SOURCE: "A Poet's Road Trip along Main Street, U.S.A.," in The New York Times, December 9, 1996, pp. A1, B8.

[In the following article, Clines relates Hass's observations on his two years in the post of U.S. Poet Laureate and its impact on his poetry writing.]

Sometimes he hits upon a lyrical scrap of haiku amid the hum of the crosstown subway. But essentially the Poet Laureate of the United States has put aside consulting his muse in favor of proselytizing Rotarians.

"I thought an interesting thing to do would be to go where poets don't go," explained Robert Hass, heading into his final four months in one of the odder capital jobs, one that he has shaped to become more like a missionary drummer in the provinces of commerce than as a performing bard in celebrity coffeehouses.

"I thought the thing to talk about is not poetic 'uplift,'" he said, "but the fact that basic literacy in this country is in a serious crisis."

With that, Mr. Hass, a celebrated 55-year-old poet and critic, offered a vivid scholarly synopsis of the decline of American literacy as he paid a rare visit to his office at the Library of Congress. He celebrated the "heroic" literacy levels of a century ago, when there was a national hunger to read and general literacy was at 95 percent. He deplored the bleak evidence of current life that finds half the eighth graders in Texas reading at the fourth-grade level.

"This is the Office of Poetry and Literature; this has to stop," Mr. Hass said, in a desperate emphasis of his concern as he sat in solitude in his attic office overlooking the Capitol dome and described his atternpt to be an activist laureate.

Ostensibly, he is one of the more powerless loners among the legions of appointees in Washington. But Mr. Hass chose to resort to the basic stuff of his art, mere words, and to spend much of the last two years in the laureate's post traveling to business and civic meetings across the nation with a straight-prose alarum that literacy standards have been plummeting.

"One thing I found out about this country was that there are thousands of business and service organizations that have to come up with a speaker every week," said Mr. Hass, who opted to exploit the mundane curiosity out there about this figure dubbed Poet Laureate to shop his warning.

In this, he has been politely citing as a most obvious factor the tax-cutting mania so popular with American candidates and voters alike. He is asking community leaders what they intend to do, beyond freezing property taxes, to see that their children can read paragraphs or poems. How well, he asks, will they be able to use their imagination, which, in this poet's outlook and his years of work, is the very taproot of community?

"I had never been to a Rotary Club in my life, but now I've been to dozens," the poet said, recounting those and assorted other civic gatherings. "And, you know, I had the prejudice they're all Babbitts. But I discovered they're downtown business people who raise money for schools, most of them, and I made some friends."

The personal price for that has been that Mr. Hass has mostly stopped creating poems and can barely wait to resume "writing and dreaming" in May, after his tour ends. His new book of poetry, Sun Under Wood by the Ecco Press, is a result of 5-year-old labors. "The life I've led is the opposite of a writer's life," he said. "I've been on the road more or less constantly."

On the other hand, Mr. Hass now counts doubly poetic his new friendship with mid-America moguls like Gordon West, chief of the Bon Ami company, which historically sold its turn-of-the-century laundry goods by offering patriotic "readers," or pamphlets, to an avidly literate America.

"He's a friend of Newt," the poet said, smiling in amazement at how far afield a laureate can roam.

"The guy put up money to bring kids to Washington to read their poems, and he was excited," Mr. Hass said gratefully, referring to a well-attended conference in the spring called Watershed, when the Poet Laureate gathered writers, environmentalists and students to focus on the nation's deep literary tradition of nature writing.

Admitting to "terror" at not writing much, Mr. Hass has made himself jot down something, anything, however light, whenever he rides public transportation here. On long airport rides, he writes 14-line taxicab sonnets. On the Metro subway, the poet—a recognized haiku scholar and translator—concocts "Metro haikus." He declines to sing the results thus far.

He prefers another genre he calls "found haiku," random snatches of overheard dialogue from life that serendipitously ring with the 17-syllable haiku formula.

"Two guys in $500 overcoats get on at the Farragut North Station," he recounted, merry-eyed at one gem. "And one says to the other, 'Well, if he had been focused, he wouldn't even have considered it.' Seventeen syllables!"

The poet sounds more like a lepidopterist in offering narrative glimpses of what he sees and hears in Washington life.

"Flying here, I see whole planefuls of guys with laptops coming in, furiously writing these arguments about, you know, why they should keep letting the whole in the ozone get bigger for five more years," he said. "I see what the business is here. It's the hustle, the business of lobbying."

The poet has had scant contact with the city's politicians, but when they inevitably pump his hand and croak, "Nice to see you!" Mr. Hass thinks that he has fathomed their art. "They shine on each person they meet."

He was touched when one senator suddenly admitted envy, taking the poet aside, Mr. Hass recalled, to confess: "I don't have time to think, to read. I'm just responding all the time. I would love to have your life."

As a roving missionary for literacy, Mr. Hass can still flash the striking phrase. As a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he cites reams of statistics on the fall of his state's public school standards after the freezing of property taxes a generation ago.

"They put a lot of disposable income in peoples' pockets," he said.

"They generated a restaurant boom. California cuisine was created, smoked salmon and arugula," he continued in mock exultation, then starkly drove his point home: "It's perfectly clear what happened. People were eating their children."

Summarizing this blunt laureate's song, Mr. Hass said, "My mantra was, capitalism makes networks. It doesn't make communities. Imagination makes communities."

The poet will spread this word into the spring and then quit his Rotarian rounds. "Did it do any good?" he has to ask. "Was I wasting my life? Should I have been home writing poems? It's like teaching. You have no idea."