by
Robert Hass
View all notes
[...] I remember an experience of standing in the library in my freshmen year of college and picking up T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and reading in it and feeling complete incomprehension and a desire to be able to comprehend it or to find someone who could explain it to me, open it up for me, so intense it felt like physical nausea. Even though I didn’t know what it was that I thought was in that poem. Not so much “life,” perhaps, but knowledge of it and its great mysteries, love and sex and death and the amorphous and puzzling self and the meanings of suffering and injustice and the nature of things. Drawn to poetry by these strong but somewhat undefinable impulses, also perhaps by the fact that putting words down on paper and composing phrases in my mind seemed like something I could actually do, I came to the writing of poetry and the reading of poetry at more or less the same time, and I took to it, entered its territory more or less poem by poem, as this or that poem—lifeless words on a page—came alive for me. So it was very much my impulse in the teaching of poetry to pass on to my students in the classroom that experience, and so teaching poetry for me has been mostly about reflecting on what makes particular poems come alive to me and trying to convey that experience to others.
In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:
The man pulling radishes
Pointed my way
With a radish.
Can you imagine the situation? The narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops and asks for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish—it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes—and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left.” That’s my image of myself teaching poetry: I was the guy with the radish.
I could say to students: if you substitute imagination for love, you have in hand one of Wallace Stevens’s persistent thoughts about the world, and our experience of it, and the nature of knowledge. Bronze then becomes a word to think about, the bronzes of autumnal New England and the sun-gilded bronzes of the tropics. We live, the poem muses, in a bronze décor. And it contains a sort of final palm tree, and a horizon, because in the imagination, which is really no space and no time, there are nevertheless horizons. So one could say that postmodernism has not so much superseded Romanticism in this poem as swallowed it. Probably that bird in the palm with its fire-fangled feathers is the sun seen through palm leaves. It could be the sun coming up or the sun going down; you can’t tell. In the imagination it could be both, and the fact that this was one of his last poems gives this ambiguity another resonance. To notice all this is to put someone’s state of mind—or someone’s construction of the fiction of a state of mind, that of a man who’s worked at poetry his entire life, haunted by the mystery of whether language can get hold of existence at all—to put that poem, its breath, its second thoughts, its strange metaphor, into other people’s possession. Something like this is surely the gift poetry gives us and that, teaching poetry, we give to others.
I did not get much of a sense of the poetry of Kim Nam-ju. It was, of course, unavailable. The few poems I did see were unpublished English translations of what seemed like youthful work. There was a description of a field, I remember, seen from a prison train, a sense of homesickness. Another poet who was in jail had been imprisoned for a violation of the publishing law because he’d printed a book-length poem about a farmers’ revolt in 1947 on an island on the southern tip of Korea. It was a sensitive subject. Korea, as you know, was occupied by the Japanese from 1905 to 1945, and no society is ruled by an invading power for that long without a lot of collaboration and bad conscience. I helped translate the peroration of his long poem, working in a hotel room between convention sessions with a very brave and intelligent Korean poet. “And so,” it began, as I recall, “the authorities who were the running dogs of Japanese imperialism / changed their uniforms and became the running dogs of American imperialism / I write this down in 1986 when the blood of Korea cries out / and the tears of Korea burst forth.” The language of the literal translation sounded to me like the slogans one saw on the banners at student demonstrations. My cotranslator had expressed no opinion about the quality of the poem. I asked him if its language was interesting in Korean. He smiled at me, nodding, as if he had an amused, distant recollection of the state of mind in which one might ask such a question, and then shrugged and said that the language had a certain vigor.
i love the way he writes this
Sugar is not native to North America. It’s indigenous to South Asia. The Arabs took it from India to the East and Spain in the eighth century and Christopher Columbus brought it from Spain to Hispaniola on his second voyage, where, as he thought it might, it flourished and quickly became a cash crop so valuable it made the settlement of the Americas a desirable proposition and brought the slave trade into being. The first slaves to arrive in the New World from the West African coast arrived in 1505 and they were brought here to work in sugarcane fields.
So there is a reason why one of the first great works of African-American nature writing is called Cane. Consider the working of the Atlantic trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ships set sail for the rich towns of West Africa with manufactured goods to sell or trade for slaves, and then sailed to the West Indies to sell or trade the slaves for sugar and molasses and rum, which they brought back to Europe and sold at an enormous profit. Consider this: sugar was such a valuable commodity that the French did not hesitate to trade all of French Canada to the English (the French foreign minister called it “a few acres of snow”) for the islands of Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia (whose later principal export was Derek Walcott), and Martinique (which in its turn exported Aimé Césaire to France). The first distillery of rum was built in Barbados in 1627, the first in Boston in 1667. Between 1870 and 1917, according to one economic historian, the most profitable industry in New York City was the refining of sugar. The Jesuits brought sugarcane to Louisiana in 1751. Today sugar contributes $2 billion a year to the Louisiana economy. Growers took cane to the Georgia wilderness, where some years later Jean Toomer had a job in the summer of 1921 at a segregated black school in a city called Sparta. The town got its name, according to the local story, because one of the Scots-Irish settlers said that the Creek people whom they drove from their lands in order to take possession of the place had fought like Spartans. Sparta throve as a center for cotton growing, but when the boll weevil came in 1910 and destroyed the cotton (one of the reasons for the urbanization of African-Americans), Sparta went broke and reverted to sugarcane, which is why Jean Toomer could write one poem that began “Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter is cold,” and another that begins “Wind is in the cane. Come along.” Well, here is all of it:
[...]
