SOURCE: An interview in Chicago Review, Vol. 32, No. 4, Spring, 1981, pp. 17-26.

[In the following interview, Remnick questions Hass about his own work in light of his influences.]

[Remnick]:

What was the original impulse to begin writing?

[Hass]:

I just liked the sound of it, I think.

Do you remember what those early efforts were like?

They were all rhymed imitations of Robert Service or Vachel Lindsay. They were very often narratives about my friends.

Was there a point at which you realized that you didn 't really have to use traditional forms?

I sort of knew that early on. I mean I had seen e.e. cummings in anthologies, but I didn't know how to hear the music of poetry without rhyme until I was in high school. City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco published Allen Ginsberg's Howl around that time. I think the Chief of Police banned it as a dirty book so, naturally, we went out and bought it and read it. The music of Howl and then Kerouac's novels, which were appearing then, sent me to writers they mentioned, Whitman and Pound, and I began to get a feeling, a very primitive feeling, for free verse.

What was it about Howl that was particularly inspiring?

Really just the sound of it. No, that's not true. The promise of adventure and intensity. And sex, I guess. Reading was always a little erotic; it carried information of the great world, right. But the actual experience in Howl was so different from mine. I was just a kid and I felt I guess the way high school kids do, sort of alienated from the mob-ethic of high school. So it was attractive, but Ginsberg's experience, the East Coast experience that he described as "vomiting paranoia," of desperation and hysteria, was not mine. In lots of ways the world seemed good to me, and I don't think I understood those poems very well.

Did anyone help you with your writing while you were in college? I find often in high schools and colleges there is a shyness about showing work to authorities like teachers or parents, and what develops is a kind of peer-reading group.

Exactly. There was a bunch of us at St. Mary's who wrote and showed each other the work. I was writing mostly prose. We all wrote both poetry and prose. I had two friends who were very conscious of being poets and whose ambitions were to be poets. Anything that conscious was a million miles from my mind. Anyway, it was a situation in which there were a lot of people in love with writing, and everybody showed each other their work.

What about the value of writing in imitation of other poets in order to learn how in a sense to read and write?

We read a lot of other people and then wrote imitations of them and of each other. You know, this was a random, intermittent activity. We weren't in training or anything. One guy imitated Pound and Hart Crane a lot but they were both too hard for me. I had read a lot of the body of traditional English poetry and, of course, Robinson Jeffers. I had a lot of it in my head memorized and … the poet who mattered to me most was probably Wordsworth, whom I really loved. At the same time, I was taking a course in this great books program in which, instead of the usual course in biology or botany, they gave us a pair of binoculars and turned us loose to watch birds for a semester. They gave us an essay by Darwin and an essay by Aristotle. At the end of the term, we had to turn in our notebooks of observation and an essay on whether looking at things and classifying them was real knowledge or not … In the meantime, I kept huge notebooks full of soul-searching and things like that. Strangely, it never occurred to me to put the two things, the notebook of creatures and plants and the notebook of interior warm-ups and practice to be a writer, together.

I think it might be fair to say that in Field Guide you 've put the two together. And in many of the poems there seems to be a fascination with the names of birds and fish and so on, the very kinds of observation and classification that you did in that notebook.

When I started doing botany and natural history in college, part of it consisted of learning the names of things I already knew, sensually, as familiars of childhood, and there was a kind of power I felt from learning the names. I felt like I was the secret owner of everything that I had come to see carefully enough to be able to give a name to. It wasn't merely a matter of having a label for something, because in order to name it, you had to know it in its uniqueness. And the other thing, I suppose, to return to the theme of California, was that everything was changing so fast. The whole post-war explosion in America was going on, and my study was a way of holding on, a way of making things that I valued stay put. By getting to know one species of grass from another, one species of bird from another, and by knowing the names, they could stay put. I thought.

There is a terrific poem in Praise, "Mediation at Lagunitas," that among other things plays with this idea of names and naming.

