The Names of Things: An Interview with Robert Hass
TOM FITZSIMONS interviews former American poet laureate Robert Hass, guest of the Writers & Readers Week at the New Zealand International Arts Festival 2006.
GETTING Robert Hass alone after one of his sessions at Writers & Readers Week is almost as hard as buying a ticket at that blasted Ticketek stall at Wellington’s Embassy theatre.
It’s not that he is reluctant to talk, it’s quite the opposite: every person who presents a book to the star poet for signing gets a conversation on top. Standing in the tent at Waitangi Park, I hear him ask people what they are studying, who they are reading and how they liked the talk.
Throw in the swarm of local poets hurrying around him and I’m thinking I might have to write some epic poem while I wait. It’s okay though – Wellington is putting on its most outrageously blue sky in months, I don’t have anywhere to be, and I’m about to talk to one of contemporary American poetry’s giants.
A quick CV: Robert Hass, born in San Francisco in 1941, won a prestigious Yale Younger Poets award for his first book, Field Guide, and has continued to draw acclaim for all his subsequent work. As American poet laureate in 1996 and 1997, he collaborated with major US newspapers to publish and comment on poems daily. He has also worked prolifically as a translator, helping the work of Japanese haiku poets and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz into English. So, hot stuff.
But you wouldn’t know it to meet him. Instead of ego and importance, Robert Hass is a curious mix of warmth, absent-mindedness and quiet intensity. He doesn’t mind which table we sit at, or when he gets to eat his lunch, or talking to a man from a little-known (but growing) arts website. But when we start talking poetry, there’s suddenly nothing else going on. He’s all concentration.
I want to start with him. I ask, ‘Why do you write poetry? What do you like about it?’
He says: ‘I’ve never been able to answer the question about why I write poetry’.
Then he pauses. Then he says: ‘I don’t know what I like about poetry. What do you like about poetry?’
I’m confused. I ask the questions around here, buddy. But he’s intent, so I answer with some blather about it taking the absolute ordinariness of words and elevating them to something else altogether. I’m entirely inarticulate, but he readily agrees with my half-formed thought.
‘Yes’, he says, ‘[Words are] the basic material of our art – the stuff that’s going through your head all the time. I think at some point everybody who wants to write poetry was moved quite powerfully by some gift of expression from somewhere, some sense of the power of language.
‘When I read certain poems – when I was maybe 13, 14 years old – they felt true to me in their feelings. It felt to me like someone was saying something completely accurate about being alive that I couldn’t paraphrase.’
I nod sagely. He cites Wallace Stevens and Lord Alfred Tennyson poems as some that helped ignite his interest, but then he gets going again on me – saying he’s just as interested in who I’m reading, and what I think of them. This is surprising. A couple of questions about me, sure, that’s a nice touch. But the ceaseless interest is bizarre. He sniffs out that I have written a poem or two, and starts issuing challeges to a ridiculous group he calls ‘your generation of poets’.
This is all tremendously inflating for me, but it’s much more telling about him. Hass is so self-effacing and genuinely interested, he’s happy to let go of the interview. I’m not though, so I ask him how he writes poems. He says they come organically.
‘I’m not always writing poems. I’m evolving things in my mind. My experience is that I almost never sit down to a blank page and say ‘now you’re going to write a poem’. It just wouldn’t happen that way.
‘Part of the process has already begun... or I have a huge pile of compost – poems that are in some stage... And I’m always slow about finishing things.
So how does he know a poem’s done?
‘Well, you never do. I mean sometimes you do. Sometimes you think ‘boy, that’s done, that’s great’, and other times you just don’t know... and you can fiddle with the poem too much and kill it. I worry about young poets and computers because you can erase, easily, many stages of the process. Which isn’t a good idea because you can write past the draft that still has the initial vitality in it.’
Hass’ poems don’t lose the vitality. They’re unmistakable for their living details. Birds, plants, landforms, spices, foods and places are named with expert precision, to the point where Hass actually refers to this process of naming in some of his poems. In Field Guide’s ‘Maps’, he writes that ‘of all the laws / that bind us to the past / the names of things are / stubbornest’. I press him on this a little more.
He says: ‘I find with the natural world – whether it’s birds or plants or rocks – trying to teach yourself the name first of all means learning to see what’s there, noticing how many needles in the bundle of a particular pine tree, or how many petals on a wildflower, or what the patterns of a rock are that you’re able to read geological history in. All of that stuff was for me, as I learned it, a way of making the world seem more alive by seeing it more accurately.’
