POET

Robert Hass (1941 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Despite Robert Haas's success as a translator and critic, Forrest Gander declares in a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay that "it is for his own musical, descriptive, meditative poetry that Robert Hass is primarily recognized." Critics celebrate Hass's poetry for its clarity of expression, its conciseness, and its imagery, often drawn from everyday life. "Robert Hass," states Carolyn Kizer in the New York Times Book Review, "is so intelligent that to read his poetry or prose, or to hear him speak, gives one an almost visceral pleasure." "Hass has noted his own affinity for Japanese haiku," Gander continues, "and his work similarly attends to the details of quotidian life with remarkable clarity." "Poetry," Hass tells interviewer David Remnick in the Chicago Review, "is a way of living . . . a human activity like baking bread or playing basketball."

With his first collection of poems, Field Guide, Hass won the 1973 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and established himself as an important American poet. Many critics noted that Hass drew on his native California countryside and his background in Slavic studies to provide much of the imagery for the volume. "The poems in Field Guide," writes Gander, "are rich with Russian accents, aromas of ferny anise and uncorked wines, and references to plant and animal life: the green whelks and rock crabs, tanagers and Queen Anne's lace, sea spray and pepper trees of the Bay Area." "He is a fine poet," Michael Waters relates in Southwest Review, "and his book is one of the very best to appear in a long time. . . . Field Guide is a means of naming things, of establishing an identity through one's surroundings, of translating the natural world into one's private history. This is a lot to accomplish, yet Robert Hass manages it with clarity and compassion." In the Ontario Review Linda W. Wagner agrees that "Field Guide is an impressive first collection. . . . Hass's view of knowledge is convincing. As we read the sonorous and generally regular poems, we are aware that the poet has achieved his apparent tranquility by living close to the edge. . . . One can be reminded only of the best of Hemingway."

Hass confirmed his ability with Praise, his second volume of poems, which won the William Carlos Williams Award in 1979. "In many ways," Gander explains, "Praise addresses the problems implicit in the first book: Can the act of naming the world separate us from the world? How is it possible to bear grief, to accept death, and how can the spirit endure?" According to William Scammell in the Times Literary Supplement, these poems "unite freshness and wonder with a tough, inventive imagination." Writing in the Chicago Review, Ira Sadoff remarks that Praise "might even be the strongest collection of poems to come out in the late seventies." Sadoff notes that Field Guide "was intelligent and well-crafted; it tapped Hass's power of observation carefully and engagingly." Nevertheless, the reviewer had "reservations" about Field Guide that "stemmed from some sense of chilliness that seemed to pervade a number of poems, as if the poems were wrought by an intellect distant from its subject matter." Sadoff continued: "I have no such problems with Praise.. . . [It] marks Hass's arrival as an important, even pivotal, young poet."

Hollins Critic reviewer Robert Miklitsch expresses similar feelings about Praise, which he feels "marks the emergence of a major American poet. If his first book, Field Guide, . . . did not provoke such acclaim, the second book will." Still more applause comes from Ontario Review contributor Charles Molesworth, who writes that Hass is "slowly but convincingly becoming one of the best poets of his generation. . . . [ Praise ] is about language, its possibilities and its burdens, its rootedness in all we do and its flowering in all we hunger for and fear. . . . But the loving tentativeness, the need to see and to save, these are Hass's own gifts. He is that extremely rare person: a poet of fullness."

In 1984, Hass published Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, a collection of previously published essays and reviews. In the volume, the author examines American writers (including Robert Lowell and James Wright) as well as European and Japanese poets. Many critics appreciated the book, honoring it with the 1984 National Book Critics Circle award, among others. "Mr. Hass's style balances conversational directness and eloquent complexity," notes New York Times Book Review contributor Anthony Libby. He concludes: "Mr. Hass believes that poetry is what defines the self, and it is his ability to describe that process that is the heart of this book's pleasure."

