Thanks, everybody, for being here.
I hope you can hear me OK in the hinterlands.
OK.
It is an honor and pleasure to introduce Robert Hass.
I found his work early in my writing life,
discovering in his poems something
I had been searching for without knowing what exactly that was.
It had something to do with marrying
the intimacy of the practice of poetry
with attending to the world beyond the self, something
to do with being a citizen in the art, something
about savoring life while bearing witness to its anguish.
I've held poems from each of his books
as talismans, works that strengthened
my belief in the necessity and beauty
of this strange and quiet art form in which we all
have found something of a home.
Field Guide came out in 1973.
Stanley Kunitz, who had selected the book for the Yale Younger
Poets Award, wrote, "Some poems present themselves
as cliffs that need to be climbed.
Others are so defensive that when
you approach their enclosure, you half
expect to be met by a snarling dog at the gate.
Reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping
into the ocean when the temperature of the water
is not much different from that of the air.
You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you,
that you have entered into another element.
Suddenly the deep is there with its teeming life."
The poem that got to me from that book-- well, of course,
"Palo Alto--
The Marshes" with its acute observation of nature,
interlaced with the bitter history and menacing sense
of the future that dwell in any American place.
But really the poem that got me was "Lament for the Poles
of Buffalo," which may be prophetic
in his long friendship with the great Polish poet Czeslaw
Milosz.
That sequence was written when Hass was teaching in a night
school during the Cambodian escalation of the Vietnam
War, his students Polish working-class people
who were displaced from their homeland,
as Hass was at the time displaced from his California
homeland.
Here was a poem of political urgency, of longing
for a place of belonging, and of literary resonance,
as the night school instructor brings
the works of Polish poets to the citizens who have lost touch
with their roots.
It's a brilliant poem and, yes, easy to settle into,
taking on such ambitious subject matter
without pretense or posturing, only empathy.
From Hass's second book Praise, the poem I have held,
or that has held me, is, of course, if you know his work,
"Meditation at Lagunitas," with its unforgettable opening,
"All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking," and its delicious
last line, "saying, blackberry, blackberry, blackberry,"
that word at once visual, auditory, and gustatory.
I learned again and again from this poem and others
that the complex world of ideas can
fall with crystalline clarity into images, that images
can hold the beautiful journeying of thought,
that, in spite of the nearness of loss,
violence, even the anguish of one's childhood family,
one can and must savor.
As I was pulling books off my shelves
this week and re-reading, I was surprised to find
in the back pages of Human Wishes from 1989
that I had roughly scrawled out a poem about a woman
sitting at a window in the rain in the back pages.
As Kunitz has said, words beget words.
Poems beget poems.
So thank you for that one.
I know I'm risking going on too long,
but I will risk it because this poet has been
as important to me as any poet.
And he has shown us, as he said poetry must do,
what it is to live at this time as opposed to any other.
Time and Materials came out in 2007,
with its remarkable "State of the Planet,"
in which Hass as environmental educator
finds in the figure of a young schoolgirl
carrying a red satchel the balancing
counterpoint to his documentation of where we stand
in the long story of Earth.
Poetry should be able to comprehend the Earth,
to set aside from time to time its natural idioms of ardor
and revulsion and say in a style as sober as Lucretius
something of the Earth beyond our human dramas.
In his most recent book Summer Snow,
he writes a brilliant series of poems for the dead--
not about death as an abstraction
but individuals who died as infants, children, youths,
the poets lost, the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting,
death a somber and dignified presence,
a figure of some authority.
I know that it's easy for a wall of emotional protection
to fall inside us thinking about the dead.
But there is comfort in bringing to them the exercise of empathy
that is at the heart of so much of Hass's work.
Finally, let me bring us to the matter of this afternoon,
in which Bob Hass will present a new collection of poets
by the great Nobel Prize-winning poet Czeslaw Milosz.
There's a poem in Summer Snow titled "An Argument
About Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley
after a Night Walking under the Mountain,"
in which it's crystal clear that the long collaboration
and friendship between Hass and Milosz
did not end with his death.
The poem welcomes Milosz to the page
along with Nietzsche, André Breton, Modigliani
and his women, armpit, nipple, a marble
tomb, and a grassy hillside.
So please join me in welcoming Robert Hass and the spirit
of Czeslaw Milosz.
[APPLAUSE]