Robert Hass Answered Your Questions on Modern Poetry

Harriet Slaughter, from Long Beach, N.Y., "As a person who enjoys writing poetry, I often struggle with the editing of my poetry, as it is different than prose in the writing form and structure. How do you know when a poem is set? I would be interested in the process you go through after you have completed a poem."

James Fothergill from Cincinnati writes, "Now that you are older, does writing poems come easier, harder, or do you have so many poems within you that you may never get to them all?"

And Kathy Hart from Marietta, Ga., "Could you describe something about your writing process? Do you have a set writing schedule that you follow?"

ROBERT HASS: Well, first question -- or the last question first -- I don't have a set writing schedule that I follow, consistently, because I -- the way I make my living is teaching and my daily schedule changes, depending on what I'm teaching, when, on what days.

But, I try to work at writing every day, for some period of time, and I deeply believe in setting the time aside, and showing up in case the muse wants to visit.

JEFFREY BROWN: In case, huh?

ROBERT HASS: Yeah, just in case, I was here, I put in my time.

But, I remember when I was younger, reading Denise Levertov say that, "If you only wrote when you were inspired, it would be like taking dictation from angels. That you would have no work to do, properly speaking."

So, and I always loved that idea, that there's, you know, work to do properly, if you can get in and try.

I'm not very disciplined about it. My wife, Brenda Hillman, who's a poet, is very disciplined about it, she works like a novelist, she has set hours, and she works with a will on those days at that time, no matter what.

I'm a little more erratic, but I try to show up.

JEFFREY BROWN: One of the, OK, another question in that group was about being, now that you're older, does it come easier, harder, or do you just have so many poems that you may never get to them?

ROBERT HASS: I think the answer, in a way, is both. It's -- there was, the only time in my life when poetry just seemed to pour out of me, was when I was starting to write.

My sense in studying other poets is, that it can -- that particular kind of delicious lightning, can strike at any time in your life, if you make yourself available to it.

For me, it's not very hard to write a certain -- it's not very hard to write an adequate poem. It's hard to write a poem that does something that strikes me as, in some way, interesting or new.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, that goes to that other question, is how do you know? How do you know when the poem is "set" as Harriet Slaughter asked?

ROBERT HASS: I think that some poems you do know, and some poems you don't.

Some poems, rarely, you just say, "There, that's done." And I think listening to storywriters talk, and essayists, I think they feel that they -- I think people feel the same way, that sometimes it's just done, you know, you did exactly what you wanted to do, some miracle was visited on you and that happened.

Most of writing is labor, and sometimes you feel like you finally get there and sometimes at the end, you've done the best you can and you abandon it, because you understand that if start over worrying to death, the life goes out of it.

JEFFREY BROWN: You were just talking earlier about your early days of writing and that gets to another section of questions, category -- people want to know how you got into it yourself, and what were the first poems that really influenced you.

Myron from Manhattan Beach, Calif., "I would like to know what was the first poem that you read, which had a profound impact on you, and why did it affect you that way? How old were you, and do you go back and read it again from time to time?"

ROBERT HASS: Yeah, I've written an essay about this, in my book "20th Century Pleasures," an essay called 'Notes on Northern California as a Culture Region.'

And in some way, I think maybe in that essay, I slightly fictionalize a set of experiences and turn them into one.

I can remember fragments of different poems, but the poem I remember and talked about, is a poem by Wallace Stevens, called "Domination of Black," which I think I read when I was a freshman in college -- high school, or maybe even in the 8th grade.

I didn't understand anything about it, but I felt in the rhythm of it, or something, a sort of shock which -- in later years I've thought to myself, was the sensation of experiencing something that seemed emotionally true, without my knowing it.

And that, for me, I'm sure it's different for different people, I grew up in a family that had drinking problems and -- among other problems --

JEFFREY BROWN: Which you write about.

ROBERT HASS: Yeah, my mother's an alcoholic, and what's typical in a family like that, there's a lot of nervousness, and secret-keeping, and flat-out lying.

And I think that the poetry first came to me, and then stayed with me, because it felt like a way of saying something true. Emotionally true. That I wasn't being lied to.

I say that and think about my -- how much my mother and her painful life, and don't want to leave an impression that she was a terrible person -- she wasn't. She was a very funny and live person. But she was, as so many addicts are, full of complicated evasions and denials and guilt.

And I read this poem which was really about weather coming in the fall, and it's of dread and exhilaration rising.

And then maybe it was the complexity and accuracy of that emotion that floored me.

ROBERT HASS: I wanted to be -- I think I vaguely wanted to be a writer. And I was quite confused about the difference between getting to be the hero in the novel, and writing, of sitting and writing a book.

I think I read Tolstoy and wanted to be a writer, but really I wanted to be Prince Andre Bolkonskys. I think that confusion has persisted through my life.

