WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:01.110 align:middle line:90% 00:00:01.110 --> 00:00:02.880 align:middle line:84% Tonight's reading besides being the latest 00:00:02.880 --> 00:00:05.550 align:middle line:84% in a distinguished and long running literary series 00:00:05.550 --> 00:00:08.820 align:middle line:84% also marks the midpoint of this year's program, which 00:00:08.820 --> 00:00:13.410 align:middle line:84% we're calling Wide Open: Poetry in the Larger World 00:00:13.410 --> 00:00:16.710 align:middle line:84% for which we've tried to test the boundaries of poetry. 00:00:16.710 --> 00:00:21.360 align:middle line:84% To look at the art and a little wider context in usual, 00:00:21.360 --> 00:00:23.850 align:middle line:84% it's doubly fitting then that Robert Hass 00:00:23.850 --> 00:00:27.480 align:middle line:84% should be here as he brings to this evening achievement 00:00:27.480 --> 00:00:30.750 align:middle line:84% and stature equal to any of the great poets we have presented 00:00:30.750 --> 00:00:33.570 align:middle line:84% over the years and is well known also 00:00:33.570 --> 00:00:36.180 align:middle line:84% in this contemporary over his work 00:00:36.180 --> 00:00:39.210 align:middle line:84% in bringing poetry to the larger world. 00:00:39.210 --> 00:00:43.170 align:middle line:84% As poet laureate from 1995 to 1997, 00:00:43.170 --> 00:00:47.580 align:middle line:84% Robert Hass did more than any previous poet in that post 00:00:47.580 --> 00:00:52.290 align:middle line:84% to demystify poetry and to broaden its audience. 00:00:52.290 --> 00:00:54.240 align:middle line:84% The laureate is actually required only 00:00:54.240 --> 00:00:56.430 align:middle line:84% to give a reading at the start of the term 00:00:56.430 --> 00:00:59.220 align:middle line:84% and to deliver an essay at the end. 00:00:59.220 --> 00:01:01.740 align:middle line:84% And Bob Hass went far beyond that, 00:01:01.740 --> 00:01:04.950 align:middle line:84% traveling on behalf of the art speaking to hundreds 00:01:04.950 --> 00:01:07.050 align:middle line:84% of literary groups, and rotary luncheons, 00:01:07.050 --> 00:01:10.860 align:middle line:84% and writing a daily newspaper column called "Poet's Choice," 00:01:10.860 --> 00:01:14.130 align:middle line:84% appearing in 25 dailies around the country. 00:01:14.130 --> 00:01:15.670 align:middle line:84% The column represented --presented 00:01:15.670 --> 00:01:20.400 align:middle line:84% a tremendous variety of poetry to ordinary readers 00:01:20.400 --> 00:01:24.540 align:middle line:84% and Bob Hass wrote of his conception of the column: 00:01:24.540 --> 00:01:26.730 align:middle line:84% "I imagine people all over America reading 00:01:26.730 --> 00:01:28.980 align:middle line:90% a poem at Sunday breakfasts. 00:01:28.980 --> 00:01:33.930 align:middle line:84% Robert Frost on the New England fall, Anna Akhmatova writing 00:01:33.930 --> 00:01:36.060 align:middle line:84% about waiting in line outside of Leningrad 00:01:36.060 --> 00:01:39.300 align:middle line:84% prison for political prisoners to live-- 00:01:39.300 --> 00:01:42.270 align:middle line:84% to deliver warm socks to her son. 00:01:42.270 --> 00:01:45.490 align:middle line:84% A Slovenian Futurist, an African-American Beat 00:01:45.490 --> 00:01:49.860 align:middle line:84% from Newark, some young Neo Punk poet breaking language 00:01:49.860 --> 00:01:53.310 align:middle line:84% to get the way the sun rises over the morally compromised 00:01:53.310 --> 00:01:55.980 align:middle line:90% landscape in West Hollywood. 00:01:55.980 --> 00:01:58.920 align:middle line:84% I imagine people cutting them out, putting them 00:01:58.920 --> 00:02:01.860 align:middle line:84% on the refrigerator under ladybug magnets, 00:02:01.860 --> 00:02:05.040 align:middle line:84% quoting them to each other at work." 00:02:05.040 --> 00:02:08.370 align:middle line:84% The column was an attempt, Hass writes, 00:02:08.370 --> 00:02:10.710 align:middle line:84% "to give us back what we are losing: 00:02:10.710 --> 00:02:14.490 align:middle line:84% a shared literate public culture." 00:02:14.490 --> 00:02:16.720 align:middle line:84% And I look at you here tonight, all of you 00:02:16.720 --> 00:02:19.590 align:middle line:84% and I see just that: a shared literate public 00:02:19.590 --> 00:02:23.160 align:middle line:90% culture right here in Tucson. 