WEBVTT

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Thanks, everybody,
for being here.

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I hope you can hear me
OK in the hinterlands.

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OK.

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It is an honor and pleasure
to introduce Robert Hass.

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I found his work early
in my writing life,

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discovering in his
poems something

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I had been searching for without
knowing what exactly that was.

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It had something
to do with marrying

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the intimacy of the
practice of poetry

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with attending to the world
beyond the self, something

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to do with being a citizen
in the art, something

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about savoring life while
bearing witness to its anguish.

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I've held poems from
each of his books

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as talismans, works
that strengthened

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my belief in the
necessity and beauty

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of this strange and quiet
art form in which we all

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have found something of a home.

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Field Guide came out in 1973.

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Stanley Kunitz, who had selected
the book for the Yale Younger

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Poets Award, wrote, "Some
poems present themselves

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as cliffs that
need to be climbed.

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Others are so
defensive that when

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you approach their
enclosure, you half

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expect to be met by a
snarling dog at the gate.

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Reading a poem by Robert
Hass is like stepping

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into the ocean when the
temperature of the water

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is not much different
from that of the air.

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You scarcely know, until you
feel the undertow tug at you,

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that you have entered
into another element.

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Suddenly the deep is there
with its teeming life."

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The poem that got to me from
that book-- well, of course,

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"Palo Alto--

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The Marshes" with its acute
observation of nature,

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interlaced with the bitter
history and menacing sense

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of the future that dwell
in any American place.

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But really the poem that got
me was "Lament for the Poles

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of Buffalo," which
may be prophetic

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in his long friendship with
the great Polish poet Czeslaw

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Milosz.

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That sequence was written when
Hass was teaching in a night

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school during the Cambodian
escalation of the Vietnam

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War, his students Polish
working-class people

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who were displaced
from their homeland,

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as Hass was at the time
displaced from his California

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homeland.

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Here was a poem of political
urgency, of longing

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for a place of belonging,
and of literary resonance,

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as the night school
instructor brings

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the works of Polish poets to
the citizens who have lost touch

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with their roots.

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It's a brilliant poem and,
yes, easy to settle into,

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taking on such
ambitious subject matter

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without pretense or
posturing, only empathy.

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From Hass's second book
Praise, the poem I have held,

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or that has held me, is, of
course, if you know his work,

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"Meditation at Lagunitas,"
with its unforgettable opening,

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"All the new thinking
is about loss.

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In this it resembles all the
old thinking," and its delicious

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last line, "saying, blackberry,
blackberry, blackberry,"

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that word at once visual,
auditory, and gustatory.

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I learned again and again
from this poem and others

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that the complex
world of ideas can

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fall with crystalline clarity
into images, that images

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can hold the beautiful
journeying of thought,

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that, in spite of
the nearness of loss,

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violence, even the anguish
of one's childhood family,

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one can and must savor.

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As I was pulling
books off my shelves

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this week and re-reading,
I was surprised to find

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in the back pages of
Human Wishes from 1989

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that I had roughly scrawled
out a poem about a woman

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sitting at a window in the
rain in the back pages.

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As Kunitz has said,
words beget words.

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Poems beget poems.

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So thank you for that one.

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I know I'm risking
going on too long,

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but I will risk it
because this poet has been

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as important to me as any poet.

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And he has shown us, as
he said poetry must do,

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what it is to live at this
time as opposed to any other.

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Time and Materials
came out in 2007,

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with its remarkable
"State of the Planet,"

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in which Hass as
environmental educator

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finds in the figure
of a young schoolgirl

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carrying a red
satchel the balancing

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counterpoint to his
documentation of where we stand

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in the long story of Earth.

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Poetry should be able
to comprehend the Earth,

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to set aside from time to time
its natural idioms of ardor

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and revulsion and say in a
style as sober as Lucretius

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something of the Earth
beyond our human dramas.

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In his most recent
book Summer Snow,

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he writes a brilliant series
of poems for the dead--

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not about death
as an abstraction

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but individuals who died as
infants, children, youths,

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the poets lost, the victims of
the Pulse nightclub shooting,

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death a somber and
dignified presence,

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a figure of some authority.

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I know that it's easy for a
wall of emotional protection

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to fall inside us
thinking about the dead.

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But there is comfort in bringing
to them the exercise of empathy

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that is at the heart of
so much of Hass's work.

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Finally, let me bring us to
the matter of this afternoon,

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in which Bob Hass will present
a new collection of poets

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by the great Nobel Prize-winning
poet Czeslaw Milosz.

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There's a poem in Summer
Snow titled "An Argument

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About Poetics Imagined
at Squaw Valley

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after a Night Walking
under the Mountain,"

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in which it's crystal clear
that the long collaboration

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and friendship between
Hass and Milosz

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did not end with his death.

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The poem welcomes
Milosz to the page

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along with Nietzsche,
André Breton, Modigliani

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and his women, armpit,
nipple, a marble

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tomb, and a grassy hillside.

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So please join me in welcoming
Robert Hass and the spirit

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of Czeslaw Milosz.

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[APPLAUSE]

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