Since the publication of Twentieth Century Pleasures, Hass has continued to write both poetry and prose. In his third collection of poetry, Human Wishes, "Hass writes in tones ranging from intimate to sarcastic," comments Gander, "and he writes of incidents as various as fishing with children and driving a dead man through the rain." The collection "is a distinct joy to experience in this time when so many published works deal with violence, aberration, and alienation," declares Daisy Aldan in World Literature Today. "His elegant gleanings of essence, often impressionist in tone, make us aware once again that beauty and meaningful silence still exist." Nation critic Don Bogen explains that Human Wishes "reveals [Hass's] basic concerns: He is a student of desire, of what we want and how likely we are to get it." "In Human Wishes," Bogen concludes, "Robert Hass captures both the brightness of the world and its vanishing."

Hass paid tribute to some of his non-Western mentors in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, translations of short works by the most famous seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters of the short Japanese poem. And, as Andrew Rathmann suggests in a Chicago Review article, Hass deserves a great deal of credit for these translations. "The translations . . . must by anyone's standard be considered remarkable poetic achievements in themselves," writes the reviewer, "comparable—in terms of sheer written fluency—to the best poems in his three previous books" of poems. Hass also succeeds at bringing a poetic form that has a long history of development in Japan to an American audience. As Mark Ford explains in the New Republic, the verse form known as haiku was developed in the nineteenth century from an older form named hokku. Hokku in turn was only part of a larger verse form known as haikai, which was practiced as a sort of game by several collaborating poets. Each of the three haiku masters (Basho, Buson, and Issa) used the short verse form to record commonplace images in an uncommon way. "Hass's language is unflashy, his interpretations sensible and his pacing effective," Ford declares. The three chosen writers in Hass's book "demonstrate the ways in which great art may intensify and illuminate our engagements with the real, the experience of art."

In 1996, Hass published another collection of poems, Sun under Wood. The poems were well received by critics and the book earned the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award. In the opinion of Poetry contributor David Baker "Hass's new volume contains many of his most important works to date, among them 'Faint Music,' 'Interrupted Meditation,' 'The Seventh Night,' and several brilliant longer poems, including 'English: An Ode' and 'Dragonflies Mating.'" For Gail Wronsky, writing in the Antioch Review, "'Forty Something' achieves a kind of perfect unification of form, tone, and story, and is a funny poem as well." The effect that Hass creates in these poems, according to Baker, is that "he is something of a buttoned-down [Allen] Ginsberg, emotionally and formally open, inclusive, enthusiastic, if considerably more ironic." He also demonstrates a sensitivity to and understanding of the people around him, both men and women. Wronsky maintains that "Hass has gone from brilliant poet to wise one with this collection, primarily because he has been listening to the female voices around him and within him. The poems in this book are large and wide and deep because of that particular exploration."

Not all critics have been convinced that Sun under Wood represents Hass's best effort. Peter Davidson of the Atlantic Monthly finds that these new poems do not compare favorably with those in previous collections. "The charm and modesty remain," he admits, "but these poems keep relaxing into the voice of an onlooker rather than taking on the energy of full participation—as though they came to the poet through a window, a filter, a screen of white noise and unscented air." Critic Dana Gioia attempts to identify what separates the better poems in Sun under Wood from the weaker ones. He writes in the Washington Post Book Review, "When Hass's new poems succeed, they achieve a quiet sublimity enriched by introspection. When they go awry, they lose themselves in a mosquito swarm of amusing but academic apercus." Still, he concedes, "This risk is the price of Hass's originality." And, in the estimation of David Baker, "All through Sun under Wood, Hass's ability to convert the comedic to sublime, the anecdotal to the metaphysical and ethical, the personal to the social, is remarkable." He concludes, "This book reaches a level of achievement Hass has not reached before. It is literary and messy, discursive and lyric. It is risky, large, and hugely compassionate."

