Time and Materials - Featured Book - Robert Hass (May 2012)

[William]

So for this month's book, I've chosen (late, I know):
Time and Materials composed by Robert Hass.

Again, I'm sorry I didn't manage a week or so notice on the book, I'll do better next month, I'll choose and announce June's book before the last week of May.

This book won two big prizes, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2008), National Book Award for Poetry (2007). US Poet Laureate between 1995-97, Hass's work is accessible, if considered somewhat academic. I happen to like it, however. And since I get to pick....

For the first poem from him, I'll choose one (as always available from someplace online as well) called:
[http://mamamonk.com/2012/01/20/the-ve...]

A Flock of Restless Noons

by Robert Hass

There’s a lot to be written in the Book of Errors.
The elderly redactor is blind, for all practical purposes.

He has no imagination, and field mice have gnawed away
His source text for their nesting. I loved you first, I think,

When you stood in the kitchen sunlight and the lazy motes
Of summer dust while I sliced a nectarine for Moroccan salad

And the seven league of boots of your private grief. Maybe
The syntax is a little haywire there. Left to itself,

Wire must act like Paul Klee with a pencil. Hay
Is the Old English word for strike. You strike down

Grass, I guess, when it is moan. Mown. The field mice
Devastated the monastery garden. Maybe because it was summer

And the dusks were full of marsh hawks and the nights were soft
With owls, they couldn’t leave the herbs alone: gnawing the roots

Of rosemary, nibbling at sage and oregano and lemon thyme.
It’s too bad eglantine isn’t an herb, because it’s a word

I’d like to use here. Her coloring was a hybrid
Of rubbed amber and the little flare of dawn rose in the kernel

Of an almond. It’s a wonder to me that I have fingertips.
The knife was very sharp. The scented rose-orange moons,

Quarter moons, of fruit fell to the cutting board
So neatly it was as if two people lived in separate cities

And walked to their respective bakeries in the rain. Her bakery
Smelled better than his. The sour cloud of yeast from sourdough

Hung in the air like the odor of creation. They both bought
Sliced loaves, they both walked home, they both tripped

In the entry to their separate kitchens, and the spilled slices
Made the exact same pattern on the floor. The nectarines

Smelled like the Book of Luck. There was a little fog
Off the bay at sundown in which the waning moon swam laps.

The Miwoks called it Moon of the Only Credit Card.
I would have given my fingertips to touch your cheekbone,

And I did. That night the old monk knocked off early. He was making it
All up anyway, and he’d had a bit of raisin wine at vespers.

(From Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005, Harper Collins, 2007)

I'd be interested in your thoughts, Hass can often be noted for taking consideration of language and it's failings in his poems, and also of the struggle to define things like specific colors in words. A poem elsewhere in this book specifically tackles colors, in fact. So have at it!

[Sophia]

The book is on order!

Yes, I see what you mean about his use of language and his struggle to define words.

I have now read this several times to make sense of it – and will probably read it again. First off, I like the way that Hass has used what feels like a stream of consciousness and crafted it into a strong poem with some excellent line-breaks. I like way he uses 'fingertips', I also particularly like the lines:

Left to itself,/Wire must act like Paul Klee with a pencil

and

There was a little fog/Off the bay at sundown in which the waning moon swam laps.

There are some stunning images and allusions here. Thank you for sharing.

I look forward to reading this poet, whom I have always meant to read.

[William]

his use of line breaks is often times quite striking, I agree. I intend to use lots of outside resources and opinions discussing Hass this month, provided I can find enough to share.

[William]

Thoughts on "The World as Will and Representation".

The entire poem is published in this link, along with an interview about the poem with the poet:
http://howapoemhappens.blogspot.com/2...

And a NY Times review of the book, which singles out the poem at the end: https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/bo...

I'm not sure how much hidden thinking there is to this poem. To me, it seems direct and emotionally powerful. I've never dealt with the subject directly, but I had a friend who's wife was similar, and the strain on him must have been immense. Perhaps cleverer readers will find some things in the color or meter than I cannot, blinded by the impact of the poem. The interview (which I read after writing my initial thoughts) is fascinating.

