SOURCE: "The Discursive Muse: Robert Hass's 'Songs to Survive the Summer'," in Studia Neophilologica, Vol. 61, No. 2, 1989, pp. 193-201.

[In the following excerpt, Gustavsson explicates "Songs to Survive the Summer," while observing that the poem is Hass's most successful work using a new discourse that breaks with the aesthetics of modernist lyric poetry.]

In the 1970s a group of American poets emerged who shared the common ambition to write a new discursive poetry. These poets, among others Robert Pinsky, Stanley Plumly, and Robert Hass, perhaps the best poet of the group, all reacted against the conventions of modernist lyric poetry and instead they wanted to recover for poetry the virtues of good, expository prose. Rejecting the esthetics of modernist lyric poetry they wanted to write a poetry of the mind that explored the discursive resources of statement and argumentation. The goal was to "have a mind of winter," in Wallace Stevens's terminology: to go beyond the lyric self and to speak about the facts of our common existence in the world. Thus these poets sought in their own individual ways to develop the possibilities of discourse in contemporary poetry. …

Among the poets of his generation, Robert Hass best succeeds in his ambition to write a new poetry of discourse. Instead of limiting discourse to didactic reflection or mastery of tone, as Pinsky and Plumly seem to do, Hass wants to realize the full possibilities of discourse by using it as a means of meditating on our human condition. Hass is also a perceptive theorist who in his essays, collected in the volume Twentieth Century Pleasures published in 1984, sketches an esthetics of discourse that both illuminates his own practice and points to the shared assumptions of the poets of the seventies.

Outlining his esthetics of discourse Hass begins by criticizing the lyric poetry of the sixties. The poets of the sixties, he argues, all courted in one way or another extreme states of mind. They wrote a poetry derived from a sharp division between inner and outer experience; the outer world was rejected in favor of an extreme inwardness, as for example in the case of the confessional poets and the deep imagists. Interestingly enough, in his reviewessay on Tomas Tranströmer's Baltics, Hass places Tranströmer in the category of the lyric poet who, faced by a threatening world, chooses to retreat into his own subjectivity. According to Hass, the lyric poetry of the sixties was then built on a strong sense of alienation, a reaction against our modern, materialistic civilization, and it often resulted in some form of solipsism since the lyric poet tended to get lost in the labyrinth of the self. Hass here draws attention to the problematic nature of all lyric poetry: the fact that the lyric poet's chief concern is not with the larger reality of our common existence but with the emotional states of the self.

The impetus behind the poetry of the sixties was a yearning for the absolute, a yearning for visionary states of mind, accompanied by a disgust with the drabness and emptiness of daily life. However, this yearning for the absolute, this preoccupation with the poet's own subjectivity, severely limits the subject matter of poetry while robbing poetry of any larger relevance for the lives people actually live. Moreover, Hass observes, the lyric poet is doomed to his sense of alienation by the mere fact that he dwells exclusively in his own subjectivity. The task for the discursive poet, on the other hand, is precisely to overcome the modern disease of alienation by anchoring his sensibility in our common everyday life. If the lyric poet distrusts the mind and thought seeking to leap out of time and the world into visionary states, the discursive poet on the contrary relies on thinking in his attempt to understand the world as we really know it. The discursive poet does not want to leap out of the world, he wants to be part of the world meditating on our common life in time. Thus he broadens the subject matter of poetry while making poetry once again a matter of public concern. It must be emphasized that Hass's ideal poet is not primarily concerned with social or political issues but rather with the only permanence we can perhaps know: daily life. The imagination of the discursive poet works within the things of this world instead of becoming a vehicle of inwardness; in other words, imagination works in the service of patient, thoughtful understanding rather than ecstatic vision. Hass can therefore condemn the lyric poetry of the sixties as a symptom of decadence observing that "the artists of decadence turn away from a degraded social world and what they cling to, in their privacy, is beauty or pleasure. The pleasures are esoteric; the beauty is almost always gentle, melancholy, tinged with the erotic, tinged with self-pity." He proposes as a remedy a poetry of discourse that can speak out of an engagement with our "world of days and habits," as he expresses it. Poetry becomes a way of being fully alive to our existence in the world, with one's whole mind and imagination, and the goal is to understand our true place in the scheme of things.

