Tonight's reading besides being the latest
in a distinguished and long running literary series
also marks the midpoint of this year's program, which
we're calling Wide Open: Poetry in the Larger World
for which we've tried to test the boundaries of poetry.
To look at the art and a little wider context in usual,
it's doubly fitting then that Robert Hass
should be here as he brings to this evening achievement
and stature equal to any of the great poets we have presented
over the years and is well known also
in this contemporary over his work
in bringing poetry to the larger world.
As poet laureate from 1995 to 1997,
Robert Hass did more than any previous poet in that post
to demystify poetry and to broaden its audience.
The laureate is actually required only
to give a reading at the start of the term
and to deliver an essay at the end.
And Bob Hass went far beyond that,
traveling on behalf of the art speaking to hundreds
of literary groups, and rotary luncheons,
and writing a daily newspaper column called "Poet's Choice,"
appearing in 25 dailies around the country.
The column represented --presented
a tremendous variety of poetry to ordinary readers
and Bob Hass wrote of his conception of the column:
"I imagine people all over America reading
a poem at Sunday breakfasts.
Robert Frost on the New England fall, Anna Akhmatova writing
about waiting in line outside of Leningrad
prison for political prisoners to live--
to deliver warm socks to her son.
A Slovenian Futurist, an African-American Beat
from Newark, some young Neo Punk poet breaking language
to get the way the sun rises over the morally compromised
landscape in West Hollywood.
I imagine people cutting them out, putting them
on the refrigerator under ladybug magnets,
quoting them to each other at work."
The column was an attempt, Hass writes,
"to give us back what we are losing:
a shared literate public culture."
And I look at you here tonight, all of you
and I see just that: a shared literate public
culture right here in Tucson.
This impulse to open poetry to the world
and to let the world into poetry has been evident
in Robert Hass's work since the beginning book of poems
called "Field Guide," which won the Yale Series of Younger
Poets Award in 1973.
As it happened, I know--
I knew Bob Hass in those days, I was an undergraduate
in Buffalo of all places when he was a young Assistant
Professor.
Buffalo was an amazing fervent literary discourse
loaded place and time.
I thought then that we would always talk and feel like that.
Ideas were everything, ideas could
be cared about passionately.
There was barely enough time in the day to explore them all,
to test their premises, and their relevance--
relevance, this was a big word.
[LAUGHTER]
To cast aside the faulty ones and to build the great ones
into a framework of a lifetime.
And then we went to graduate school after that.
[LAUGHTER]
And I found out just what a special place and time
Buffalo had been in the late 60s and early 70s,
but then it was no longer.
Later though, when fate or whatever brought,
both Bob Hass and myself back to the Bay Area, both of us
are natives there and had been California exiles in Buffalo.
I found that I could return to that sense of potency
and irresistibly of ideas and their connection
to our existence simply by talking to Bob
or by reading his work.
In Hass's own poems, ideas are manifest in the moment,
in the life, in a rare and fine way.
If you know what is perhaps his best known poem, "Meditation
at Lagunitas" you'll know what I mean.
The poem takes Lacan's idea of the breach between language
and what it attempts to name, the notion
that "the word is elegy to what it signifies" as Hass wrote.
The poem applies this idea of personally feeling
the grief that must be there if this notion
of our ultimate distance from things is true.
You could read a lot of Lacan without ever [? knowing that ?].
This faith in ideas, a determination that may be true
in terms of language and in terms of one's own life
has a couple of corollaries in the work of Robert Hass.
One is that each poem must be new, must prove itself.
Bob has never stopped developing as a poet,
has never settled for a Bob Hass poem.
He's always wrestled with poetry demanding that we percieve ever
further with its questions both philosophical and formal.
And he's never stopped examining his own voice and his own set
of presentation in poems.
Once I spoke to Bob about translation, and he said,
"translation solves about the problems of being a poet."
And I took this to heart as it addressed my main difficulty
with poetry, that is the poet persona that sends up
the parade of ego in the poem.
Translating into the poet one could
engage all the gorgeousness, the depth, the passion, of poetry,
and not be applying it to oneself like a mantle.
Robert Hass's work in translation, especially
in bringing the work of Czeslaw Milosz to an English audience
is I believe one of the great literary labors of our time.
An extraordinary collaboration of two great poets, one of whom
is big enough simply to act as the translator.
This impulse in translation, the jettisoning
of ego in pursuit of the pure poem
is clear too in Hass's own poetry,
in which the poetic persona itself is often the question.
And that the voice that comes of this struggle
is wonderful ingratiating, modest,
confessional without insisting, intimate without entrapping,
and seeming in many poems to vanish altogether
into language and into exquisite detail.
"Poetry" Hass has written, "teaches the pleasure
of attention to detail" and this matter of the world is what his
poems illuminate about the self --
not the self of the poet.
Hass's continual quest for the poem beyond the self
is the reason that so many of his poems
going back now almost 30 years, remain so luminous and fresh.
A reason too that these works will
stand for a long, long time.
I could go on, but I won't.
So just let me say that gives me extreme pleasure and pride
to present to you on this night, the exact 40th anniversary
of the Poetry Center, a friend, a poet of the moment,
and a poet of the age, Robert Hass.
[APPLAUSE]