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When I Began Writing Poems, It Was In The Late 60s And Early 70s When The Literary And Cultural Atmosphere Was Very Much Affected By What Was Going On In The World, Which Was, In Succession, The Civil Rights Movement, The Antiwar Movement, And The Women's Movement In The 60s, 70s, And Into The Early 80s. And All Of Those Things Affected Me And Affected My Thinking, Particularly The Vietnam War.

-Robert Hass

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When I Began Writing

Robert Hass

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When I Began Writing Poems, It Was In The Late 60s And Early 70s When The Literary And Cultural Atmosphere Was Very Much Affected By What Was Going On In The World, Which Was, In Succession, The Civil Rights Movement, The Antiwar Movement, And The Women's Movement In The 60s, 70s, And Into The Early 80s. And All Of Those Things Affected Me And Affected My Thinking, Particularly The Vietnam War.

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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.

In California In The Early Spring, There Are Pale Yellow Mornings, When The Mist Burns Slowly Into Day, The Air Stings Like Autumn, Clarifies Like Pain - Well, I Have Dreamed This Coast Myself.

I Think That Poets Can Say, "what We Want Is For Everybody On Earth To Wake Up Free From Fear And With Access To Medicine And Clean Water And Education." But I Don't Think Poets Have Any Special Insight On How To Get There. And The 20th Century Is A Pretty Good Record Of That Because So Many Of The Great Poets Were Stalinists: Vallejo, Neruda, Eluard, Aragon, Etc. They Wrote Their Odes To Lenin And Stalin. They Glorified Some Of The Most Violent And Grotesque Dictatorships Of The 20th Century. And A Lot Of The Ones Who Were Not Stalinists Were Fascists Or Fascist Sympathizers.

I Am Talking About Poetry. It's Like That Line From [john] Yeats: I Go Back To "where All The Ladders Start/ In The Foul Rag And Bone Shop Of The Heart."

When I Was In High School In The '50s You Were Supposed To Be An Elvis Presley, A James Dean, A Marlon Brando Or A Kingston Trio Type In A Button-down Shirt Headed For The Fraternities At Stanford Or Cal.

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.

Such Tenderness, Those Afternoons And Evenings, Saying Blackberry, Blackberry, Blackberry.

I Don't Know That I Had A Sense That There Was Such A Thing As "the Poetry World" In The 1960s And Early 70s. Maybe Poets Did, But For Me As An Onlooker And Reader Of Poetry, Poetry Felt Like It Was Part Of A Larger Literary World. I Mean, Even The Phrase "the Poetry World" Reflects A Sort Of Balkanization Of American Literary And Artistic Life That Has To Some Extent Happened Since Then.

One Of The Interesting Things About The History Of Poetry In The 16th, 17th, And 18th Centuries Is That People Who Read Liked Getting Their Information In Rhyme Just As Much As In Prose. The Genre That We Would Think Of As Nonfiction Often Was Written In Verse In Forms Like The Georgic When People Thought That One Of The Tasks Of Poetry Was Conveying Arguments And Information In A Pleasant Way.

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.

When I Began Writing Poems, It Was In The Late 60s And Early 70s When The Literary And Cultural Atmosphere Was Very Much Affected By What Was Going On In The World, Which Was, In Succession, The Civil Rights Movement, The Antiwar Movement, And The Women's Movement In The 60s, 70s, And Into The Early 80s. And All Of Those Things Affected Me And Affected My Thinking, Particularly The Vietnam War.

My Suspicion Is That Once You Have Literacy In Place, The Readership Has Not Changed Very Much.

After Pope, In The Beginning Of Romanticism, People Developed The Idea That Imagination Rather Than Reason Was A Special Form Of Knowledge And Its Best Expression Is Through Poetry. Therefore, Poetry Should Not Try To Do The Stuff That Mere Prose Does: Convey Information Or Make Arguments About Ideas.

Do Poets Have Any Insight Into What's The Right Ratio? I Doubt It, But I Think That They Can Be Awake To What The Ends Are.

Haiku Is An Art That Seems Dedicated To Making People Pay Attention To The Preciousness And Particularity Of Every Moment Of Existence. I Think That Poetry Can Do That.

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.

I Teach A Lecture Course On American Poetry To As Many As 150 Students. For A Lot Of Them, Its Their Only Elective, So This Is Their One Shot. Theyll Take The Russian Novel Or American Poetry, So I Want To Give Them The High Points, The Inescapable Poets.

