The Hass

I am so excited about this poet, the third poet in the series. He is the former Poet Laureate of the United States, Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winnder, two time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award. I am talking about Robert Haas, maybe the most presitigious living author in America. Jenny Browne did an excellent job in bringing him to the Lennox Seminar.

I was able to see both his reading and his lecture to the class. A lot of us there had read his poetry for the class as well as from other places; we all knew of him before Jenny Browne brought him to the seminar, unlike the other poets who we were not familiar with. Hass is a very influential poet and has changed poetry greatly by his example.

It was interesting to hear how "old-fashioned" his tastes in poetry are. He recited a couple of poems during the lecture. One, a poem from the court of Henry VIII, so a sixtienth centurty poet. The second was a poem by Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", that famous poem that begins, "Whose woods these are I think I know; / His house is in the village though. / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow." Considering how traditional his tastes are, his poetry is surprisingly different. He does not often use normal form in his poetry.

Heroic Simile

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa's Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw's tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days' work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they'll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don't know
whether they're Japanese or Mycenaean
and there's nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

Robert Hass is also an active enviromentalist, which goes toward what he sees to be the role of poets in society. He believes the role of the poet is to call to attention, to be the "namer of things unnamed". By calling attention one gives significance and importance.