Yeah. I think that poem came out of a sudden realization that the word was not the thing. It was something that dawned on me very slowly even though it is the most obvious thing in the world. I always got things like that confused. I read War and Peace and wanted to be a writer because Pierre and Andre had such interesting lives. Somehow I didn't realize that Tolstoy spent all of his time sitting on his ass writing War and Peace—you know the confusion? The poem really came about because a friend came over and was explaining to me ideas in contemporary philosophy about how man uses words because he is alienated from his environment, that we use words because we don't have what we want and that, in fact, language emerges from the difference between here and there. So all language is an expression—not of what I took it to be in my experience of naming and calling the world into being—but rather of saying goodbye to it or come here to it.

Do you recall the composition of the poem?

It took me a very long time to write it because what I first wrote did not seem a poem to me. "All the new thinking is about loss. / In this it resembles all the old thinking …" That kind of philosophical, or general, language didn't belong to my notions of what you could do in a poem. All right, I thought you could do it, you can do anything in a poem, but it made me uneasy. A version of it sat for a very long time unfinished, for two or three months or so, and then I picked it up and finished it in a different version than this and was very unhappy with it. I felt uneasy about it and set it aside. That was three or four years ago. About two years later I was going through some poems and thought, "Actually this is kind of interesting," and saw what the problem had been.

Can you say what the problem was?

It's hard for me to talk about it. I write, "There was a woman/I made love with and I remembered how, holding / her small shoulders in my hands sometimes …" I don't know exactly what I had there before, but I knew the issues in the poem had for me to do with the power, the ferocity of the impulse to be merged with someone. With violence. And it troubled me, coming up against this. I had written another poem, "In Weather," that contained images of violence against women and I thought, "Wait a minute, what am I? A vampire? Why is this coming up again." But I was pretty sure it wasn't the same thing. I thought "In Weather" was about nature-hating, insofar as a poem is "about" something. I had sensed a connection between nature-hating and woman-hating in somebody else, in a poem I heard read, and was trying to feel my way into the poem, and I found it was very easy to feel my way into it, and that shocked me. This poem felt different. I was trying to think about aggression against women, on the one hand, which is real and all around us, and a different and absolutely necessary kind of violence in sexual desire itself. Most of this wasn't very conscious. I was grouping for a phrasing or a music. At just about that time, two things happened: a friend of mine killed himself and a young sculptress whom I had met was murdered. It was one of those times in life when you feel like getting through it is wading through blood. I couldn't think about small distinctions anymore. I just felt sick, so I set the poem aside again. Then one day about a year later I found myself, because I remember what I've written, reciting the poem aloud to myself as I was taking a walk, and the phrasing came to me. So went home and dug out the poem and finished it. That was four years after the first writing. The last lines had to be altered slightly, and then I felt the poem was done. I don't usually work quite that way.

Usually a little quicker?

Oh yes, because after a while it becomes a question of how long are you the same person working on a poem.

Do you think any kind of non-poetic music, real music, has influenced your work at all?

No, I don't think so really. I think very much the influence for me in poetry is poetry. Specifically Wordsworth and Pound and through them Snyder and Whitman and others. A lot of people. Another poet I admire a lot is a sixteenth-century poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, who wrote songs to be sung to the lute. Those songs are a lot like George Oppen's poems. They are very tough, austere poems with plain, rough rhythms, and an enormously subtle discrimination. I go to Wyatt to hear his music a lot because there is no bullshit about it. On the other hand, I love the music of people like Hart Crane and Roethke. I guess there is not one model. What I seem to return to most is Pound in the late Cantos, and Wordsworth's blank verse.

Certain poetic communities like the Beats or the Black Mountain group not only consisted of outstanding poets and poems but also seemed to show the value and sometimes the dangers of such a community. Do you find correspondence with fellow poets about your work to be useful?