It Is Good Sometimes For Poetry To Disenchant Us.

If You Ask Me If I Have This Or That Principle, Tell Me What Its Consequences Are, And Then I'll Tell You Whether I Have That Principle Or Not.

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.

Poetry Is A Man Arguing With Himself; Rhetoric Is A Man Arguing With Others.

[osip] Mandelstam Was Killed By Stalinist Forces.

There's A Good Deal In Pound's And Eliot's Poetry That Stood Up Even Though Their Politics Were Deplorable. Or Pound's Very Deplorable, Eliot's Kind Of Deplorable.

It's Hell Writing And It's Hell Not Writing. The Only Tolerable State Is Having Just Written.

One Way To Escape The Universe In Which Everything Is A Kind Of Media Cartoon Is To Write About The Part Of Your Life That Doesn't Feel Like A Cartoon, And How The Cartoon Comes Into It.

Literature, The Study Of Literature In English In The 19th Century, Did Not Belong To Literary Studies, Which Had To Do With Greek, Latin, And Hebrew, But Instead With Elocution And Public Speaking. So When People Read Literature, It Was To Memorize And To Recite It.

Sometimes From This Hillside Just After Sunset The Rim Of The Sky Takes On A Tinge Of The Palest Green, Like The Flesh Of A Cucumber When You Peel It Carefully.

When Emily Dickinson's Poems Were Published In The 1890s, They Were A Best-seller; The First Book Of Her Poems Went Through Eleven Editions Of A Print Run Of About 400. So The First Print Run Out Of Boston For A First Book Of Poems Was 400 For A Country That Had Fifty Million People In It. Now A First Print Run For A First Book Is Maybe 2,000? So That's A Five-time Increase In The Expectation Of Readership. Probably The Audience Is Almost Exactly The Same Size As It Was In 1900, If You Just Took That One Example.

There's Very Little Solid Research On Readership, Yet People Make Pronouncements About It All The Time.

Not To Make Too Much Of A Claim For Poetry, But This Is A Question That Goes To The Moral Heart Of The Business Of Any Art: How Do You See The World, And What Right Do You Have To See The World In The Way That You Do?

I Think That My Responsibility To My Art Is To Try To Get It Right Or To Push The Boundaries Of What I'm Able To Do In Any Way.

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.

There Are Instances: [henry David] Thoreau Read [john] Wordsworth, [john] 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.

If You Were Making Poetry Out Of Convictions - Trying To Convince Other People - You Were In The Territory Of Rhetoric, And That Wasn't The Territory Of Poetry. I Think That's Pretty Smart. I Think That It Doesn't Need To Be Altogether True, But That Was My Starting Place.

The Birds Are Silent In The Woods. / Just Wait: Soon Enough / You Will Be Quiet Too

The First Book That Really Knocked Me Out Was The 'brothers Karamazov.' I Read It When I Was A Senior In High School.

The Professionalization Of Poetry, Or The Balkanization, Has Come Out Of The Fact That When You Apply To Most Creative Writing Programs, You Have To Choose Your Genre.

A Word Is Elegy To What It Signifies.

The Earth Forgives The Previous Year Every Year.

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.

Our History Doesn't Look At Our Own Violence, The Violence In Our Own Past, And We Go Out And Repeat It Someplace Else.

Justice Is The Well Water Of The City Of Novgorod, Black And Sweet.

All The New Thinking Is About Loss. In This It Resembles All The Old Thinking

The Problem With Describing Poets As Legislators Is That At That Level Of Politics - Politics As Political Invention - Poets Have No Special Skills And Are Not Apt To.

Poetry Had In The Hands Of Various People Become A Place For Inconvenient Knowledge Insofar As It Was A Place For Knowledge At All. But It Was A Place Where You Could Talk About Other Kinds Of Experience Than The Official Version.

Poetry, When It Takes Sides, When It Proposes Solutions, Isn't Any Smarter Than Anybody Else.

Images Are Not Quite Ideas, They Are Stiller Than That, With Less Implication Outside Themselves. And They Are Not Myth, They Do Not Have The Explanatory Power; They Are Nearer To Pure Story. Nor Are They Always Metaphors; They Do Not Say This Is That, They Say This Is.

It Turns Out - This Is A Metaphor Out Of [charles] 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.