[William]

...this by the way highlights one of the truly splendid things about living artists...you can actually ask them questions..and get answers!

[Sophia]

I read this poem for the first time, yesterday, and was completely bowled over by it! I agree; I don't see that there's a lot more hidden meaning, lurking in the wings.

The rhythm and the line breaks work really well. Further, whilst Hass could have merrily tripped along to a great ending contemplating where we get "our first moral idea/About the world," he sets us up for it, before then, when he sneaks in an allusion to the Aeneid. Thus, he adds yet another layer that well illustrates the tragedy: a child is deemed responsible for an alcoholic mother who is determined to drink.

Yes, it's great to be able to ask a living author questions about his/her work. Although poets, in my experience, rarely have a lot to say over and above where an idea came from. But then, the best art is like that…

[Glenn]

Just read The World as Will and Representation yesterday; by far my favorite poem in the book so far (I'm about halfway through). I like the idea in the NY Times review that the world is perceived simultaneously in public and in private, and that the personal and national somehow fuse together in our consciousness.

My interpretation of this idea in the poem is that the experience of disaster and emotional tragedy in a person's life is lent greater scale simply because it occurs early in life. In other words, it's not that you begin by perceiving the public and private simultaneously. It's that you perceive the private so intensely and traumatically that it takes on the scale of the public world, a national importance.

Anyway, I loved the poem, and I think the book is excellent.

[Sophia]

Glenn wrote: "In other words, it's not that you begin by perceiving the public and private simultaneously. It's that you perceive the private so intensely and traumatically that it takes on the scale of the public world, a national importance."

What an insight. Thanks!

[Sophia]

My overwhelming impression is that Hass is a consummate poet who can write pretty much anything he wants. Indeed, this volume of poems covers almost every form on pretty much any subject you care to name. And the scope of his learning is immense as demonstrated by ‘State of the Planet' (On the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory).

His mood varies: he can be playful as in 'I Am Your Waiter Tonight and My Name Is Dmitri', whilst at the same time intimate. Further, 'Drift and Vapour (Surf Faintly)' manages to be honest as well as wry. His flair for dark humour is very attractive!

He has the enviable ability to take a thing and run with it. He gives the impression that it's very easy to observe something as simple as the image of a "cardinal’s sudden smudge of red/In the bed grey winter words" and to then go on to write about the problem of describing the colour red. Needless to say he manages to do just this in 'The Problem of Describing Color' and much, much more.

Another 'problem' poem attempts to describe trees. Ironically – perhaps because he won't/can't (!) – He tells us that "there are limits to saying,/in language, what the tree did." Further, that "It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us."

It's almost impossible to select a favourite poem. I particularly enjoyed the sequence 'Breach and Orison’, and 'After the Winds'. The latter poem contains this very poignant and all too human observation about Easter morning, which surely is a metaphor for all relationships that have ended, no matter what the reason.

For Magdalen, of course, the resurrection didn't mean
She'd got him back. It meant she'd lost him in another way.
It was a voice she loved, the body, not the god

But if I had to choose just one, I think it must be 'Art and Life', if only because every time I read it I find something else. With consummate skill Hass marries observations about a work of art, its composition, Vermeer's immediate world; and the people eating lunch in the employee’s cafeteria who may, or may not, have been engaged in a relationship with 'The Milkmaid'. Plus - as if this isn't enough - he even weaves in details of what reads like a contemporary one night stand.

Thank you Will for choosing this volume of poetry. I enjoyed it immensely.

[Thing Two]

Wow. I JUST got this from the library. I've been on a waiting list for it since May. Starting today ... late to the discussion as always! :)

[William]

That's ok, I'm late picking a new book, thanks to my move. I'll get back on track in October.

[Thing Two]

Good. It will give me a chance to catch up on my poetry.

[Sophia]

Me too! I still haven't finished reading Fire to Fire