 As
Reviewed By: |
A Brilliant Welter
Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass. Ecco, $22.95 |
As
Reviewed By: |
A Brilliant Welter
Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass. Ecco, $22.95 |
When Robert Hass’s Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 received the 2007 National Book Award, it seemed fitting for a poet a little under-praised, considering how long he has been publishing and how well writing. Granted, there are others of his generation in the same situation, for example, Robert Pinsky or Marilyn Hacker. Not that these figures have been ignored: Both Hass and Pinsky have served as Poet Laureate. Hacker’s first book won an NBA, Hass’s last book Sun Under Wood won the NBCC prize, and some time ago he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Also, an earlier prose book of his won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
That was his Twentieth
Century Pleasures, and the title provides a good entry into his
poetry. Pleasure has been one of his earmarks from the beginning—the
pleasure of natural landscapes, of reading, of the table, and of
lovemaking. Emphasis on the senses rather sets him apart from a poetic
tradition that in many ways is still tight-laced and Puritan. How long has
it been since we’ve seen, in a national magazine, a poem that dealt with
nonviolent sexual experience? Novels, films, visual art, and choreographic
works effectively convey the intensity of physical intimacy, but poetry
shies away from this subject. Instead of the ecstatic flesh we get
violence, violence, far beyond the “spaghetti Western” level. So
much bloodshed might be understood as a sublimated form of it, Thanatos
trumping Eros; and that’s why Hass’s recurrent theme amounts to
something non-trivial. If I read him aright, he is suggesting that one of
the causes of contemporary anxiety, alienation, and aggression is the
inability to experience and value pleasure. Hass is a native of
California, the state whose motto seems to be “Enjoy your life,” along
with the vineyards and restaurants that ease the process. He is also a
member of the generation that protested the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, and
I’m willing to bet he, like all the rest of us, read Norman O. Brown’s
Life Against Death, which theorized that personality distortions
arise from the failure of sexual love. Brown believed that the collective
result of that failure for society was to foster warlike behavior, which,
in an era of nuclear weapons, would eventually amount to the destruction
of humanity and its culture. (Those unable to find Brown’s book can find
a good summary of it in Susan Sontag’s first collection of essays Against
Interpretation.)
A countercurrent to the subject of pleasure in Hass is the elegy,
the recognition and assessment of loss. His best-known poem, “Meditation
at Lagunitas,” which appeared in his first book, announces the theme,
and he has returned to it many times. Time and Materials contains a
poem titled “The World as Will and Representation,” which, though not
the best in the volume, explains, more than any other, Hass’s elegiac
temperament. It tells how Hass’s alcoholic mother was forced by his
father (while the boy watched) to take a drug called Antabuse; this drug
induces vomiting if any amount of alcohol is ingested during the following
twenty-four hours. The father winks at his son and says, “Keep an eye on
Mama, pardner,” then goes off to work. The boy stays behind and
witnesses his mother’s inevitable, defiant drinking: Slumped in a bathrobe, penitent and biddable, My mother at the kitchen table gagged and drank, Drank and gagged. We get our first moral idea About the world—about justice and power, Gender
and the order of things—from somewhere.
I suppose many critics would describe this as a “Confessional”
poem and believe that doing so settled its hash. Yet, attaching dismissive
labels like “Confessional,” “academic,” “experimental,” or
“political” is the critical equivalent to the ad hominem in
debate. (You know, labeling someone as a “bleeding-heart liberal” or
an “aesthete” a “nut-job” or a “Fascist” as a substitute for
dealing with the substance of the argument advanced.) Real criticism
requires more effort, and it should assume that no subject matter, even
autobiographical, is automatically excluded. In this instance of
autobiographical writing, I would say the poem is an unsentimental,
economical narrative that sounds fully plausible and will provoke sharp
emotion in all but cynical readers. The text would probably be just as
effective if typeset as a prose poem; lineation doesn’t add much to the
effect, though you can scan the lines as rough iambic meter, with five or
six feet per line. The figurative language and intense imagery standard
for poetry are largely absent, nor do we hear unusual sound effects.
Although Hass briefly expands the scope of the subject by alluding to the Aeneid
(the moment when Aeneas flees the burning city with his father on his
back), I think the allusion is too weighty for this poem, given how
unliterary and unadorned it is. A defense would no doubt argue that
resolute austerity of presentation matches the dire events recounted; even
mildly aesthetic touches might seem like window-dressing. As for the
Trojan allusion, though grand, it conveys the notion of a son bearing the
burden of his father. Fine, but then Hass is repudiating the paternal
legacy here, whereas Aeneas intended the opposite.