‘Also’, he says later, ‘there’s the specificity of Anglo-Saxon words. In Shakespeare’s plays, there are over a hundred birds named specifically. I think it’s a tendency of our cultural heritage to love the specifics of the world, and to distrust abstraction. Even ‘bird’ is an abstraction. You say ‘goldfinch’, you get a little nearer. ‘Female goldfinch on a...’ you get a little nearer.’
Hass suggests that poetry made away from traditional centres of art like London and New York is especially keen on names.
‘If you read through an anthology of poetry for New Zealand, or poetry from the Western United States, it’s full of place names. The history of those names is often interesting.’
‘I feel like Paris poets don’t feel the need to constantly say, ‘I’m in Paris, I’m in Paris, I’m in Paris’, but somehow Californians and New Zealanders in their poetry need to be saying ‘Here I am in California, Here I am in New Zealand.’
Apparently this is another issue that my generation will have to explore, but I want to talk about poetry in general. I ask why many people find poetry obscure and esoteric, and if that can be changed.
‘I think it can be changed,’ he says,’ and I think it’s different in different cultures. In Korean culture, for example, everybody writes poetry and people think poetry’s totally cool. High school kids in America now, because of rap and hip-hop, think being able to rap, which means extemporize endless rhymes and poems, is really cool.’
‘The other thing is that often the most powerful poetry takes a while for people to get, in terms of reading it and understanding. Everybody gets U2, but they don’t get Beethoven’s late quartets. Beethoven’s late quartets have to be there if the human soul is going to know what it’s capable of. You know, some poems are hard and some poems are easy, and only people who love poetry will ever really like the hard poems. That’s just the reality. Only people who love dance are going to like the really esoteric dance concerts.’
But I get confused, I protest. Some poems just leave me straight baffled. He’s not concerned.
‘There are reasons for that. Wallace Stevens said: “A good poem just successfully eludes the understanding”. I think a lot of people feel that about modernist poetry. And then maybe another reason is [what] Robert Frost said: ‘Any damn fool can start a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one’. You don’t want to come down on all fours necessarily.’
‘When poetry was reinvented in the Western world, after Latin poetry died out, the first set of poems to be written down were by William of Provence in France... Four of them are riddles and four of them are pornographic boasts. Somebody said that kind of divides up the two impulses of poetry – on the one hand the impulse to let it all hang out, and on the other hand the impulse to say it, but to say only the secret of it. And I think there are the two kinds of poets.’
When Hass talks, it comes out in surges of thought. He’ll finish a sentence and pause, and I’ll be just about to open my mouth when his next string of words will start unraveling out. His voice is warm and smooth, and he changes the structure of his sentences halfway through, as if revising a poem.
Someone brings him a coffee. We pause. We wrap things up with politics. Hass is known for his activism. Though his poems are proudly Californian, he’s upset by the Bush administration’s policies – in Iraq and at home.
‘The American political landscape at the moment is a disaster. Americans were frightened into backing this war, which was really a reckless and wrong-headed thing to do, and now that’s become evident, and they don’t know how to get out of it.
‘This particular administration represents, in Bush, the interests of oil companies, and in Cheney, the interests of mining and ranching, among others – all the extractive industries. They are people who are undoing, by administrative fiat, as much of the environmental regulation in the country as they can. The good news is that they’re finally very unpopular, very unsuccessful, and are going to get kicked out of office in another couple of years, but it’s really been a catastrophic time.’
Hass says there’s been no translation of public will into politics because of, ‘a complete failure of leadership in the opposition. Millions of people around the country got out and said: “There are no weapons of mass destruction”, “There is no connection to al-Qaeda”, “The US must not do this thing”, and the people in the streets were right, and the people in the Pentagon were wrong – about the facts!’
As he talks, he forgets the time again. He’s completely involved. I say some of it is hard to believe.
He says no,
‘It’s not hard for me to believe, because I went through the Vietnam War. I was in graduate school then, I had a Vietnamese neighbour. I knew more about what was going on in Vietnam than the people who started the war did. The idea that our leaders are well-informed is one of the big mistakes in thinking about this stuff.’
Here, as in the natural world, it’s the seeking out of specific knowledge that Hass extols. How many petals on the flower? How many WMDS? It is always easier to lie in the abstract than in the details.
And so we come back to the names of things, and the names for things, and the tremendous power of language in our lives – no matter if we read poetry or not. The power to keep our thoughts and our world connected. The power to keep our experience honest. Robert Hass understands it, and he’s generous about passing that understanding around.
» Field Guide: Robert Hass @ NZ International Arts Festival
GETTING Robert Hass alone after one of his sessions at Writers & Readers Week is almost as hard as buying a ticket at that blasted Ticketek stall at Wellington’s Embassy theatre.