Consider this: in 1898 the United States, by seizing Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War, acquired control of one half of the world’s total sugarcane production. At that time the U.S. was also the world’s largest consumer of sugar, after Great Britain. It consumed two million tons of sugar a year and produced only three hundred thousand tons domestically in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Georgia. The cost to the United States of its sugar imports was $80 million a year. Reason enough to spend fourteen years from 1899 to 1913 suppressing the Philippine independence movement, which resisted our best efforts to bring them democratic institutions. Wind is in the cane. Come along.
damn
I am sure the natural world gave some pleasure to the people who worked the land for those four hundred years. But we will not find in the written record what sunlight looked like to them in the leaves of trees along the Rappahannock River in the spring, or what the sky looked like when tens of thousands of migrating passenger pigeons flew over, or how woods sounded when pileated woodpeckers were as common as wild turkeys, or how the land had been altered by centuries of European agricultural practices. I’m sure that there was an immense practical and aesthetic, biological and pharmaceutical and ecological lore passed down in the oral tradition, from farmer to farmer, naturalist to naturalist, by people who were outdoors every day and observed the world as a respite from backbreaking labor, but it is invisible to us. There may have been an Emersonian nature out there or a Thoreauvian nature, of the kind that those New Englanders learned to see from reading English and German Romantic poetry, but in the tradition of the spirituals, “black nature” is slavery:
Don’t care where you bury my body,
My soul is going to shine.
So, of course, they show up in poetry. “I do not know much about gods,” wrote T. S. Eliot, who grew up along the Mississippi in Saint Louis, “but I think that the river is a strong brown god.” “Under various names,” wrote Czeslaw Milosz, who grew up in Lithuania along the Neman, “I have praised only you, rivers. You are milk and honey and love and death and dance.” I take this to be the first stirrings, even as our civilization did its damming and polluting, of the recognition of what we have lost and need to recover. When human populations were small enough, the cleansing flow of rivers and their fierce floods could create the illusion that our acts did not have consequences, that they vanished downstream. Now that is no longer true, and we are being compelled to reconsider the work of our hands. And, of course, we are too dependent on our own geographical origins to have lost our connection with them entirely.
I think so. Robert Duncan speaks of the “tone leading” of vowels. One vowel sound leads you to another vowel sound leads you to another vowel sound—I mean, at some point, the core of the business of poetry is to be taken someplace you didn’t know you were going by the sound out in front of you that you didn’t know you could hear until you heard it. This is probably true of prose, too, it’s just more intensely true of poetry. Sound harmonies and disharmonies lead you to say things and invent things you couldn’t otherwise say. And the other part, of course, is that those harmonies, if they’re particularly arresting to the ear, make the old connection between poetry as an oral art and memory as a storage system. That’s the oldest thing about poetry.
responding to: "Do the sounds of words, and their rhythms, lead the creation of a poem for you? As opposed to having a predetermined thing that you want to say."
The work I’ve done in translation, or writing essays, for example, is just labor. You get in and you do it, though the getting in can be prolonged agony. With poems, if I have a deadline—like I told my editor, Dan Halpern, that I’m going to get a book ready, so I know he needs a finished manuscript by a certain time—then I can get down to work in a forced march and say, Okay, I’m going to spend x number of hours a day and wrestle with these things and muscle through all my hesitations and get the poems into shape. There’s a part of me that wants to let problems go for a while, let a piece of writing simmer and percolate, in the hope that my unconscious will take care of it. That the solution will come. And I think that’s useful up to a point, but I also think you come back to the basic thing about writing. You’ve got to exercise your will and get work done. You’ve got to show the muse you’re willing to show up, whether anything is happening or not. But in another way I’ve been such a bad model, as far as work ethic, because of my ox-like tendencies. A lot of that labor went into prose and translation. Sometimes I would be in the middle of writing an essay on Ernesto Cardenal or on what’s going on in Chinese poetry, but I’d be thinking, Why don’t I just shut up and try to write a poem?
But anyway, so, how many years was it, five? I was writing poems. And I was in New York and giving a reading. This was sometime in the late seventies. Dan said, I would like to publish your next book with Ecco Press, which he had just started. I said, Dan, I don’t have a book. And he said, I just heard you read an hour’s worth of poems I haven’t heard before. There must be a book there. I said, I’ve got lots of poems, but I’ve no idea for a book. And I was really stuck because I was dead sure that it had to be organized more or less chronologically in the order that I’d written the poems. And he said, Let’s take a look at them, and we went to his place. He had an apartment down on West Thirtieth. A penthouse in the middle of the Garment District. We started to lay out the poems on the floor. And he started moving them around, and I said, See, here’s the problem, you can’t do this, and you can’t do that, and those have to come near the end, and this has to be near the beginning. And he said, Just let me work on this, will you? He laid out all the poems on the floor and started moving them around. He put what I thought were some of the strongest, which I was sure had to come at the end, at the beginning. And he said, I think this is starting to work. And I went into the bathroom and threw up. And came back and looked and said, Actually this does kind of work.
hahaha