Sure. Though after college, when I began to write most intensely, I felt very isolated, and I don't have the habit of a community of writers. That sort of first publication that comes from showing poems to friends is not deeply a habit of mine, and I feel it sometimes as a lack. But I do find it very useful to correspond with friends, and with different people for different things. John Peck is an old friend and, though he knows the experimental tradition better than I do, I think his attitude toward poetry is more formal and more austere. So we get into arguments that are very helpful to me. I remember he said to me in one letter, "I'm not interested in passion; I'm interested in affections. I'm not interested in vision; I'm interested in attention." At that time, working on the poems in Praise, passion and vision were what interested me. I think in Field Guide it might have been affections and attention. I was in a bad way and was trying to probe sources but I felt very unsure of myself. So I wrote back, "How can you sustain attention or affection if they don't come from some vision or some deep passion?" He himself had a kind of Augustinian passion for accuracy, for real clues, you know. I think he was writing "The March Eclogues" at that time and his attitude was that American romanticism was bloated and in its death throes. The fashion was to freight poems with poeticisms, call them archetypes, and ego exaltation. I think he would just as soon have killed it off. I found the problem as he posed it helpful.

In the "Songs to Survive the Summer," there is a section that delineates an entire recipe for onion soup, and as a whole that kind of simplicity, naturalness and directness seems almost Oriental to me. In fact, you have written an imitation of Basho, and Stanley Kunitz has pointed out other poems in which you write either in imitation or celebration of Oriental forms. Have you studied Oriental languages or culture?

I've studied Japanese a little but haven't studied Chinese at all. My interest in Asian poetry comes through what was in the air on the West Coast, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, and then it's central to modernism, anyway, in Pound and Arthur Waley's translations. For a long time I didn't understand haiku. My friend Phil Dow finally thrust it at me. To my eternal gratitude. The attractiveness of it is in the clarity, and the clarity of it is like having a clear head. What you sense about John Ashbery, for example, is that he is really trying to protect himself against all the brain-roof chatter by becoming the brain-roof chatter and by just letting the mind move the way the mind moves when it's doing that. Another tactic for dealing with the same thing is to try to sink into the place where all that noise stops, and that was traditionally the way of the Japanese poet. It is very attractive to me, not so much as a way of writing poetry but as a way of being and of clearing my head of distraction.

A contemporary of yours, Charles Wright, described a certain distance he required of himself in his poems as a kind of invisible pane of glass, a situation that, in effect, allowed everything to be seen but prevented total self-involvement as in so-called confessional poetry. Is there any thought of distance in your attitude toward your poems?

I'm not sure I understand what he meant, but the idea of lacquering the poem, even transparently, and putting it on the wall in a museum so it is a poem, and not an extension of yourself, bothers me. I dislike that idea of art a whole lot. Poetry is a way of living, I think. It's a human activity like baking bread or playing basketball. At least I think it should be. It ought to have that quality. What ought to distinguish it in that way is craftsmanship which is not distancing, though it does throw your attention off yourself and onto the work to be done.

I think his idea is that in some, say, of Anne Sexton's lesser poems, there is too much bleeding directly onto the page, and that is a problem.

I think that's not true. I think the problem with those poems is that they are not close enough to Anne Sexton, not that they are too close. They are bad fictions of being personal. But every poet has his or her own tactic to get to the place where you need to get to write poetry.

Is the self in your poems never a persona?

I think that you never get your whole self into a poem. If there is such a thing as "the whole self." As soon as you say "I" on the page, it is a persona. But every time we speak, it is to some extent a persona: it's not the whole person—at the level of content. At the level of act, the whole person can be speaking. In a good poem, for that reason, this shouldn't be an issue. Basho says that the trouble with most poetry is that it is either subjective or objective.

It should be both?

It should be neither. It should get past the place where those words have any meaning.