The inclusiveness of the discursive mode arises from the fact that the mind of the poet is free to move in and out of experience. Moments of lyric intensity do of course occur, as do moments of narrative or pure fantasy, but they are swept along and incorporated into the flow of discourse. Hass's model for this kind of poetry is probably Wallace Stevens, the master of discourse in this century. Stevens can be said to be the metaphysician of daily life in that he spent his whole life as a poet meditating on the nature of reality. A typical poem by Stevens consists of a series of statements undergoing endless qualifications and modifications. His poetry records the twists and turns of a mind moving about in the world. Another side of Stevens is his sensuousness, his delight in the life of the senses, and this is also something Hass shares with him. Both poets, then, are firmly anchored in the world of their own experience and both are meditative poets of time using the conversational mode as a means of meditating on our life in time. According to Hass, discourse is a "form of time" imitating life in time, and that is why discourse plays such an important role in his poetry. Discourse enables him to fulfill the dual task he sets himself as a poet: both to record and to understand our life in time.

Hass's attitude to life has much in common with Zen Buddhism, particularly with the haiku poets of Japan. In his essay "Images" he has written perceptively on the Japanese haiku poets and especially Buson seems to be a favorite of his. Hass praises Buson for his alertness to the things of this world and for his freshness of observation. However, this freshness of observation is suffused with a meditative attitude of mind; the act of seeing thus becomes an act of meditation. Buson has a transparent mind purged of all lyric egotism and the amazing thing is that his transparent mind somehow functions as a sixth sense illuminating the world. This also explains Buson's emotional range: he can write about suffering, grief, and joy with the same kind of clarity and quiet intensity. Hass is of course not a haiku poet, nor is he a Zen Buddhist, still in his poetry of discourse he seeks to inform his own some illuminating insight into our human condition.

"Songs to Survive the Summer" is at once Hass's longest and most successful poem. Standing as it does at the end of his second book Praise, published in 1979, this poem in many ways represents the culmination of his development as a poet. In his first book of poems, Field Guide published in 1973, Hass is mainly concerned with the naming of things. Poetry here serves as a kind of field guide helping the poet to take possession of his own world, to stake out, so to speak, the territory of his own sensibility. Hass wanders about in his native Californian landscape observing with sensual delight what goes on around him. He seems to be particularly fond of the fruits and berries that grow in California; many poems also express a quiet celebration of domestic love. Temperamentally Hass is above all a poet of joy who gives his heart to the good things in this life, yet he is very much aware of the presence of darker forces.

The naming of things in Field Guide appears almost programmatic on Hass's part: it is his way of keeping his own sanity in an insane world characterized by war and violence. It must be remembered that most of these poems were written at the time of the Vietnam war. By going back to the essentials of life, by keeping close to the facts of his own existence, Hass seeks in the manner of the Japanese haiku poets to preserve his clarity of mind. It is therefore no coincidence that a group of poems invokes Buson, Issa, and Basho, the three great masters of the haiku tradition. Hass also needs that clarity of mind when meditating on the contradictions of our human condition. The project in his second book, Praise, is precisely to somehow exorcise the terror at the heart of things by giving it a name and a place in human consciousness. Discourse acquires as a result a new urgency and inventiveness; facing the inescapable Medusa-head of human existence, the specter of loss and death lurking within all things, Hass draws on the full resources of his art and imagination. And catharsis now becomes the goal of his art: the purgation of the fears and anxiety inhering in our mortal condition. Hass's development as a poet can then be summarized in this way: first he names the world as it is, then he goes into the crucible of loss, and finally he is able to celebrate the world as it is. "Songs to Survive the Summer" exemplifies above all the last two stages of his development while fully orchestrating the thematics of loss.

