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Joined: Mar 2010 Posts: 253 Location: Wheaton, Illinois, USA
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 Re: Poetry in Person: Robert Hass I find Robert Hass pompous and posturing. This was the ‘70’s when such behavior was expected of Nuevo-intellectuals. However, he made some good points and made me think about some good stuff.
Talking about nature poems, Hass says,“… poetry was invented in cities, and it continues to be invented In cities.” I’m not sure that is factually correct. Certainly song, at least in the West, was invented in the country.
“I was reading Jane Jacobs …” Jacobs wrote The Wealth of Cities, a book I recommend to any general reader, but Hass either assumes his audience already knows that or they will look it up and maybe be impressed by his awareness of something so other-than-poetry.
“Of course, setting out consciously to write about anything, I’m sure you all know, does absolutely no good.” So, how does one set out to write about anything? Unconsciously? Hass seems to imply that it is some kind of magic. That poets have knowledge not available to just anyone, a kind of gnosis. I am willing to grant that poets have the gift of vision that not just anyone has. They have this in common with all artists.
“The spirit, literally the breath of poetry, is in the vowel sounds.” Yes, okay, the Koine word that we translate as “spirit” can mean “breath” as in “inhalation.” Hass has made, or quoted, a pun. Spirit=essence; spirit=breath. Showing-off aside, this is an interesting point. It is counter intuitive because spoken consonants are also breath dependent. But, those vowel sounds make rhyme for sure. There will be more talk about the sound of poems by other poets later in the book. We will get into the argument that sound is more important than meaning.
The poem featured in this session is “Meditations at Laguntas.” It is a hard poem in that it is not about its own subject and it uses obscure words. I have reproduced it here and added an analysis from Vroman’s bookstore site.
Meditations at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
This poem, I think, is difficult. Or at least it is for me. Again, it seems like it's saying something about language, and how inadequate language can be. The lines, "because there is in this world no one thing/to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,/a word is elegy to what it signifies." suggests that once something is named, it ceases to be what it once was. There's a fundamental divide between the natural world and the cognizant, named world of people.
Except that people are part of the natural world, too. The latter half of the poem is a memory from the poet's youth triggered by a nearly unrelated sensation of holding his lover's shoulders ("It hardly had to do with her."). Indeed, these memories, launched by the feel of a human being, of "her small shoulders," convinces him that "There are moments when the human body is as numinous as words." Numinous is an interesting word here. It means "surpassing comprehension, unknowable." What's interesting is that Hass suggests words are beyond our comprehension, that once we've given something a label, a word, it "dissolves." And yet, here's this woman. Holding his lover, the poet feels a "violent wonder at her presence." Hass isn't bemoaning the limits of language; rather he's celebrating its wonder. The tenderness of saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry is what he longs for, not seeing a blackberry bramble. It's the language, not the thing itself.
_________________
--Gary
"Freedom is feeling easy in your harness" --Robert Frost
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