One May Prefer Spring And Summer To Autumn And Winter, But Preference Is Hardly To The Point. The Earth Turns, And We Live In The Grain Of Nature, Turning With It.

My First Book Was Published When I Was Thirty-two, So I Think It Was Basically Finished When I Was Thirty Or Thirty-one. And So Then You Think, "well, What Have You Failed To Do?" And My Answer To Myself Was Almost Everything.

Take The Time To Write. You Can Do Your Life's Work In Half An Hour A Day.

Milton Was The First Person Who Really Experimented With Putting Politics Into Sonnets.

Poetry Is A Fireplace In Summer Or A Fan In Winter.

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.

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.

When I Was In College, I Lost My Scholarship One Year. I Had Enough Money For Tuition, But Not Room And Board. So I Camped In The Hills.

There Are Either Poems About Sex/love Or God.

Imagination Runs Through The Places Where We Live Like Water. We Need Both Things-a Living Knowledge Of The Land And A Live Imagination Of It And Our Place In It- If We Are Going To Preserve It.

If You're Imaginatively Responsible To The Place You Live In, You Understand The Watershed.

Places You Live

Golf Is A Worrier's Game, Inward, Concentrated, A Matter Of Inches, Invented By The Same People Who Gave Us Presbyterianism.

Fiction Writers Have Their Own World, And Poets Have Their Own World, And Literary Criticism Has Sort Of Passed Over Into Cultural Studies In The University, And So On. They Seem More Disconnected From Each Other Than They Did When I First Began To Write.

After A While I Understood That, Talking This Way, Everything Dissolves: Justice, Pine, Hair, Woman, You And I. There Was A Woman I Made Love To And I Remembered How, Holding Her Small Shoulders In My Hands Sometimes, I Felt A Violent Wonder At Her Presence Like A Thirst For Salt, For My Childhood River With Its Island Willows, Silly Music From The Pleasure Boat, Muddy Places Where We Caught The Little Orange-silver Fish Called Pumpkinseed. It Hardly Had To Do With Her. Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

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.

Reading Is A Gymnasium For The Imagination Where People Can Work Out, Get Ready For The Shocks Of Existence. [...] For Me, The Intimate Teachers Have Not Only Taught Me How To Make Things, They Have Represented Some Qualities Of Mind And Mindfulness That I Would Like To Have.

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.

Another Problem About Writing About Politics In The "age Of Globalization" Is That So Much Of The Violence In The Form Of War And Also In The Forms Of Institutional Violence - Sweatshops, Child Labor, Victimization Of People Economically - Happens Elsewhere And Out Of Sight. And When We Do Know About It And Need To Witness It, It's Always Mediated By Images Of One Kind Or Another, So You're Kind Of Stuck Trying To Write About What It's Like Trying To Be You Living Your Life Thinking About And Experiencing This Stuff In That Way.

One Thing We Do Know Is That Mass Literacy Is A Product Of The 19th Century, At Least In English-speaking Cultures - Ireland, England, Scotland, Canada, And The U. S.

I Think That What Art Can Do Is Refresh Our Sense Of Justice, Wake Us Up To What We've Taken For Granted In The Political Realm, As In The Other Realms.

Sometimes You Have To Be Less Ashamed About Writing A Bad Poem Than You Would Be About Being Silent.

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.

We Don't Know Our Own Story.

Longing, We Say, Because Desire Is Full Of Endless Distances.

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.

Someone Will Always Want To Mobilize Death On A Massive Scale For Economic Domination Or Revenge. And The Task, Taken As A Task, Appeals To The Imagination. The Military Is An Engineering Profession.

A Movement Got Started For Common Schools, And By The End Of The 19th Century, 91 Percent Of Americans Could Read And Write.

Prose Gets Divided Up Into Fiction And Nonfiction And Short Fiction And Long Fiction And Autobiographical Nonfiction And So On. Poetry Can Do Any Of Those Things Except With The Added Definition Of Intensified Formal Pressure.

Fiction And Nonfiction

You Only Had Widespread Literacy And Books That People Could Afford In The Middle Of The 19th Century. Did More People Read Poetry At The Turn Of The 20th Century When There Were About Fifty Million People?

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.

As An Artist, You Have The Job Of Working Out Whatever Is Given You To Work Out.