To give one's "fears a shape," in Hass's own terminology, becomes both the subject and the goal of "Songs to Survive the Summer." The question of form therefore assumes thematic significance since form is what enables the poet to come to terms with our mortal predicament. In his long sequence Hass uses a fixed form, a three-line stanza, which is quite unusual for him. As most free-verse writers he lets each poem assume its own particular form, but here in "Songs to Survive the Summer" he adopts a given, fixed form. The triplet is then the "shape" he employs in order to organize his "fears." Within the unit of the triplet, a quite simple form, Hass can vary his line length from one to four stresses whereby he achieves a new freedom and flexibility of rhythm. Perhaps Wallace Stevens serves as his model here; Stevens is very much "form's hero," as Hass calls the Arctic explorer Wilhelm Steller, the persona of his sequence. What Steller accomplishes as a scientist, Stevens manages to do as an artist: by means of his craft he gives shape to the formlessness of experience walking around with a "pure exclusive music / in his mind," in Hass's own words.

Hass is very much aware of the need to revitalize free verse as a medium of writing and in his collection of essays he devotes two important essays to this subject. He thinks that free verse: the creative sense of form. Rhythm, Hass insists, constitutes the basis of free verse. The revolution of the fifties, initiated by such poets as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Robert Lowell, has degenerated into an orthodoxy of conventional free verse. In order to revitalize free verse, young poets must regain a creative sense of form because without a vital, living sense of form free verse loses its special energy and strength. If a young poet wants to make it new, to use Pound's famous dictum, he must recapture the very pulse of free verse: the creative sense of form. Rhythm, Hass insists, constitutes the basis of free verse, not diction, imagery, or tone; rhythm alone is the revolutionary ground of poetry. One solution to the crisis of free verse is to do what Hass himself does in "Songs to Survive the Summer": to fall back on a rather simple form, in his case the triplet, and to use this form as the basis for writing free verse. Another solution would be to rely on the shapeliness of discourse, a discourse governed by a meditative act of mind, as Hass's own poetry so well illustrates. That Hass holds strong views about the importance of a shaping principle in free verse is borne out by his comment on Stanley Plumly's notion of tone. To exclusively rely on tone, Hass observes, is yet another sign of the degeneration of free verse adding that because "it has no specific character, we make a character in it." The formal principle for a vital free verse on the other hand derives from what he calls "the shape of its understanding": the movements of a mind weaving a pattern or design out of the particulars of experience. It is appropriate to use the metaphor of weaving here for the form-creating activity of art since Hass himself adopts this metaphor in "Songs to Survive the Summer."

"Songs to Survive the Summer" can be seen as a long meditation on the ever-present fact of death. The situation of the poem is announced at the very beginning: the mother of a neighbor child suddenly dies of an allergic swelling in the throat. The dead mother was a close friend of Hass's daughter who now is unable to sleep because of the shock of this sudden death. The motivation of the poem is then urgently and deeply personal: it is addressed to Hass's own daughter to somehow help her come to terms with the inescapable fact of death. Hass sympathizes with his daughter's fears because, as he tells us in one of his essays, he himself once barely escaped dying of an allergic swelling in the throat. "Songs to Survive the Summer" therefore constitutes his attempt to give his fears a shape through art, or through weaving, the key image of the poem. His daughter has been taught how to weave by her friend who died so unexpectedly, and throughout the poem she occupies herself with weaving. The key image of weaving brings together the notions of death, art, and consciousness; in other words, as so often is the case, death turns out to be the mother both of art and consciousness.

The idea that loss and grief form part of our very lives is emphasized by the epigraph to "Songs to Survive the Summer" taken from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov: "It's funny, isn't it, Karamazov, / all this grief and pancakes afterwards." In his long poem Hass seeks to elucidate this central paradox of our lives by drawing on the full resources of his discursive art, adopting "a collage of different attitudes towards experience," to use his own description of the method that Czeslaw Milosz employs in his late poetry. According to Hass, Milosz's aim in his late poetry is to fully render the contradictions of life speaking through a series of personae in search of abiding truths. In a similar manner Hass adopts different attitudes or approaches toward the central enigma of death in his own long sequence.

