FOR RELEASE 08/19/08

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ROBERT HASS IN TEL AVIV

The former US poet laureate guest lectures on postmodern poetry and nature.

by Ilana Teitelbaum
Poetry Media Services

It was evening in Tel Aviv and already dark, but for poet Robert Hass, who had landed at Ben-Gurion Airport just hours before, it was a different time entirely. Gamely concealing the weariness he must have felt, the two-time US poet laureate, recent winner of the National Book Award, and environmental activist reflected upon the events that had brought him across the Atlantic.

Hass’s poetry is weighted with intense contemplation, and in person he is much the same: his blue eyes are intent and his speech deliberate as he considers each sentence.

“I’m interested in Israel,” he says, “because I think that after St. Petersburg, it’s the place on earth I have read the most about without having ever been there.”

With an ironic smile he adds, “That’s not excluding the Old and New Testaments.”

The catalyst for Hass’s visit was a literary conference at Tel Aviv University, entitled “Poetic Natures: The Environment, Literature and the Arts.” He guest lectured at the conference and read from his poetry on the theme of “trees” against the backdrop of the university’s botanical gardens.

On the environmental side, Hass observes that there are geographical and historical parallels between Israel and his native California, which in turn means that the environmental concerns in both places are similar.

“Both are intensely remade agricultural landscapes,” he notes, adding that both places owe their agricultural advancement to “ingenious but ecosystem-altering water projects.

“I’m curious about water politics [in Israel]. In California all politics are water politics—scratch any surface, and underneath it’s usually about who gets the water and how.”

Hass has spent his entire life in California, and consequently his poetry is often evocative of the wildlife and terrain of the US West Coast. As poet laureate, Hass was intensely active, initiating an educational program called “River of Words” in schools across the country.

“There are now tens of thousands of kids who have participated in the program,” says Hass. “They write poetry and make art out of their experience of natural surroundings.”

The idea of the program, he explains, is to heighten children’s environmental consciousness. At the same time, he is wary of attempts to enforce attitudes upon children, because “poetry is the opposite of propaganda.”

In this sense, Hass practices what he preaches; his poems could hardly be called environmental, which he says is the result of a conscious decision. His realization, he says, was, “I don’t want to write poems about how great the mountains are.”

While much of his poetry teems with descriptions of nature, these descriptions are most often reflective of themes that are deeply personal, or bound to a broader philosophical meditation. On the other hand, his marveling attention to minute details in nature bespeaks an abiding love.

At the conference, Hass planned to address the relationship between postmodernism, poetry and science. Literature about nature is nothing new, Hass observes, citing the Romantic poets and Henry Thoreau as examples. The difference, he explains, is that postmodernism has altered the approach to nature in poetry and the arts in general.

“I think there’s enormous power and possibility in the fact that one main thing that science has taught us in the 20th century is the limits of the human understanding of nature,” explains Hass. “It’s a great mystery . . . E.O. Wilson, the philosopher of biogeography, says that every creature lives in its own sensory world. We can never understand what happens in an animal’s head.”

A secular man who was raised Catholic, Hass acknowledges the irreplaceable role that religion can fill in a life. “Literature doesn’t go as deep as religion,” he says. “It doesn’t tell you how to welcome a child into the world, how to get married, bury the dead, bring food to the sick. Not that religions do a great job at these things, but they aim to.” Hass regards the postmodern perspective of nature as relatively unexplored territory in poetry, concluding, “It seems to me that the fact that we don’t know how to read the world, and that most of the old ways of looking at it need reexamining, means that the subject matter of poetry seems inexhaustible.” Postmodernism, he adds, is “skepticism put to work, the work of the imagination.”

Ilana Teitelbaum is a freelance writer living in Jerusalem, as well as an editor and co-founder of the Middle East environment blog www.greenprophet.com. This article originally appeared in the Jerusalem Post. Distributed by the Poetry Foundation. Read more about Robert Hass, and his poetry, at www.poetryfoundation.org

© 2008 by Ilana Teitelbaum. All rights reserved.