Like most other poets, you have in various poems made allusions to other poets and poems. I think one of the things that seems to scare a new reader of a poet like Eliot, whose work asks for quite a bit of previous reading, is this idea of prerequisite reading. Do you sympathize with that fear at all?

Sure, and I felt the same way. When I started reading modern poets, the difficulty of certain poems, not the difficulty created by grammar and things like that but the difficulty created by work I hadn't read, annoyed me. In fact I just wouldn't read them. I'd pick up a poem and it would have an epigraph in Greek and a title in Italian and that was it, I never read it. I had a strong feeling when I began writing that I wanted to write poems that at the level of reference were simpler, though not necessarily at the level of grammar. If it is a hard thing to say, then it's hard to say it and it is not going to come out easy. Poetry is hard in some ways and the society it makes its way in is too goddamn easy.

In what way is it easy?

A terrific example is "Star Wars." In "Star Wars" Luke Sky walker at the end of the movie, which kids have seen 50 or 60 times, is told to trust his feelings and shoot a torpedo, while he is going 600 mph, into a target of around a quarter of an inch. The training that prepared him to do this, in the structure of the movie, was to wave a light beam for a minute and a half. In the traditional hero tales, like the tales of the samurai or the story of Odysseus, the hero goes through a prolonged period of training and then maybe he can trust himself. Chuang Tzu said in the Emperor's court: "I don't want to rule other people. I am going to do something much harder, I am going to learn how to rule myself." And he spent his life working at it.

I'd like to turn now to one of your long poems, "In Weather," and ask about the history of its writing.

The writing of the poem is interesting to me, because I wrote the first section of it, which is no longer the first section, and thought I had written a poem—and liked it. I called it "In Weather." I was living in western New York and I went to the university to teach the next morning and I came back the next evening, read it, wrote a second section, and again thought I was finished. The third day I read the first two sections and wrote a third, the fourth day a fourth, and so on, for eight days. It was mostly written without revision. A couple of weeks before I had been reading a long poem by a Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry, called "The Window Poems," which I admired a lot, and I think the versification of my poem, its way of moving in its lines, came from that. Originally I wrote it in the third person, so it began, "What he wanted / in the pearly repetitions of February / was vision …" which I guess is something that Charles Wright would call a distancing tactic. At first I didn't understand why I did that; it turned out the reason was that the poem was going to deal with some frightening material for me. When I finished it, I saw that it should really be in the first person—mainly so that it owned up to the material in the fourth section—and that involved some small rewriting. I also felt that the first poem or the first section was really a warm-up, it wasn't necessary, so I lopped it off.

Does that happen very often, that the first lines or stanzas or even sections turn out to be a warm-up or slow arrival at the real poem?

Yes.

Is it ever used later?

Well, I never throw anything away.

Much of the impact of the poem comes from the juxtaposition of the various sections. Generally, what is your view of numbered sections in a long poem, how do you want that to work for the poem?

Think of it as a digging with interconnected passages. Some of them are used a lot, some are there if you want to use them, some have been sealed off. One of the impulses I have is to mine the abandoned rifts. Setting things against each other is a way of doing that, and numbered sections is a way of indicating it.

I think the first important poem I know of that uses numbered sections in that way is Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." It's possible that Pound did it earlier. It comes from cubism. What Picasso did was to take all the pieces of a person and reassemble them so that there was a feeling of things being held together under duress in some painting or, by the addition of some fantastic or grotesque dream-element, of falling together in some weird way that seems shockingly natural. Not normal, but natural. Anyway, the technique is by now a sixty-year-old way of indicating this kind of exploration. It's probably also, less grandly, a device like the chapters, to mark a pause and keep the attention from flagging.

A women said to me that she felt "In Weather" was like a Chinese screen, that the different faces of the poem commented on each other, and that pleased me. I had the feeling that a metaphor in one poem was equivalent to a metaphor in another poem on another subject. These aren't things I was entirely aware of while I was writing. To take an obvious example, the way that my life seemed to be a matter of picking up garbage and tending to things that didn't give a damn about me one way or the other in the second section is a little bit like the life of the male part of the innkeeper worm in the third section. There are a lot more. It felt dense with connection.