If I’d written the poem, I’d have dropped the Trojan allusion
and reconceived the text as a brief prose memoir. But I’m not Hass, the poem stands, and there may be a good reason. For the full effect of the volume as a whole, he may have decided readers would need the information contained in “The World as Will and Representation,” even if he couldn’t convey the facts with as much art as we’ve come to expect. Elsewhere in the book, we encounter poems describing Hass’s love relationships, these extraordinarily charged and imbued with the breathless wonder seldom found outside anthologies of Romantic poetry. The beloved, portrayed in Hass’s poems almost entirely without visual detail, registers mainly as a voice, in reported dialogue. Also, she seems to suffer from unexplained spiritual maladies, as in “Domestic Interiors” and “Drift and Vapor (Surf Faintly).” Comfortable expectations about the nature of love are defied as we are exposed to a relationship where demons as a matter of course josh and ice each other, all part of the high-voltage picture. The results are gripping and oddly flavored. At the very least, we understand how it is that Hass is able to face full into the wind without bolting or even turning aside his gaze. There
are several kinds of poems in Time and Materials, some
“experimental” or elusive in meaning and perhaps even approaching
indeterminacy. In varying degrees, these poems use a jump-cut or collage
to bring together disparate information, imagery, or dreamwork, while
leaving inexplicit the criteria for inclusion. It’s as though Hass
builds a playground structure from lots of different sources and allows us
to decide for ourselves how to use it. Another way to think about these
poems is as Rorschach tests, where a poem’s meaning occurs at the
interface with each reader, who acts a co-creator along with the poet. All
poems of course have “expansion joints,” allowing for some latitude in
how they are to be understood; but the degree of control exercised by the
author over the interpretation of a text varies. It was no doubt
inevitable that Hass, living in the Bay area, close to the epicenter of
unconventional poetics, would be affected by it all. So there are several
poems in Time and Materials that Rae Armantrout, say, or Lyn
Hejinian might read without automatically groaning. For example, “Breach
and Orison, or the title poem or “Twin Dolphins.” Actually some of
Hass’s most delicate, sensuous lines appear in the latter: Harlequin sparrows in a coral tree. One halcyon harrying another in the desert sky. Blue and would be turquoise, Would be stone. ………………………… Brilliant welter, azure welter, Occurs—the world occurs— Only
in the present tense. The
poem concludes with a couple of lines from Stevens, perhaps to remind us
that sensuous poetry of elusive meaning has been around for quite a while.
And maybe it’s time for everyone to acknowledge that the polemic
currently conducted on behalf of the “experimental” in poetry, though
it has its points, ought not to include the argument of newness.
After Góngora, after Rimbaud, after ultraísmo in Spain ca. 1919,
after Dada and Surrealism, after Gertrude Stein, after Mandelshtam, after Trilce,
after Mina Loy or the forgotten American poet Abraham Lincoln Gillespie
(1895-1950), after The Tennis Court Oath, after André du Bouchet,
Denis Roche, and Anne-Marie Albiach—after so much diverse, ingenious
resistance to paraphrase, what the Language poets are doing can’t be
described as unprecedented. If “it’s been done before” invalidates a
poem, all poetry now being written falls under the judgment. Given that no
two people in human history have ever been duplicates, the sole guarantee
of being original comes from putting oneself accurately and idiomatically
into words. And of course originality is only one value among many
that a poem may embody. Meanwhile, it’s become clear that we will always
have two parallel approaches to the writing of poetry, both of them
traditional. One tradition is based on regularly evolved modes of
communication and narrative, the other on the kind of autonomous verbality
found among the poets in Hall of Fame of Difficulty. Hass makes occasional
excursions into underdetermined signification, but most of his poems adopt
the more accessible approach.
The latter include a few works that border on the reportorial and
essayistic, poems whose political urgency sponsors the effort to get
messages across as quickly as possible, while still retaining the earmarks
of poetry. In this connection, read “Bush’s War,” which revisits
most of the twentieth century’s military catastrophes, complete with
their incredible casualty figures. Hass does something along the same
lines in a Korea poem titled “On Visiting the DMZ at Panmunjom: A Haibun.”
As the image of millions upon millions of civilian bodies, incinerated or
heaped up in the charnel house, scores in deeper, horror and nausea
compete with a brutal sense of absurdity. Fact and feeling are not
incompatible, therefore, poems may use fact; and the poet has done so. Another
pressing current-events topic Hass is concerned about is the destruction
of the environment. We infer this in several poems using natural settings,
and the issue is argued directly in “State of the Planet,”
commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty
Observatory at Columbia University. As much as I share Hass’s panic and
mourning in the face of what’s happening to our atmosphere, our water,
our wildlife, and our earth, I don’t find this poem fully effective. It
is diffuse where it should be focused. The full weight of the coming
disaster isn’t rendered sharply enough, though none of the poem’s ten
sections is without invention and useful comment. Just because readers of
poetry already share his convictions is no reason for Hass not to state
them. But I wonder whether the inclusion of both antiwar and environmental
poems doesn’t point toward a contradiction. Reflecting on the war
statistics Hass cited, then moving to the “Green” poem, I had this
thought: Suppose all of the last century’s wars had been averted and the
hundred million people who died of war-related causes had lived—lived,
been fruitful, and multiplied. Clearly the current world population would
be far in excess of the six billion now engulfing the planet. All the
more, given that industrial production, agriculture, new housing
construction, and medical research wouldn’t have been interrupted; the
global prospects for good health and longevity would have soared. Which
means we would have been in a much worse situation than we now are. That
must be the ghost of Malthus chuckling in a corner; but I’m not tempted
to join in. It’s
a measure of Hass’s achievement that reading his work leads to
reflections beyond the nuts and bolts of daily life. But then, one of his
mentors was Czeslaw Milosz, who was an adept of disaster, with experience
and powers of reason not common in the poet tribe. Hass includes here a
translation of Milosz, plus a kind of poetic hommage, confirming my
sense that Milosz is a great historical figure, though possibly not as
subtle and inventive a poet as Hass. Anyway, both poets are the sort that
gets you thinking—and if the resulting thoughts drift toward tragedy,
that is not their fault. |
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