The Poem That Comes Closest To Saying What I Think Is The One In Human Wishes Called "rusia En 1931." This Poem Is About [osip] Mandelstam, Who Was A Great Poet And An Anti-stalinist, And [cesar] Vallejo, Who Was A Great Poet And A Stalinist.

The Record Of Poetry In The 20th Century Isn't All That Great Anyway. Most Of The Poets Who Weren't Fascists Were Stalinists.

[cesar] 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.

Writing Is An Incessant Process Of Discovery.

I Think One Percent Of The Population Attended College When Wallace Stevens And Robert Frost And Gertrude Stein Were At Harvard. Now I Think Forty Percent Of Americans Have Some College Education. That's An Astronomical Change.

Repetition Makes Us Feel Secure And Variation Makes Us Feel Free.

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.

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 Think That Were I In The Middle Of An Obsession To Write About, Say, Sudden Oak Death In California Or My Grandchildren Or Time And Memory And How They Look When You Get To Be In Your Sixties, And I Thought, "well, Yes But People Are Dying Every Day In Baghdad," I Wouldn't Feel Guilty About Not Writing About Baghdad If I Didn't Have Any Good Ideas About How To Write About It.

What We Usually Find Is That When People Think They Have A New Idea Or Approach Something For The First Time, It Is Actually A Recurrence Of A Line Of Thinking Explored In The Past.

When I Applied To Stanford, I Applied For Graduate Work In The Phd Program, Not To The Creative Writing Program, Mostly Because Though I Had Some Vague Ambition Of Becoming A Writer And I Was Trying To Write Poems And Essays And Stories, I Didn't Feel Like I Was Far Enough Along To Submit Work To Some Place And Have It Judged.

In The Beginning Of The 19th Century, Maybe Forty Percent Of Women And Fifty Percent Of Men Could Produce A Signature, Which Meant That They'd Had At Least Three Years Of Education Because It Was In Third Grade That People Started Penmanship In The 19th Century. And Of Course Black People Could Get Killed If They Got Caught Teaching Themselves To Read In Some Parts Of The Country.

It Seems Like Every Ten Years There's A Book That Says That Poetry Used To Be Popular, And Now It's Not, But We Really Have No Way Of Knowing, In Terms Of Relative Size Of Audience And Other Things, Exactly Who Readers Were.

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.

I Think It's True To Say That In 1973 I Could Read Every Book Of Poems That Was Published In A Year, And I Did.

If You Read Three Books A Day You Couldn't Read All The Poetry That's Being Published.

Like Everyone Else, I Was At Least Peripherally Involved In The Antiwar Movement. You Woke Up Every Morning Feeling Tormented About What Was Going On In Vietnam. It Seemed To A Lot Of Us Like A Catastrophe From The Very Beginning, Inflicting Immense And Needless Suffering On Not Only The American Soldiers But On A Lot Of Innocent Peasants Who Were Caught In A Cold War Proxy Battle - Two Million Vietnamese Died During Those Years, And You Woke Up Every Morning Knowing That That Was Going On.

Ko Un Is A Crucial Poet For The Twenty-first Century, And This Is An Enormously Fresh And Vivid Translation.

[osip] 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 [carl] 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.

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.

Pound Described Poetry As Original Research In Language, And Just As Formal Experiment In Poetry Has To Try Things And Has To Go Too Far, So Does Experiment With Writing About Politics In Poetry And What The Politics Of Poetry Is.

Where Politics Is Concerned, I Think Poets Have To Be Pragmatists, Philosophical Pragmatists.

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.

Someone In Ireland Asked Me How Many Republican Poets There Were In The U.s., And I Thought Maybe Two. Maybe There Are 10,000 Poets, And Maybe There Are Two Republicans Among Them.

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.

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.

It's Clear That There Has To Be Some Play Between The Vitality Of Invention In Economic Life And Some Regulation Of It, And In Some Ways The Great Ideological Wars Of The 20th Century That Cost So Many Lives Had To Do With Whether To Have Managed Economies Directed By Government Or Economies Directed By The Free Movement Of Capital, Which Is Only Partially Subject To Government Regulation.

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.

I Thought It Was Irrelevant To Talk About What A Wonderful Thing Poetry Was If You Didn't Teach People To Read.

Nostalgia Locates Desire In The Past Where It Suffers No Active Conflict And Can Be Yearned Toward Pleasantly.

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.

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