Robert Hass: An interview by Grace Cavalieri

American Poetry Review, The, Mar/Apr 1997 by Grace Cavalieri

This interview was conducted in October 1995at the Library of Congress with the Poet Laureate Robert Hass who reads from Field Guide, his first book, and Human Wishes, and from other poets work identified in the interview. In 1996 Hass's new book, Sun Under Wood, was published by Ecco Press. The following was broadcast on "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress" in 1996.

-Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri: Last night you said that imagination makes communities.

Robert Hass: Yes, I said that.

GC: Now what did you mean?

Hass: Well I said that in connection with a poem from Field Guide ("Concerning the Afterlife. . . the Indians of Central California Had Only the Dimmest Notions") What I had in mind . . . I wrote that poem, I guess it must have been the early seventies. . . one of the things I was thinking about during the years of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, was the way in which our imagination of Western polities, I guess is the word, has gone wrong so I set myself the task of trying to read through some of the thinkers like Hobbs who give us our ways of thinking about government. The first thing that struck me about our democratic capitalist ways of thinking about societies is that they always begin in the idea of some Robinson Crusoe figure, some male appropriating, changing property and then building up into notions of men in competition with each other over the world's goods which then of course Adam Smith picked up and said, "Ah, but this is a magical system. Everything turns out fine. Prices get set. People get the best goods" and so on. It's an imagination of the world in which it's guys competing with each other over goods. GC: Yes, you said markets make networks.

Hass: That's right.

GC: But imagination which is more human makes the community "spirit" I guess.

Hass: I would say it a little differently. The market makes networks, but I think real markets in fact do make communities. Because people don't behave according to rules of economic rationalities.

GC: Real markets are the product of the kinds of thought forms which you advocate.

Hass: They are products of affection and imagination. You know the kind of stuff you do when you have a clean exchange with somebody. Makes a certain kind of relationship. The first real philosopher of the market system, Jeremy Bentham, said the perfect participant in the market is a man perfectly rational, perfectly selfish and perfectly free. That's not how we behave nor would it be desirable to behave that way. GC: Its not a bad thing to have you in Washington, you know. And you claim you might be able to lobby for American writers and for the mind and heart. Not a bad thing I think.

Hass: A recent poem which makes this point is "Iowa City...." It goes on a bit. But it makes this point from another angle altogether. You know, it's going to make it sound like poetry has a moral purpose and I don't really think it does. So I won't make a speech except to say we live in families, not on islands. That's where human polity starts. We live among other creatures. "Iowa City, Early April" was written in Iowa. I never lived in the Midwest before and so that was a record of that experience.

GC: I live in West Virginia so I'm grateful for your meditative nature poems. I'm very glad you mention that new poem because it's a very good demonstration of something I feel about your work which was with us even in the beginning. Field Guide was certainly much with the deer, the serenity, even in tumultuous times-the early seventies, you had this extreme quieting at the center in that book and it was an absorption in nature with that attention to detail which we see in your latest work. Also there seems to be less self in your poems now and more of everything else. Do you agree?

Hass: In that poem, yes.

GC: Your work has moved that way.

Hass: I think that's true. I mean of course everything anybody writes is drenched in the self because language is, but you can try to use it to represent what doesn't belong to the self entirely.

GC: When the experience is totally mine and not Robert Hass's, I guess that's what I mean. Which is quite a miracle I think. "Iowa City . . ." will be part of a new book we don't know about yet. We don't even know the title.

Hass: That's right. I wish I knew the title.

GC: Last night at your reading, your premier, you said, "out of self-delusion comes poetry" and you talked about "this precious delusion." Where is that referenced in your own work?

Hass: I was quoting Czeslaw Milosz. From a wonderful poem of his. He's an astonishing poet of the century now in his eighties and in the most recent book Facing the River he includes a poem which I translated with him called "Report" in which he checks in with the higher powers about what it's been like to be a poet. It begins presenting a report . . . it goes on to say we learn too much about the bizarre nature of man . . . possessed by self-delusion. . . He goes on to say "out of self-delusion comes poetry" and poetry confesses the flaw.