Robert Hass's TIME AND MATERIALS
Imagine Billy Collins trapped in a library of classic literature for a year–and the poems he would write after his escape. That would be TIME AND MATERIALS, the latest poetry collection by Robert Hass. When I was in the graduate writing program Stanford, Hass had passed through not too many years earlier but his reputation lingered–particularly his dissertation on Dostoevsky (which I must fact-check). His first books of poems, FIELD GUIDE, was well received, and his poems have only gotten denser, in a good way. Hass is a true literary man, adept in translations, an artist in metaphor, and with literary investigations (Milosz, Horace, Goethe, Transtromer) wide-ranging enough to make one feel adrift in a very small boat of one's own reading.
His new poems need to be read in very quiet moments with your full powers of concentration. I tried that yesterday morning, at 6 a.m., after I had made a crackling fire in my fireplace (it was -22 below up north in Minnesota), and with a strong cup of coffee in hand. One of my favorites was "Ezra Pound's Proposition" (linking child prostitutes in Bangkok to the World Bank). Another, "I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri", a nod to John Ashbury's poem, is a funny, extended geneaology of a modern young waiter 'who may very well be great-grandson of the elder Karamazov brother.' That and a couple of other Hass poems cleared my head. For a moment in my quiet, pre-dawn house I had a shooting star flash of insight into what good poems do: they remind us that the half thoughts, the fragments of apprehension, the eighth notes of understanding, the shards of insight that we quickly let go of as crazy, dangerous, or too crushingly sad to think again let alone say aloud–that these are in fact the truth of our lives.
I teach writing in college as well as high school. I enjoyed your short story collection very much (A Gravestone Made of Wheat). I am from Duluth, MN, living in Ohio now, and can sympathize with how cold it is up there right now! I look forward to reading your blog on a regular basis! Merry Christmas!
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My favorite Robert Hass poem is "Dragonflies Mating." I just discovered him actually, when I was trolling Poetry.org. He reminds me of Robert Frost a bit the way he uses poetry to tell stories of Native people. How beautiful is this:
"The people who lived here before us
also loved these high mountain meadows on summer mornings.
They made their way up here in easy stages
when heat began to dry the valleys out,
following the berry harvest probably and the pine buds:
climbing and making camp and gathering,
then breaking camp and climbing and making camp and gathering.
A few miles a day. They sent out the children
to dig up bulbs of the mariposa lilies that they liked to roast
at night by the fire where they sat talking about how this year
was different from last year. Told stories,
knew where they were on earth from the names,
owl moon, bear moon, gooseberry moon.
One almost swims in his words, and this poem for me, really transports me. I can't even describe really, what it is about it, a sort of musical quality, especially when one reads it aloud. I don't know why, but he also reminds me of Louise Erdrich's prose (I know, doesn't make sense, maybe because of the Native American theme in this poem. I get a real sense of what it is I am missing, because city life is too busy and too loud, and sounds rough and fast like Carl Sandburg's "Chicago". Sometimes I just like to get lost in my Rilke or my Wordsworth and Keats. There is another fellow I like quite well, wrote a poem called "Northern Lights" by the name of Mark Jarman:
"They were all white, passing through their stages
In sheets and ladders, rivulets and falls,
White—a dream of color or an aftermath
Of color stripped to gauze and gossamer,
A white electric squall in half the sky,
Epiphany for the blind, and veils of tears.
Magdalene’s tears. The tears that Jesus wept.
What draws them forth? Mortality and laughter,
The sad and funny fact that you will die
And that you’ve made your children, they will die.
Do they hold that against you? My parents made me.
They went ahead and made me, child of love,
Child of a loving union, which would end,
But which I grew up thinking would not end..."
the rest is at http://www.rattle.com/blog/2008/11/northern-lights-by-mark-jarman/comment-page-1/
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what is your favorite story.?????
-<3-
mariah
lynn
likens
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