00:02:23.160 --> 00:02:25.710 align:middle line:84% This impulse to open poetry to the world 00:02:25.710 --> 00:02:28.380 align:middle line:84% and to let the world into poetry has been evident 00:02:28.380 --> 00:02:31.710 align:middle line:84% in Robert Hass's work since the beginning book of poems 00:02:31.710 --> 00:02:34.830 align:middle line:84% called "Field Guide," which won the Yale Series of Younger 00:02:34.830 --> 00:02:38.040 align:middle line:90% Poets Award in 1973. 00:02:38.040 --> 00:02:39.810 align:middle line:90% As it happened, I know-- 00:02:39.810 --> 00:02:43.230 align:middle line:84% I knew Bob Hass in those days, I was an undergraduate 00:02:43.230 --> 00:02:46.980 align:middle line:84% in Buffalo of all places when he was a young Assistant 00:02:46.980 --> 00:02:48.390 align:middle line:90% Professor. 00:02:48.390 --> 00:02:51.870 align:middle line:84% Buffalo was an amazing fervent literary discourse 00:02:51.870 --> 00:02:54.660 align:middle line:90% loaded place and time. 00:02:54.660 --> 00:02:59.190 align:middle line:84% I thought then that we would always talk and feel like that. 00:02:59.190 --> 00:03:01.860 align:middle line:84% Ideas were everything, ideas could 00:03:01.860 --> 00:03:03.780 align:middle line:90% be cared about passionately. 00:03:03.780 --> 00:03:08.490 align:middle line:84% There was barely enough time in the day to explore them all, 00:03:08.490 --> 00:03:11.490 align:middle line:84% to test their premises, and their relevance-- 00:03:11.490 --> 00:03:13.140 align:middle line:90% relevance, this was a big word. 00:03:13.140 --> 00:03:14.340 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:03:14.340 --> 00:03:17.490 align:middle line:84% To cast aside the faulty ones and to build the great ones 00:03:17.490 --> 00:03:20.160 align:middle line:90% into a framework of a lifetime. 00:03:20.160 --> 00:03:22.200 align:middle line:84% And then we went to graduate school after that. 00:03:22.200 --> 00:03:24.660 align:middle line:90% [LAUGHTER] 00:03:24.660 --> 00:03:26.910 align:middle line:84% And I found out just what a special place and time 00:03:26.910 --> 00:03:30.940 align:middle line:84% Buffalo had been in the late 60s and early 70s, 00:03:30.940 --> 00:03:33.400 align:middle line:90% but then it was no longer. 00:03:33.400 --> 00:03:36.910 align:middle line:84% Later though, when fate or whatever brought, 00:03:36.910 --> 00:03:40.300 align:middle line:84% both Bob Hass and myself back to the Bay Area, both of us 00:03:40.300 --> 00:03:45.390 align:middle line:84% are natives there and had been California exiles in Buffalo. 00:03:45.390 --> 00:03:48.420 align:middle line:84% I found that I could return to that sense of potency 00:03:48.420 --> 00:03:51.690 align:middle line:84% and irresistibly of ideas and their connection 00:03:51.690 --> 00:03:55.320 align:middle line:84% to our existence simply by talking to Bob 00:03:55.320 --> 00:03:57.840 align:middle line:90% or by reading his work. 00:03:57.840 --> 00:04:02.310 align:middle line:84% In Hass's own poems, ideas are manifest in the moment, 00:04:02.310 --> 00:04:06.180 align:middle line:84% in the life, in a rare and fine way. 00:04:06.180 --> 00:04:10.080 align:middle line:84% If you know what is perhaps his best known poem, "Meditation 00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:12.780 align:middle line:84% at Lagunitas" you'll know what I mean. 00:04:12.780 --> 00:04:16.709 align:middle line:84% The poem takes Lacan's idea of the breach between language 00:04:16.709 --> 00:04:19.050 align:middle line:84% and what it attempts to name, the notion 00:04:19.050 --> 00:04:24.720 align:middle line:84% that "the word is elegy to what it signifies" as Hass wrote. 00:04:24.720 --> 00:04:29.100 align:middle line:84% The poem applies this idea of personally feeling 00:04:29.100 --> 00:04:32.220 align:middle line:84% the grief that must be there if this notion 00:04:32.220 --> 00:04:36.240 align:middle line:84% of our ultimate distance from things is true. 00:04:36.240 --> 00:04:38.276 align:middle line:84% You could read a lot of Lacan without ever [? knowing that ?]. 00:04:38.276 --> 00:04:41.090 align:middle line:90% 00:04:41.090 --> 00:04:44.210 align:middle line:84% This faith in ideas, a determination that may be true 00:04:44.210 --> 00:04:47.750 align:middle line:84% in terms of language and in terms of one's own life 00:04:47.750 --> 00:04:50.900 align:middle line:84% has a couple of corollaries in the work of Robert Hass. 00:04:50.900 --> 00:04:55.490 align:middle line:84% One is that each poem must be new, must prove itself. 