From 1995 to 1997, Hass set aside his personal role as poet to take up the mantle of the nation's poet, serving as U.S. Poet Laureate and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Long a largely ceremonial position, the poet laureate has recently become far more of a public advocate for poets and their work, a potentially thankless task. Yet, as Michael Coffey reports in Publishers Weekly, "Being the frontman for a quaint art that barely has a profession tied to it unless it's called teaching—does not faze Hass. Rather, it is a task to which he has taken naturally. In fact, there may not be a better poet today working with such Catholic tastes, boundless energy and open aesthetics as Hass." In one sense, this new role was a logical extension of his personal, private work to a public arena. Sarah Pollock elaborates in Mother Jones, "Hass' tenure as poet laureate has been a more public expression of the lifelong concerns that inform his poetry: a close attention to the natural world, a sense of self developed in relation to the landscape, and acute awareness of both the pleasures and pains of being human."

The poet laureate position also heightened the political sensibilities of the poet and his work. Hass recognized early on that the political and business climate seemed to have little use for poetry and other arts. As Hass explained to Francis X. Clines in the New York Times, he came to realize that "Capitalism makes networks. It doesn't make communities. Imagination makes communities." Recognizing that capitalism and its networks held sway in political and business thought, Hass set out to infuse some imagination into the situation. He focused on promoting literacy. And, he told Clines, "I thought an interesting thing to do would be to go where poets don't go." He visited businesses, convincing some to support poetry contests for schoolchildren. He spoke to civic groups, praising their efforts to support education and trying to broaden their horizons. As a result, Clines observes, "He has shaped [the poet laureate position] to become more like a missionary drummer in the provinces of commerce than as a performing bard in celebrity coffeehouses." Because of these efforts, "Robert Hass is the most active Poet Laureate of the United States we've ever had," believes Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Frances Mayes, "and he sets a standard for those who follow."

CAREER

State University of New York at Buffalo, assistant professor, 1967-71; St. Mary's College of California, Moraga, professor of English, 1971-74, 1975-89; University of California, Berkeley, professor of English, 1989- -. Visiting lecturer at University of Virginia, 1974, Goddard College, 1976, and Columbia University, 1982. Poet in residence, The Frost Place, Franconia, NH, 1978; U.S. Poet Laureate and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, 1995-97.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

• Field Guide, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1973.
• Winter Morning in Charlottesville, Sceptre Press (Knotting, Bedfordshire, England), 1977.
• Praise, Ecco Press (Hopewell, NJ), 1979.
• (Contributor) Phrases After Noon, Frankfort Arts Foundation, Larkspur Press, 1985.
• The Apple Trees at Olema, Ecco Press, 1989.
• Human Wishes, Ecco Press, 1989.
• Sun Under Wood: New Poems, Ecco Press, 1996.
• (Editor, with John Hollander, Carolyn Kizer, Nathaniel Mackey, and Marjorie Perloff) American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, two volumes, Library of America, 2000.

Contributor of poetry to various anthologies, including The Young American Poets, edited by Paul Carroll, Follett (New York, NY), 1968, and Five American Poets, Carcanet (Manchester, England), 1979.

TRANSLATOR

• (With Robert Pinsky) Czeslaw Milosz, The Separate Notebooks, Ecco Press, 1983.
• (With Milosz) Milosz, Unattainable Earth, Ecco Press, 1986.
• (With Louis Iribarne and Peter Scott) Milosz, Collected Poems, 1931-1987, Ecco Press, 1988.
• (With Milosz) Milosz, Provinces, Ecco Press, 1993.
• (And editor and author of introduction) The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, Ecco Press, 1994.
• Milosz, Road-side Dog, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
• Milosz, Treatise on Poetry, Ecco Press/Harper Colllins Pub., 2001.