Hass opens his sequence by recalling an intriguing memory from childhood. Once, standing under the loquat tree outside his bedroom window, his grandfather gave him a wooden nickel saying: "Don't / take any wooden nickels, / kid." He never understood his grandfather's joke or advice never to let himself be deceived and, even as a grown-up, he still carries around that wooden nickel in his pocket as a kind of talisman. The implication of this anecdote seems to be that there are things in life that cannot be understood but must simply be lived with, such as time, the arch-deceiver and thief, who robs us of every paradise we have; "every paradise is lost," Hass observes in another poem. And finally time will rob us of life itself. Standing under the loquat tree, the tree of life in his childhood world, Hass received his first initiation into the secrets of life. Later on in the sequence, this same loquat tree will figure in another charged memory from childhood.

In order to exorcise their fears, caused by the specter of loss and death, Hass and his daughter sing old country songs together. They try out recipes for soup, the "herbal magic," and Hass even includes an appetizing recipe for onion soup in his poem. He seems especially to enjoy cooking, and eating represents of course the central ritual of our daily lives, a celebration at once of love and permanence. Hass and his daughter also read fairly tales about "spindly orphan / girls" who, although lost and lonely in the world, always manage to overcome their difficulties. However, adult life is very different indeed since the world is full of lost and lonely people. At this point Hass is reminded of a short story by Anton Chekhov: the story is about the widow Maryushka who goes mad when her only son leaves her. Every day she writes a letter to her son where she gives vent to her troubled mind.

"When it is bad, Vanya,
I go into the night
and the night eats me."

In fact the section about the unhappy widow Maryushka is lifted verbatim from the poem "For Chekhov" in Field Guide. Hass, by the way, has a special liking for Chekhov; he refers to him repeatedly both in his prose and poetry. In world literature Chekhov stands as the undisputed master of the pathos of human loss. He writes about lonely and lost characters who are all defeated by life and forced to retreat into their own dreams. An atmosphere of sadness and melancholy saturates Chekhov's work; it is the sadness and melancholy of the universal human experience of loss.

As a counterpoint to the previous section's hysterical reaction to loss, Hass now inserts a haiku to right the emotional balance of his sequence.

What a strange thing!
To be alive
beneath plum blossoms.

This haiku expresses the wonder of merely being alive and in this it resembles many of Buson's haikus. Hass's haiku seems in fact to be inspired by one of Buson's most famous haikus, his death-bed poem (in Hass's own rendering):

In the white plum tree,
night to next day just
turning.

The plum blossoms in Hass's haiku add to the poignancy of his sense of wonder since the plum tree blossoms during such a fleetingly short period of time. Still he is not content with expressing an ecstatic moment of wonder; he also notes wryly that the "black-headed / Steller's jay is squawking / in our plum." The jay occupies a special place in Hass's imagination since it keeps reappearing throughout his writings. To Hass the jay has an almost emblematic value: it represents for him the bird of death. His sense of wonder standing under the plum blossoms is then severely undercut by the squawkings of the bird of death, and he muses to himself: "A hard, indifferent bird, / he'd snatch your life."

Still moments of ecstacy, though transient, are very real indeed; perhaps it is during these moments that we glimpse our true nature and destiny. Hass remembers a vision of transcendence that he once had in the Palo Alto marsh: "sea-birds rose in the early light // and took me with them." Another time he dreamt that river-birds lifted nd carried him away. Visions and dreams are the very stuff of our spiritual lives; they are what satisfies the spirit's hunger for transcendence. Hass now turns to sexual desire, the hunger of our flesh. Sexual desire resembles spiritual longing in that neither can be wholly satisfied. He presents sexual desire as a kind of affliction or sickness that is disturbingly alike the allergic swelling that suddently killed his neighbor….

