SOURCE: "Approaching the Fin de Siècle," in The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 200-18.

[In the following excerpt, Davidson evaluates Hass's use of the scenic mode in his poetry, commenting on his skill in evoking the natural landscape and describing its allegorical relationship to a cognitive act.]

The most obvious change that has occurred in the past twenty years (the perennial Beat revival notwithstanding) has been a growing skepticism about the more expressive or visionary claims of neoromantics like Duncan, McClure, and Ginsberg. The elegiac rhetoric of the 1940s and the bardic chant of the late 1950s have given way to a considerably cooler tone and chastened rhetoric. At times, as in the case of "language writing," this skepticism has been embodied in formal procedures (the use of Fibonacci number series, collaboration, the "new sentence," etc.) that limit the role of personal expression. And where a process- or action-oriented aesthetics dominated much of the poetry that we have seen so far, poets of the 1980s have developed more subtle modulations of tone that return a degree of irony and self-effacement to poetry. Though these characteristics are by no means limited to Bay Area writers, they have been nurtured by and in response to many of the issues raised by the expressivist poetics that dominated the San Francisco Renaissance.

Recent writers have taken two directions in addressing the crisis of expressivity. The first, epitomized by the work of Robert Hass (and evident in other local writers like Robert Pinsky, Jack Gilbert, Denise Levertov, Diana O'Hehir, Joseph Stroud, and Gary Soto), derives from Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder and emphasizes an allegorical relationship between the natural landscape and cognitive acts. The second, embodied in the work of Lyn Hejinian and others of the so-called language movement, extends from linguistically self-reflexive tendencies in Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan that stress the productive nature of language in forming the subject. Although these two tendencies have a common emancipatory goal for poetic language with respect to social practices, they differ in the specific ways that language functions in relation to those goals.

Charles Altieri [in Self and Sensibility in Contemporory American Poetry, 1984] has characterized the work of Hass and many of his contemporaries in terms of the "scenic mode." In such poetry (his example here is William Stafford),

[the] work places a reticent, plain-speaking, and self-reflected speaker within a narratively presented scene evoking a sense of loss. Then the poet tries to resolve the loss in a moment of emotional poignance or wry acceptance that renders the entire lyric event an evocative metaphor for some general sense of mystery about the human condition.

Altieri is not entirely happy with the scenic mode in its pure form and sees in a poet like Hass a more subtle working-out of its major presuppositions. Hass is particularly valued for refining the dramatic and emotional features of that "lyric event" so that the "mystery" is grounded in specific properties of voice.

If one of the principles of the scenic mode is its dependence on evocation of scene, one could hardly find a better example than Hass. His work often describes the natural landscape, particularly that of the coast. Hass comments on the importance of this landscape to his poetry in "Some Notes on the San Francisco Bar Area as a Culture Region." It is partly an homage to Kenneth Rexroth, who inspired the younger poet to write a poetry of place, but the debt is acknowledged in a rather roundabout way. In the essay, Hass describes growing up in San Rafael, his Portuguese babysitter, life in Catholic school, playing Little League baseball, the beginnings of his literary career in an essay contest, and his discovery of poetry in an anthology bought with his prize money. In the midst of these reflections he provides a terse statement of poetics:

Art hardly ever does seem to come to us at first as something connected to our own world; it always seems, in fact, to announce the existence of another, different one, which is what it shares with gnostic insight. That is why, I suppose, the next thing that artists have to learn is that this world is the other world.

The essay complements this remark by its meandering, anecdotal quality. Just as Hass wanders among his memories of childhood that led him to Kenneth Rexroth's poetry, so we as readers are invited to discover Hass's poetics along the way. The daily world of a familiar landscape and the exotic world encountered in literature are one and the same, though the former is often invisible without the latter.

The unifying image that holds landscape and art together is the creek that flowed next to the poet's Little League field. The same creek appears in a poem by Kenneth Rexroth that Hass quotes:

Under the second moon the
Salmon come, up Tomales
Bay, up Papermill Creek, up
The narrow gorges to their spawning
Beds in Devil's Gulch.

Rexroth's poem, so active in rendering the specific California locale, links Hass to his past and to the "other world" immanent in this one. This world within the world is not a mystical quotient but something constitutive in the "culture of the West Coast"—a synthesis of place and propositions about the place. It is a synthesis that is fully developed in the work of Wallace Stevens, another poet Hass quotes in the essay. The fish that return to spawn in Papermill Creek are obeying a primitive rite of return, which the essay, in its memorial tribute to Rexroth, imitates. Poetry, landscape, and sexual imperative merge and follow their own instincts, though Hass's procedure is anything but arbitrary.

