Introduction of Robert Hass
By Edward Griffin, Professor of English
Since 1986, when the Consultant on Poetry to the Library of Congress was first designated the “Poet Laureate” Consultant, nine poets have held that position. Of the nine Poets Laureate, four have given the Joseph Warren Beach Lecture at the University of Minnesota. They are Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov, and Robert Pinsky. It is a mark of the distinction of the series named to honor our former colleague Joseph Warren Beach that such eminent poets and critics have regularly visited us for the Beach lecture. This evening represents a particularly significant moment, because tonight these four Poets Laureate will be joined by a fifth, our honored guest Robert Hass.
I am privileged to say a few words of welcome to Robert Hass and to introduce him to you. This assignment is especially pleasant for me, because Bob Hass and I knew each other in graduate school at Stanford University and because, like him, I grew up for a good portion of my life in San Francisco and the Bay Area. We even went to rival colleges: Bob basked in the sunlit hills of the East Bay on the beautiful campus of St. Mary’s College in Moraga; I stayed home and shivered at the University of San Francisco, whose campus was perched on the foggiest, dampest hill in that great city of fog and hills. But eventually our paths intersected a bit farther south on the San Francisco peninsula when we both enjoyed the sunshine and palm trees on the campus of Leland Stanford’s ranch-turned-university in Palo Alto.
When I earned my degree, I came east to Minnesota; when Bob earned his, he went farther east to the State University of New York at Buffalo. But before long the lure of the East Bay’s sunlit hills brought him back to St. Mary’s as a teacher, and later down the road to the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently Professor of English. I stayed here on the prairie, admiring and enjoying Robert Hass’ work and career from a distance, but this happy occasion has brought us together again here on the banks of the Mississippi. On behalf of the University of Minnesota, its Department of English, and our benefactors the Beach family, I extend to you, Bob, a hearty and appreciative welcome. We hope that you will soon and often find your back to this land of lakes, rivers, and forests.
Robert Hass won the Yale Younger Poets prize for his first collection, tellingly entitled Field Guide. His subsequent books of poetry have also been singled out for applause and honors: the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America for Praise; the Commonwealth Club Award for Human Wishes; the National Book Critics Circle Award for his 1996 book Sun Under Wood. He is also a marvelously gifted translator—many here will know his translation work with Czeslaw Milosz and his translations of haiku, which were published as The Essential Haiku. Moreover, he writes wonderful, graceful prose: his collection of essays Twentieth-Century Pleasures, also won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
The titles of his books accurately reflect his preoccupations as a writer. He is a poet unafraid to praise as well as to rebuke; the poems are astonishingly precise statements in words about our human wishes, failed or fulfilled; his observations of light and the growing natural world are almost painfully acute renderings of both sun and wood; and taken together, we now see that from the start he has written for us a field guide to who we are and have been in the last half of this century. ‘Tis no wonder that he was chosen Poet Laureate for 1995-97.
He called his acceptance of the post of Poet Laureate an “act of citizenship.” I think he meant that if we are to have a Poet Laureate in the United States—one wonders what Whitman would have thought of the very idea—it should be a position in the American grain, a position bringing poetry, indeed reading itself, into American communities, connecting it with people outside the academies and outside the circle of fellow-poets and the initiate among readers of poetry. I think Whitman would have heartily approved of that idea. So he focused his attention during his “act of citizenship” on improving literacy all over this continent. “I thought it was irrelevant to talk about what a wonderful thing poetry was if you didn’t teach people to read,” he said.
Simultaneously with putting citizens in touch with words, he drew their attention to their responsibility for stewardship of the land and its waters. He believed that this twin-pronged approach, literacy and environmental stewardship, patiently but strenuously applied, could reawaken in the citizens of the republic a dormant sense of community, because it could rekindle their recognition that community itself derives from an awakened imagination. In an interview published in Mother Jones—a journal with a rather different slant from that of The Publications of the Modern Language Association—he explained how these concerns connect: “If you’re imaginatively responsible to the place you live in,” he said, “you understand the watershed. Once you figure out something about the watershed, you’ll find out where the schools are going to hell, and the kids aren’t learning, and there is no money. Social issues, class issues, and environmental issues are all connected.” To the objection that a Poet Laureate was hired to talk about poetry, not social issues, he replied, “I am talking about poetry. It’s like that line from Yeats: I go back to ‘where all the ladders start/In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.’ If you’re going to get up to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost and Langston Hughes and Sylvia Plath you’ve got to figure out how you put people in possession of their heritage.”
Robert Hass is here this evening to talk about poetry and help us take possession of our heritage. Would you please join me in welcoming him to the University of Minnesota?
April 13, 1999
Ted Mann Concert Hall