I wrote some poems in college, and I wrote stories and in those years I read the first essays of James Baldwin were appearing, and they had enormous impact on me. And I tried to write personal essays.

And, and then in graduate school, I think I was 23 or 24 when I started reading a whole group of writers, not any one. But there was this enormous amount of interesting work going on in American poetry.

I was reading "The Novelist." I was reading Bernard Malamud, and John Cheever, and John Updike and Philip Roth, and Saul Bellow.

And Saul Bellow excited me; the others I thought were OK. When I started reading the poems of Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop, to Muriel Rukeyser of an anthology that I read in those years called "Fifteen Modern American Poets," also Delmore Schwartz.

I started reading the Beat poets, and the poets of the generation born in the 1920's, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Robert Bly, William Burroughs, and John Ashbery -- there's an incredible range of interesting and exciting writing going on.

And I found myself more and more -- I was 22 or 23, married, had a baby. When -- you know, after we'd bathe the child and put him to the bed, I would get out big sheets, and start writing down lines that would come into my head from my excitement about poetry.

And I think that's how I got started taking it seriously.

JEFFREY BROWN: And while we're on the subject, what about now?

Debra Otero from Vancouver, Wash., writes, "Do you have a favorite poem? Who was your favorite poet that you read just for enjoyment?"

ROBERT HASS: Oh, there are a couple of -- I mean, I read a lot of poetry for enjoyment.

The poems of -- the books of my, you know, I've been doing this for years, and I have many friends and colleagues in the art whose work I'm excited to see, when someone produces a new book that I care about.

So, it would be hard to give a lot of names -- Jorie Graham's new book, "Sea Change," just came across my, is sitting on my desk, I'm quite excited by that book. There's a new book by C.D. Wright which I just got in the mail that I'm very excited to read.

The poets I read for pleasure vary from time to time, but two that I return to often for a certain kind of inspiration, I guess, or -- are George Oppen, American poet, associated with the objectivist movement, is a guy writing in the 1930s, spent his last years in San Francisco.

He's a kind of steely truth-teller, and a poet who I think of as having enormous integrity in his process. I read him for an inspiration.

I read Czeslaw Milosz, in translation, of course, a poet who I translated to remind myself of what poetry can do. Then there are poets I read for their amusement, Hart Crane is a poet I read, Frank O'Hara is a poet I read for pleasure.

When you listen to the body of your poetry, do you hear certain other poets?

ROBERT HASS: Yes, I do.

JEFFREY BROWN: Who, is the next question?

ROBERT HASS: Roethke has those poems that goes, "I take this rhythm from a man name Yeats, I take it and I give it back again/His other tunes and other wanton beats have touched my heart and fiddled through my brain/Yes, I was dancing mad, and how that came to be the bears and Yeats would understand."

So, poets are always taking and giving from each other, poetry is an enormous pot luck, in that way.

JEFFREY BROWN: Some people, this is back to the, I guess, process of writing, is a kind of, questions about how you stay fresh.

David Allen from Vancouver, "After many years and many poems and attempts, one falls into familiar and comfortable patterns of phrase or diction. The warm, pink, bunny slippers that are comforting at home, alone, it's slightly embarrassing when seen by another. How do you work to refresh or renew your voice?"

ROBERT HASS: My experience has been that life takes care of that. That, when you -- and often painfully. You find you, in your life that you have things to learn, and that's always -- and then, and then it falls in your poetry.

I mean, as an example, I often give assistance, and in my first book, I think I did a lot of, very unconsciously, descriptive poetry. I was imitating, maybe, Gary Snyder, among others, Robert Lowell -- and I sort of came to realize that there was a certain male way of writing, probably derived ultimately from Hemingway which -- the premise of which was, "I'll describe what I'm seeing, and you guess what I'm feeling."

The emotion arising implicitly from what seemed like objective description and the idea underneath that there was this enormous well of feeling that you were supposed to be alerted to, but the poet wasn't showing it.

I was in a generation raised on the face of Gary Cooper, and other Western stars. The idea was that the male toolkit was you didn't show a whole lot of emotion.

JEFFREY BROWN: Right.

ROBERT HASS: And when my wife, my young wife, said to her young husband, "Let's talk." I would sort of fold my arms and say, "Okay, what do you want to talk about?"

And at a certain point I had to learn to be more comfortable with my own feelings, and also with the more complicated adult feelings I was going through.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yeah, I think that will resonate with a lot of different generations, not just the Gary Cooper generation.

ROBERT HASS: Yeah, I mean, some people thought that marriage was the marble threshing floor where you -- and I think that, and it's often been for me in relationships -- that my, the problems with my ways of seeing and being would be painfully evident in one way or another and eventually that would change what I would try to do in my poetry.