00:04:55.490 --> 00:04:58.130 align:middle line:84% Bob has never stopped developing as a poet, 00:04:58.130 --> 00:05:01.220 align:middle line:84% has never settled for a Bob Hass poem. 00:05:01.220 --> 00:05:05.210 align:middle line:84% He's always wrestled with poetry demanding that we percieve ever 00:05:05.210 --> 00:05:09.740 align:middle line:84% further with its questions both philosophical and formal. 00:05:09.740 --> 00:05:13.280 align:middle line:84% And he's never stopped examining his own voice and his own set 00:05:13.280 --> 00:05:15.500 align:middle line:90% of presentation in poems. 00:05:15.500 --> 00:05:17.950 align:middle line:84% Once I spoke to Bob about translation, and he said, 00:05:17.950 --> 00:05:20.330 align:middle line:84% "translation solves about the problems of being a poet." 00:05:20.330 --> 00:05:22.880 align:middle line:90% 00:05:22.880 --> 00:05:26.590 align:middle line:84% And I took this to heart as it addressed my main difficulty 00:05:26.590 --> 00:05:31.700 align:middle line:84% with poetry, that is the poet persona that sends up 00:05:31.700 --> 00:05:35.960 align:middle line:90% the parade of ego in the poem. 00:05:35.960 --> 00:05:37.580 align:middle line:84% Translating into the poet one could 00:05:37.580 --> 00:05:42.860 align:middle line:84% engage all the gorgeousness, the depth, the passion, of poetry, 00:05:42.860 --> 00:05:48.110 align:middle line:84% and not be applying it to oneself like a mantle. 00:05:48.110 --> 00:05:50.390 align:middle line:84% Robert Hass's work in translation, especially 00:05:50.390 --> 00:05:54.010 align:middle line:84% in bringing the work of Czeslaw Milosz to an English audience 00:05:54.010 --> 00:05:57.950 align:middle line:84% is I believe one of the great literary labors of our time. 00:05:57.950 --> 00:06:01.790 align:middle line:84% An extraordinary collaboration of two great poets, one of whom 00:06:01.790 --> 00:06:06.180 align:middle line:84% is big enough simply to act as the translator. 00:06:06.180 --> 00:06:08.910 align:middle line:84% This impulse in translation, the jettisoning 00:06:08.910 --> 00:06:11.670 align:middle line:84% of ego in pursuit of the pure poem 00:06:11.670 --> 00:06:14.220 align:middle line:84% is clear too in Hass's own poetry, 00:06:14.220 --> 00:06:18.390 align:middle line:84% in which the poetic persona itself is often the question. 00:06:18.390 --> 00:06:21.150 align:middle line:84% And that the voice that comes of this struggle 00:06:21.150 --> 00:06:24.480 align:middle line:84% is wonderful ingratiating, modest, 00:06:24.480 --> 00:06:28.500 align:middle line:84% confessional without insisting, intimate without entrapping, 00:06:28.500 --> 00:06:31.290 align:middle line:84% and seeming in many poems to vanish altogether 00:06:31.290 --> 00:06:35.040 align:middle line:84% into language and into exquisite detail. 00:06:35.040 --> 00:06:38.790 align:middle line:84% "Poetry" Hass has written, "teaches the pleasure 00:06:38.790 --> 00:06:43.990 align:middle line:84% of attention to detail" and this matter of the world is what his 00:06:43.990 --> 00:06:46.280 align:middle line:84% poems illuminate about the self -- 00:06:46.280 --> 00:06:48.790 align:middle line:90% not the self of the poet. 00:06:48.790 --> 00:06:51.400 align:middle line:84% Hass's continual quest for the poem beyond the self 00:06:51.400 --> 00:06:53.590 align:middle line:84% is the reason that so many of his poems 00:06:53.590 --> 00:06:58.750 align:middle line:84% going back now almost 30 years, remain so luminous and fresh. 00:06:58.750 --> 00:07:00.430 align:middle line:84% A reason too that these works will 00:07:00.430 --> 00:07:03.460 align:middle line:90% stand for a long, long time. 00:07:03.460 --> 00:07:06.130 align:middle line:90% I could go on, but I won't. 00:07:06.130 --> 00:07:09.160 align:middle line:84% So just let me say that gives me extreme pleasure and pride 00:07:09.160 --> 00:07:12.730 align:middle line:84% to present to you on this night, the exact 40th anniversary 00:07:12.730 --> 00:07:16.480 align:middle line:84% of the Poetry Center, a friend, a poet of the moment, 00:07:16.480 --> 00:07:18.670 align:middle line:84% and a poet of the age, Robert Hass. 00:07:18.670 --> 00:07:22.020 align:middle line:90% [APPLAUSE] 00:07:22.020 --> 00:07:25.000 align:middle line:90%