A Man for All Seasons

Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass, a former US poet laureate, draws on his lifelong observation of nature in and around the Bay area. Photo by Shoey Sindel

Some might bristle at being labeled a regional poet. Not Robert Hass. During a career that’s spanned more than 40 years, the former US poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author has returned again and again to the landscape of his native California for inspiration. His work, which frequently celebrates the unfolding of seasons, draws on his lifelong observation of nature in and around the Bay area.

“I’ve always loved and been curious about the natural world,” says Hass, who will be the featured guest at tonight’s Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading at the Castle. “It’s been a continuous source of pleasure in my life, and it’s always seemed to me a gift to get to know the life of the places where I’ve lived.” Growing up in Northern California, home of naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir and the birthplace of other environmental organizations as well, Hass says, “one would have to work at not being interested in the environment.”

Hass’ poems are celebrated for their clarity, their closely observed imagery, and their conciseness. Now 74, he is one of the most widely read contemporary poets and has won nearly every prize imaginable, among them a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, a National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Last year he received one of the literary world’s most celebrated honors, the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Award bestowed by the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” During his tenure as US poet laureate, from 1995 to 1997, Hass was commended for his efforts to promote literacy and the environment. He is the cofounder of River of Words, an innovative program combining science and the arts for children.

Hass is characteristically modest about his literary accolades. “I’ve been very grateful whenever I’ve gotten that kind of acknowledgment, especially from my peers in the art, but then you get on with it,” he says. “It hasn’t made your work any better or worse, and you still have to just get down to it. I think I’ve noticed, in myself, and in others, that the sting of not getting a prize is much more stimulating.”

An English professor at UC Berkley since 1989 (he continued teaching while poet laureate, commuting from Washington each week), Hass says he tries to write almost every day. “I tend to write poems, work on long poems or poem sequences in bursts, and then take forever living with them until they feel finished, or at least until I feel they’re finished with me.” He says some poems percolate for years before they’re done, while others “come to me of a sudden from nowhere.”

A highly regarded translator, he spent more than 25 years translating the work of his friend Czeslaw Milosz, a Nobel prize–winning Polish poet. Hass is also the author of The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, a translation of the work of three masters of the poetic form.

He says that as a young man he was dismissive of haiku, once telling a friend that he thought haiku were “the stuffed animals of poetry.” His friend responded that he was an idiot and promptly handed him the first volume of R. H. Blyth’s acclaimed four-volume study of haiku. From that point on, Hass says, he was hooked.

Translation, he says, makes one a better poet. “It’s the intensest way to study another poet, and it’s bound to give you other eyes to see with, sensibilities to absorb and struggle with.”

Critics and fellow poets have long expressed admiration for the stealth-like quality of Hass’ work. The late Stanley Kunitz wrote that “reading a poem by Robert Hass is like stepping into the ocean when the temperature of the water is not much different from that of the air. You scarcely know, until you feel the undertow tug at you, that you have entered into another element.” Reviewing the poet’s latest collection, The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems (Ecco/Harper Collins, 2010) for the New York Times, David Orr compared reading a good Hass poem to “watching a painter whose brush strokes are so reassuringly steady you hardly notice how much complex and unsettling depth has been added to the canvas.”

Former three-time US poet laureate Robert Pinsky, a College of Arts & Sciences professor of English and a former classmate of Hass’ at Stanford, has been trying to bring his friend to campus for years. “Bob knows a lot and notices a lot and never shows off about either one,” Pinsky says. “The surface of his work is disarming, the range great.”

Also reading at tonight’s event is Meg Tyler (GRS’04), a College of General Studies associate professor of humanities and chair of the Institute for the Study of Irish Culture at BU. It’s a fitting pairing of poets. Like Hass, Tyler writes often about a particular geographical place—in her case, the rural landscapes of Ireland. She’s traveled to Ireland and back four times in ten months, and says that “the landscapes of Connemarra, Sligo, and the North Coast permeate my dreams.” Next year she will teach at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queens University in Belfast on a Fulbright Scholarship. Tyler says that tonight she plans to read poems from her new manuscript, provisionally titled The Field of Calls. The poems, which she describes as “written in a fury of inspiration in the last year,” focus on the heart’s yearnings, the vulnerability people experience in love, and those far-flung, Irish landscapes.

The author of a scholarly work of Nobel laureate Heaney’s poems, Tyler says her work has been influenced by Heaney and by other Irish poets, including Michael Longley, William Butler Yeats, and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. “What I love is their commitment to saying things in highly stylized ways and paying tribute to the wonder in the world without overlooking its violence, the wretchedness of political and religious strife. Beauty wins out, but the other things are not neglected or diminished,” says Tyler.

The Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading usually invites a noted poet and a recent Creative Writing Program alum to read, and while Tyler isn’t a program alum (she earned a PhD in 20th-century American, British, and Irish poetry), she took Pinsky’s poetry workshop as a student, an experience she found transformational. Poems, she says, “shifted from being things outside me to something that could be made in the furnace within.”

Tyler says that for her, writing is born out of an urgency. “The poems come out of who knows where and their presence is insistent. When I write, it is because I have to—I am unable to get on with anything else until I set the words down.”

That theme is echoed by Hass. “Nobody really cares whether you write poetry or not,” he says, “so you have to want to do it.”

The Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading, featuring Robert Hass and Meg Tyler, is tonight, Monday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m. at the Castle, 225 Bay State Road. The event, presented by the College of Arts & Sciences Creative Writing Program, is free and open to the public.

The Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading is funded by Nancy Livingston (COM’69) and her husband, Fred M. Levin, through the Shenson Foundation, in memory of Ben and A. Jess Shenson.