OTHER

• Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, Ecco Press, 1984.
• (Editor) Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems by Robinson Jeffers, Random House (New York, NY), 1987.
• (Co-editor with Bill Henderson and Jorie Graham) The Pushcart Prize XII, Pushcart (Wainscott, NY), 1987.
• (Editor with Charles Simic) Tomaz Salamun, Selected Poems (translations from the Slovene), Ecco Press, 1988.
• (Editor) Tomas Transtroemer, Selected Poems of Tomas Transtroemer, 1954-1986, translated by May Swenson and others, Ecco Press, 1989.
• (Editor with Stephen Mitchell) Into the Garden: A Wedding Anthology, Poetry and Prose on Love and Marriage, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1993.
• (With Milosz) Czeslaw Milosz, Facing the River: New Poems, Ecco Press, 1995.
• (Author of introduction) Back Roads to Far Towns: Basho's Oku-No-Hosomichi, translated by Cid Corman and Kamaike Susumu, with notes by the translators, illustrated by Hayakawa Ikutada, Ecco Press, 1996.
• (Editor and author of commentary) Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life, Ecco Press, 1998.
• (Essayist) California: Views by Robert Adams of the Los Angeles Basin, 1978-1983, San Francisco: Mathew Marks Gallery and New York: Fraenkel Gallery, 2000.

Weekly columnist for the Washington Post, featuring the work of famous and new poets.

FURTHER READINGS

BOOKS

• Claims for Poetry, University of Michigan Press (Ann Arbor), 1982.
• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 18, Gale (Detroit), 1981.
• Contemporary Poets, sixth edition, St. James Press (Detroit), 1996.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 105: American Poets since World War II, Second Series, Gale, 1991.
• Poetry Criticism, Volume 16, Gale, 1997.
• Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry, Ecco Press, 1994.
• The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

PERIODICALS

• Antioch Review, summer, 1997, p. 380.
• Atlantic Monthly, June, 1979, p. 93; March, 1997, p. 100.
• Booklist, September 15, 1996, p. 205; March 1, 1998, p. 1086.
• Boston Globe, September 24, 1989.
• Chicago Review, winter, 1980, p. 133; spring, 1981, pp. 17-26; winter, 1983, p. 84; winter, 1997, p. 106.
• Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1997, p. 2.
• Harper's, May, 1979, p. 88.
• Hollins Critic, February, 1980, p. 2.
• Hudson Review, winter, 1973-1974, p. 717.
• Iowa Review, fall, 1991, p. 126.
• Library Journal, October 1, 1996, p. 82.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 18, 1984; April 13, 1997, p. G.
• Mother Jones, March-April, 1997, p. 16.
• Nation, May 19, 1979, p. 574; December 11, 1989, pp. 722-23.
• New England Review, Volume 2, number 2, 1979, pp. 295-314.
• New Republic, March 16, 1992, pp. 34-5; October 31, 1994, pp. 48-51.
• New York Review of Books, November 7, 1985, pp. 53-60.
• New York Times, December 9, 1996, p. A1.
• New York Times Book Review, May 4, 1980, p. 15; March 3, 1985, p. 37; November 12, 1989, p. 63; April 27, 1997, p. 13.
• Ontario Review, fall, 1974, p. 89; fall-winter, 1979-80, p. 91.
• Parnassus, February, 1988, pp. 189-95.
• Poetry, January, 1980, p. 229; March, 1985, pp. 345-48; January, 1993, pp. 223-26; August, 1997, p. 288.
• Publishers Weekly, October 28, 1996, p. 51; March 24, 1997, p. 25.
• Raritan, summer, 1990, p. 126.
• Southern Review, spring, 1996, p. 391.
• Southwest Review, June, 1975, p. 307.
• Studia Neophilologica, Volume 61, number 2, 1989, p. 193; Volume 63, number 2, 1991, p. 189.
• Times Literary Supplement, May 28, 1982; March 15, 1985, p. 293.
• Voice Literary Supplement, December, 1989, pp. 5-6.
• Washington Post, March 19, 1997, p. D1.
• Washington Post Book World, August 19, 1979, p. 8; January 26, 1997, p. 8.
• World Literature Today, winter, 1985, p. 163; spring, 1990, p. 313.