Robert Hass's Guilt or The Weight of Wallace Stevens

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2007 by Olson, Liesl

The sensitive, autobiographical nature of Hass's writing, however, can exasperate some readers; one critic has dubbed Hass a poet for bourgeois-bohemians, citing David Brooks' recent term.37 Hass has no interest in making up a world or designing a language different from the life and language in which he finds himself. His images-sharp as haiku-register the urge to pin down and make sense of this life, rather than claim total explanation, or worse, incomprehensibility when experiences seem too enormous in scope. But Hass also describes how images sometimes decontextualize what they present; he argues that Imagism-à la Pound and Fennellosa-allows for a "dramatic ambivalence" of detachment, of "throwing the weight of meaning back on the innocence and discovery of the observer," as if seeing something for the first time.38 These micro-epiphanies eschew temporal context, like the flash of a photograph stilling a moment in place, forever. In his new volume, Hass unites images with a mature suspicion (probably acquired from Milosz) of what they may overlook.

Time and Materials aims to place the reader in time, announced by the date on the title's cover: 1997-2005. These eight years most noticeably mark a time before and after 9/11-and they assert the weight ofthose years; to use one of Hass's own metaphors, the poems accumulate matter. In the volume's title poem, Gerhard Richter's "Abstrakt Bilden" is a model of this accumulation; the layers of paint-"action painting"-allow the painter to "behave like time": "To score, to scar, to smear, to streak, / To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape."59 In a companion poem, "Art and Life," the lucid "stream of milk" in a Vermeer painting is also "Shocking," inversely accreting power as the layers of "time" have been stripped back carefully to reveal an original white. These two poems announce the volume's central concern with painting; the poem from which I draw my epigraph tracks Milosz's response to three museum paintings. The exclamatory "O" is an expression of wonder moving through the world even at three removes (painting, poem, translation), though the poet no doubt admires, in particular, paint's visual immediacy. In fact, the clarity of the white stream in "Art and Life" blurs the milkmaid's world with the poet's, an erotic charge that takes him back 300 years, and then forward again, as the "hoofbeats of shod horses on the cobbles" become the paintbrush's fibers:

... the stickiness of paint

Adhering to the woven flax of the canvas, here

Is the faithfulness of paint on paint on paint on

paint.

And something comes alive this way we cannot

have,

Can have because we cannot have it. Something

stays.40

The application of paint in Vermeer and Richter-representation and abstraction-encodes the hand that paints, the vigorous gesture, still alive in the painting and in the poet. "Art and Life" does not glorify a painting's revelations-art as epiphany-but rather what art gives context to, a "life" into which the painting enters, continuity that "stays." Hass here envies the physical dimensions of painting. Poetry's only relationship to the body resides in its orality, the music of the mouth. In this strain, Hass's own work has always been wrought with self-critique.