His sense of sexual revulsion is associated with the oppressive heat of July when flies drone "in the juice of rotten quince," an oblique allusion to the sexual act. At the end of "Songs to Survive the Summer" he will return once again to the knot of sexual and spiritual desire.

Hass now approaches a decisive crisis in his long meditation on death. He almost touches the despair of the widow Maryushka in Chekhov's short story, feeling the intense loneliness of the human heart in the face of pain and frustration….

[In the poem speed or restlessness represents] the modern way of life; it is, in a sense, restlessness that saves us from the anxiety of death. Yet, properly understood, restlessness is the perverted form that the anxiety of death has taken in our time. However, Hass manages to break out of his spell of despair by recalling the achievement of the Arctic explorer Wilhelm Steller, "form's hero" who "made / a healing broth." Steller becomes his persona through whom he can finally arrive at an affirmation of life as an art of survival.

Wilhelm Steller was a German naturalist who accompanied Bering on his second Arctic expedition in 1741-42. This expedition led to the discovery of Alaska and Steller's task was to observe the fauna and flora of the Arctic region. During his voyage to the North he kept a journal where he carefully noted down his observations; the epigraph to Praise is probably a quotation from this journal. Because of his intractable and quarrelsome temperament Steller soon attracted the enmity of the crew, but he was a dedicated scientist who never lost an opportunity to study the wildlife of the Arctic. The voyage was very difficult, full of hardships and troubles, and it nearly ended in disaster when the ship went aground on Bering Island. Most of the crew had already died of scurvy by then and now Bering himself died and was buried on the island. However, in spite of all the hardships, Steller succeeded in naming "all the beasts / and flowers of the north," in Hass's own words. As a matter of fact, Hass's emblematic bird of death is actually named after the German naturalist: Steller's jay. In "Songs to Survive the Summer" Steller's voyage of exploration into the Arctic North becomes a metaphor for the difficult voyage into the great unknown: death. Like his persona, Hass observes and names the great unknown, death, and by so doing he learns the difficult art of survival. The goal is to acknowledge the ever-present reality of death, to see it as part of our very lives. As a final gesture of acceptance Hass imagines that after death all the dead will be saved; after the sufferings and grief of time all the dead will be made whole again outside time….

The dead have a feast, a kind of thanksgiving feast curiously alike the American thanksgiving dinner, before taking possession of their new-found land.

In the next section of "Songs to Survive the Summer" Hass yet again shifts the scene of his poem, this time to a memory from childhood. He remembers how, when he was just the age of his daughter, he sat in the loquat tree eating figs while watching the Pentecostal meetings at a neighbor's house. He sat there in the moonlight eating the first fruits of knowledge, listening to the bewildering songs of spiritual longing, "half / pleasure and half pain." Spiritual longing here appears mixed in a strange way with sexual desire; where there is human desire of any kind there is also pain and frustration. In fact frustration and pain add strength and depth to our desires; in other words, death intensifies life, it is ultimately what gives meaning to life. Yet death is also the great enigma or the mysterious Other of our lives. "Songs to Survive the Summer" can therefore be seen as a wisdom poem; Hass uses this term himself in his essay on Tranströmer. It is a wisdom poem moving towards some kind of healing knowledge. And Hass closes his sequence by summarizing both for his own and his daughter's benefit the chief insight of his long poem….

If we are the children of death, if death sings us, then death is the way we use our lives. Paradoxically, death is at once our fate, and what constitutes our true freedom. To be aware of death, to use our lives with this awareness in mind, is to be fully human: the true children of death. Thus death breathes on us an awareness of our proper destiny in time. Such then is the insight that Hass has wrestled from the Angel of Death in "Songs to Survive the Summer." After his long struggle with the Angel of Death he has received a liberating benediction: to finally enter the only paradise left to us, that is, to enter our transient and imperfect lives celebrating "the steady thoughtlessness / of human use." A curious thing to celebrate perhaps, "the steady thoughtlessness / of human use," yet deeply meaningful for a poet whose central impulse has always been to joyfully affirm our common everyday life.