -- he was one of the first European poets to get interested in Sufi ideas. I also love a lot a younger Swedish poet named Tomas Transtromer and he was influenced by Ekelof.
Coyote	Do you think that good collaborative poetry is possible? Or are solitary authors best suited for creating meaningful art? We've tried to create stories as a group here, but with meandering results ...
Bob Hass	I think stories, though fun as play, isn't a good approach. The best collaborative written art I know is the Japanese renga, and I would think it would be ideal for collaborative work in this medium. Its philosophy has to do with understanding change.
Coyote	How does it work?
Bob Hass	If you read my book "The Essential Haiku", you'll get some sense of how renga work. There are lots of books on the subject, but the basic idea is that the first person writes three lines of poetry: for example, "A cloudy gray afternoon/ the plum blossoms already gone/ wind off the Pacific." Then, the next person has to write two lines that complete the poem. Anyone want to try?
spoon	Window reflections/ voices beyond the wall.
Bob Hass	Great, spoon! Now, the next person starts with the two lines: window reflections/ voices beyond the wall; and the next person has to write three lines that complete that poem independently of the first. In other words, it doesn't have to have the weather or the season of my part of the poem. Guest 718, suppose after those lines; window reflections/ voices through the wall -- you wrote "it could snow in Baltimore/ I have been thinking about / my parents and my life".
Guest 718	Wow that's nice!!
Bob Hass	You see, it can be pretty simple.
Coyote	I close my eyes / the wind hurls / where did my spirit go?
Bob Hass	So now, ahh... Coyote! The way it works we now have one poem.
Coyote	when does it stop?
Bob Hass	There are two forms: one goes on for 36 verses and one goes on for 100 verses in Japanese. What the Japanese did was have each session supervised by a master poet who was a renga teacher and could accept or reject a verse- most of the famous haiku poets made their living as renga masters. Probably that's too formal for Americans, but you could have a kind of informal guide.
Guest 718	Bob, if you could be anything at all in the world, would you be a poet?
Bob Hass	I think so... most of the time. I like my life. Sometimes I want to live without words.
Coyote	Okay, Bob, you've been very generous with your time ...
Bob Hass	It's been fun!
Coyote	I want to thank you on behalf of everyone. You've given us a lot to think about and pass on ...