And you say that you didn 't think in terms of these connections while writing the poem?

No, I wasn't thinking, now I am going to write a section. They came one day after another at the bidding of what went before … I would get a feeling that it wasn't finished and would feel the next thing happening.

Do you feel there is something magical or awesome about that?

I sure do. Yes. What I think is that "the imagination is shapely." It's the ordinary miracle. And artists make themselves available to it. Maybe one of the things that is true about language is that it is our function to be the consciousness of things.

When you sit down to write a poem do you usually begin with an overall narrative or theme or a rhythm or phrase?

Usually a rhythm or a phrase, hardly ever a thematic notion.

How did that happen with "In Weather"?

I had never lived in snow, and I think that the poem originally began "Never having lived in snow / I had not known how it harbored / death in its absences." Something like that. It was the phrase "how it harbored death in its absences" that came into my head, and a feeling having to do with snowfall and skin in the moonlight.

The length of your line in "In Weather" is pretty consistent; it is a short often trimeter line that was used often by Yeats and contemporaries like Philip Levine.

But I vary the line length a lot. "The Return of Robinson Jeffers" had a really long line and then in my later poems I have consciously tried to write a longer line.

Why?

Because the poems started to look like a riddle about how did the moron get to the bottom of the ladder. It was one perception per line going down the page. When I first started reading poets like Creeley, James Wright in The Branch Will Not Break, Galway Kinnell, and Williams, one of the things that seemed terrifically fresh and attractive about them was that there was that one clear perception on each line or broken very plainly across two lines; it was unlike the packed, complicated modern poets—Eliot, Pound, and Hart Crane. It was like a first icy taste of something. That was very appealing to me. It was also characteristic of the Chinese poems. Each line is a clear unit of meaning with one clear image in it. Then, after a while, I felt impatient with it. I began to feel that there were kinds of richness that just couldn't be touched if that was the only way you rendered perception.

Also, once you start to hear a music, you can become a slave to the way you write. You might begin writing in a certain way because it feels right for the way you experience the world. After you do it for a while, you might find yourself experiencing the world in a certain way in order to write about it in the way that you know how to write. And that's boring, and pretty soon you'll start jazzing it up, writing from your will. That's happened with the one line one image thing. The image has gotten more and more bizarre and inflated in the effort to make the perception seem original. When a good style starts to feel like necrophilia, it's best to walk away from it. You know: glitter rock, punk rock, post-punk rock. It's time to try something else.

In order not to get trapped, I think an artist has to keep trying to enrich his means so that all the different ways he or she feels about things are available as materials for the art they practice. (Bad grammar. I'm trying to deal with gender in the language.) Otherwise, you just get locked into a particular way of seeing and speaking and feeling.

When you go back over your poems in the process of revising, do you ever count syllables or work out the metrics?

With some poems I do. Mostly I go by instinct these days. There are really two main elements of music for me, stress, which governs the line, and the rhythm of phrases, which governs the building of the larger structure. Though it's not metrical, the kind of poem we were talking about, plain and clear, relies on stress because there are a lot of pauses while the things presented sink in. If you speed things up and lengthen the line, stress becomes relatively less crucial. And since we have ways of talking about stress rhythm and don't have systematic ways of talking about phrase rhythm, you have to go by instinct pretty much. I mean, you would anyway, but you can't mumble to yourself, I think I'm going wrong here because of such and such, in the way that you can, thinking about stresses. Sometimes I can feel in my own work, or in student work when I've taught, that the powerful part of the writing has a certain kind of rhythm, and when I've gone away from that rhythm I've lost it. I'll maybe call myself back by analyzing the parts of the poem where it seems powerful or interesting to see if I can get back into that music and stay with it until it plays itself out.