The essay I have been describing appears in an anthology called 19 New American Poets of the Golden Gate, the title including an obvious reference to Donald Allen's earlier anthology in which the San Francisco Renaissance was first acknowledged as a literary force. Hass follows his essay with a poem, "Palo Alto: The Marshes," that dramatically underscores the influence of Rexroth on his work:

She dreamed along the beaches of this coast.
Here where the tide rides in to desolate
the sluggish margins of the bay,
sea grass sheens copper into distances.
Walking, I recite the hard
explosive names of birds:
egret, killdeer, bittern, tern.
Dull in the wind and early morning light,
the striped shadows of the cattails
twitch like nerves.

This first section of the poem establishes an identity of two sorts: a temporal one between the speaker and the absent "She" (Mariana Richardson, whose father owned the San Rafael land grant in the late 1890s) and a spatial one between both speakers and the tidal landscape. The spatial bond between speaker and addressee is not only geographic—their shared concern for a common landscape—but psychological in that this same tidal region provides the backdrop for troubled dreams of natural destruction and human cupidity. In establishing the literal as well as psychic landscape, Hass acknowledges his close links to Rexroth and Everson, who … read social and theological meanings in the text of nature. And in rehearsing "the hard / explosive names of birds" he continues an imperative in Gary Snyder. But whereas for Snyder naming offers a healthy antidote to human exploitation of nature, Hass recognizes a fatal complicity between the desire to name and the desire to control.

Hass views the historical transformation of the California landscape by invoking the eyes of Mariana, once glimpsed in a picture:

Hass's obvious pleasure in naming birds, plants, and animals is gradually qualified as he realizes his own role in the history he describes, a history that disempowered the native inhabitants of the region, and ultimately, turned the marshes into "brackish, / russet pools" where only "dead bass surface / and their flaccid bellies bob."

The poem quietly chronicles this usurpation of land from the period of land grants and settlement through the Bear Flag War and Kit Carson's raids on Indian villages. By the end, this history (Hass continues to call it a "dream") includes American adventurism in Vietnam:

Here everything seems clear,
firmly etched against the pale
smoky sky: sedge, flag, owl's clover.
rotting wharves. A tanker lugs silver
bomb-shaped napalm tins toward
port at Redwood City. Again,
my eye performs
the lobotomy of description
Again, almost with yearning,
I see the malice of her ancient eyes

Hass recognizes that the desire to describe the landscape in such detail is part of the problem. The writer performs "the lobotomy of description" and feels the "malice" of historical judgment. When he claims that "Here everything seems clear," he refers to the time and place but also to the clarity of historical contradictions that emerge through the speaker's desultory meditation. What began as an attempt to remember the "explosive names of birds" rebounds as a mockery of that adjective when set beside "bomb-shaped napalm tins." What establishes itself, what is "etched against the pale / smoky sky" may be clear to the physical eye, but to the conscious intellect that must negotiate phenomenological claims against historical reality, the scene is quite murky.

Hass concludes by leaving many of the rhetorical tensions in place, much as he sees California as a conflicted dream of natural beauty and human despoilment:

The otters are gone from the bay
and I have seen five horses
easy in the grassy marsh
beside three snowy egrets.
Bird cries and the unembittered sun,
wings and the white bodies of birds,
it is morning. Citizens are rising
to murder in their moral dreams.

These last two quatrains are reminiscent of two other poets of place, James Wright and Robert Bly (although the ghost of Theodore Roethke hovers over the entire poem), in the way that they merge precise description with generalized statement. The final image, in its rather heavy-handed moralism, attempts to transcend the natural hieroglyph of "five horses" "beside three snowy egrets." Of course this heavy-handedness is part of Hass's method—as it is in Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota." Hass deliberately scuttles his own tendencies toward refined imagistic clarity in a moment of apotheosis and bald declaration. It is a sign of impatience, much like the famous "blackberry, blackberry, blackberry" conclusion of "Meditation at Lagunitas," a refusal of equivocation in the face of a palpable sense of loss and contradiction.

In Hass's work, craft is everywhere present yet nowhere evident, a value inherited from his former Stanford teacher Yvor Winters. Where Everson's rocking iambic cadences or Snyder's pared-down imagism foreground the materiality of language, Hass modulates his voice to attempt various dramatic responses to a crisis that is both historical and existential. We "seem" to be hearing a person talking to himself ("Well, I have dreamed this coast myself), but the discursive tone is constantly modified by lyric compression: "The star thistles: erect, surprised, / and blooming / violet caterpillar hairs." Repetition, though unenforced, is operative in producing historical ironies that undergird the poem. The "silver" salmon that Kit Carson finds upon entering an Indian Village return as the "silver" napalm tins; the "dream" of bay marshes shared by speaker and subject returns as the "moral dreams" of a civic mandate. Throughout the poem, the speaker's outrage is tempered by rhetorical balance, a balance that ultimately recognizes its own will to power.