It’s not that he is reluctant to talk, it’s quite the opposite: every person who presents a book to the star poet for signing gets a conversation on top. Standing in the tent at Waitangi Park, I hear him ask people what they are studying, who they are reading and how they liked the talk.
Throw in the swarm of local poets hurrying around him and I’m thinking I might have to write some epic poem while I wait. It’s okay though – Wellington is putting on its most outrageously blue sky in months, I don’t have anywhere to be, and I’m about to talk to one of contemporary American poetry’s giants.
A quick CV: Robert Hass, born in San Francisco in 1941, won a prestigious Yale Younger Poets award for his first book, Field Guide, and has continued to draw acclaim for all his subsequent work. As American poet laureate in 1996 and 1997, he collaborated with major US newspapers to publish and comment on poems daily. He has also worked prolifically as a translator, helping the work of Japanese haiku poets and Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz into English. So, hot stuff.
But you wouldn’t know it to meet him. Instead of ego and importance, Robert Hass is a curious mix of warmth, absent-mindedness and quiet intensity. He doesn’t mind which table we sit at, or when he gets to eat his lunch, or talking to a man from a little-known (but growing) arts website. But when we start talking poetry, there’s suddenly nothing else going on. He’s all concentration.
I want to start with him. I ask, ‘Why do you write poetry? What do you like about it?’
He says: ‘I’ve never been able to answer the question about why I write poetry’.
Then he pauses. Then he says: ‘I don’t know what I like about poetry. What do you like about poetry?’
I’m confused. I ask the questions around here, buddy. But he’s intent, so I answer with some blather about it taking the absolute ordinariness of words and elevating them to something else altogether. I’m entirely inarticulate, but he readily agrees with my half-formed thought.
‘Yes’, he says, ‘[Words are] the basic material of our art – the stuff that’s going through your head all the time. I think at some point everybody who wants to write poetry was moved quite powerfully by some gift of expression from somewhere, some sense of the power of language.
‘When I read certain poems – when I was maybe 13, 14 years old – they felt true to me in their feelings. It felt to me like someone was saying something completely accurate about being alive that I couldn’t paraphrase.’
I nod sagely. He cites Wallace Stevens and Lord Alfred Tennyson poems as some that helped ignite his interest, but then he gets going again on me – saying he’s just as interested in who I’m reading, and what I think of them. This is surprising. A couple of questions about me, sure, that’s a nice touch. But the ceaseless interest is bizarre. He sniffs out that I have written a poem or two, and starts issuing challeges to a ridiculous group he calls ‘your generation of poets’.
This is all tremendously inflating for me, but it’s much more telling about him. Hass is so self-effacing and genuinely interested, he’s happy to let go of the interview. I’m not though, so I ask him how he writes poems. He says they come organically.
‘I’m not always writing poems. I’m evolving things in my mind. My experience is that I almost never sit down to a blank page and say ‘now you’re going to write a poem’. It just wouldn’t happen that way.
‘Part of the process has already begun... or I have a huge pile of compost – poems that are in some stage... And I’m always slow about finishing things.
So how does he know a poem’s done?
‘Well, you never do. I mean sometimes you do. Sometimes you think ‘boy, that’s done, that’s great’, and other times you just don’t know... and you can fiddle with the poem too much and kill it. I worry about young poets and computers because you can erase, easily, many stages of the process. Which isn’t a good idea because you can write past the draft that still has the initial vitality in it.’
Hass’ poems don’t lose the vitality. They’re unmistakable for their living details. Birds, plants, landforms, spices, foods and places are named with expert precision, to the point where Hass actually refers to this process of naming in some of his poems. In Field Guide’s ‘Maps’, he writes that ‘of all the laws / that bind us to the past / the names of things are / stubbornest’. I press him on this a little more.
He says: ‘I find with the natural world – whether it’s birds or plants or rocks – trying to teach yourself the name first of all means learning to see what’s there, noticing how many needles in the bundle of a particular pine tree, or how many petals on a wildflower, or what the patterns of a rock are that you’re able to read geological history in. All of that stuff was for me, as I learned it, a way of making the world seem more alive by seeing it more accurately.’
‘Also’, he says later, ‘there’s the specificity of Anglo-Saxon words. In Shakespeare’s plays, there are over a hundred birds named specifically. I think it’s a tendency of our cultural heritage to love the specifics of the world, and to distrust abstraction. Even ‘bird’ is an abstraction. You say ‘goldfinch’, you get a little nearer. ‘Female goldfinch on a...’ you get a little nearer.’
Hass suggests that poetry made away from traditional centres of art like London and New York is especially keen on names.
‘If you read through an anthology of poetry for New Zealand, or poetry from the Western United States, it’s full of place names. The history of those names is often interesting.’
‘I feel like Paris poets don’t feel the need to constantly say, ‘I’m in Paris, I’m in Paris, I’m in Paris’, but somehow Californians and New Zealanders in their poetry need to be saying ‘Here I am in California, Here I am in New Zealand.’
Apparently this is another issue that my generation will have to explore, but I want to talk about poetry in general. I ask why many people find poetry obscure and esoteric, and if that can be changed.
‘I think it can be changed,’ he says,’ and I think it’s different in different cultures. In Korean culture, for example, everybody writes poetry and people think poetry’s totally cool. High school kids in America now, because of rap and hip-hop, think being able to rap, which means extemporize endless rhymes and poems, is really cool.’
‘The other thing is that often the most powerful poetry takes a while for people to get, in terms of reading it and understanding. Everybody gets U2, but they don’t get Beethoven’s late quartets. Beethoven’s late quartets have to be there if the human soul is going to know what it’s capable of. You know, some poems are hard and some poems are easy, and only people who love poetry will ever really like the hard poems. That’s just the reality. Only people who love dance are going to like the really esoteric dance concerts.’
But I get confused, I protest. Some poems just leave me straight baffled. He’s not concerned.
‘There are reasons for that. Wallace Stevens said: “A good poem just successfully eludes the understanding”. I think a lot of people feel that about modernist poetry. And then maybe another reason is [what] Robert Frost said: ‘Any damn fool can start a poem, but it takes a poet to get out of one’. You don’t want to come down on all fours necessarily.’
‘When poetry was reinvented in the Western world, after Latin poetry died out, the first set of poems to be written down were by William of Provence in France... Four of them are riddles and four of them are pornographic boasts. Somebody said that kind of divides up the two impulses of poetry – on the one hand the impulse to let it all hang out, and on the other hand the impulse to say it, but to say only the secret of it. And I think there are the two kinds of poets.’
When Hass talks, it comes out in surges of thought. He’ll finish a sentence and pause, and I’ll be just about to open my mouth when his next string of words will start unraveling out. His voice is warm and smooth, and he changes the structure of his sentences halfway through, as if revising a poem.
Someone brings him a coffee. We pause. We wrap things up with politics. Hass is known for his activism. Though his poems are proudly Californian, he’s upset by the Bush administration’s policies – in Iraq and at home.
‘The American political landscape at the moment is a disaster. Americans were frightened into backing this war, which was really a reckless and wrong-headed thing to do, and now that’s become evident, and they don’t know how to get out of it.
‘This particular administration represents, in Bush, the interests of oil companies, and in Cheney, the interests of mining and ranching, among others – all the extractive industries. They are people who are undoing, by administrative fiat, as much of the environmental regulation in the country as they can. The good news is that they’re finally very unpopular, very unsuccessful, and are going to get kicked out of office in another couple of years, but it’s really been a catastrophic time.’
Hass says there’s been no translation of public will into politics because of, ‘a complete failure of leadership in the opposition. Millions of people around the country got out and said: “There are no weapons of mass destruction”, “There is no connection to al-Qaeda”, “The US must not do this thing”, and the people in the streets were right, and the people in the Pentagon were wrong – about the facts!’
As he talks, he forgets the time again. He’s completely involved. I say some of it is hard to believe.
He says no,
‘It’s not hard for me to believe, because I went through the Vietnam War. I was in graduate school then, I had a Vietnamese neighbour. I knew more about what was going on in Vietnam than the people who started the war did. The idea that our leaders are well-informed is one of the big mistakes in thinking about this stuff.’
Here, as in the natural world, it’s the seeking out of specific knowledge that Hass extols. How many petals on the flower? How many WMDS? It is always easier to lie in the abstract than in the details.
And so we come back to the names of things, and the names for things, and the tremendous power of language in our lives – no matter if we read poetry or not. The power to keep our thoughts and our world connected. The power to keep our experience honest. Robert Hass understands it, and he’s generous about passing that understanding around.
» Field Guide: Robert Hass @ NZ International Arts Festival
Major American poet Robert Hass has been United States Poet Laureate (1995-1997) and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow, and is a renowned translator and critic. Hass’ poetry is informed by close attention to the landscape and the natural world, and keen observation of the pain and pleasure of human experience. Remarkable for its clarity, the writing is sensual and meditative....[Read More]
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