Zen Luminaries: Poet Robert Hass in Conversation with Jon Joseph & Friends: On His Own Poetry, Japanese Haiku Masters, & 25 Years Working with Milosz

Jon Joseph talks with acclaimed poet Robert Hass about the great Japanese Haiku masters, Hass’s poetry, and his twenty-five-year collaboration with the poet Czeslaw Milosz.

Robert Hass, a Bay Area native, is one of the most prolific and celebrated American poets of the last half century. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995–1997, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Wallace Stevens Award.

Among the early influences on Hass’s work were the Chan-Zen leanings of Beat poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lew Welch. Later, Hass would publish The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). Hass also translated and worked closely with Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz for many years.

From the introduction to Hass’s Essential Haiku:

What is in these poems [haiku] can’t be had elsewhere. About the things of the world, and the mind looking at the things of the world, and the moments and the language in which we try to express them, they have unusual wakefulness and clarity. Perhaps the best way to get to it … is to read them as plainly and literally as possible. In the end, the best advice to readers of the poems may be the advice Basho gave his writers: “Prefer vegetable broth to duck soup.”

From the great haiku poet Kobayashi Issa (d. 1827):

Don’t worry, spiders
I keep house
casually.

Except from Hass’s eight-page poem, “Santa Barbara Road,” in his book, Human Wishes:

Household verses:“Who are you?”
the rubber duck in my hand asked Kristin
once, while she was bathing, three years old.
“Kristin,” she said, laughing, her delicious
name, delicious self. “That’s just your name,”
the duck said. “Who are you?” “Kristin,”
she said. “Kristin’s a name. Who are you?”
the duck asked. She said, shrugging,
“Mommy, Daddy, Leif.”

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.

—Poet Stanley Kunitz

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941 and grew up in San Rafael. In the midst of the 1950s Bay Area poetry scene, Hass entertained the idea of becoming a beatnik. He graduated from Marin Catholic High School in 1958. When the area became influenced by East Asian literary techniques, such as haiku, Hass took many of these influences up in his poetry.

Hass is the author of nine poetry collections, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry from 1995 to 1997, and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001 to 2007. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2002.

Robert Hass is the Distinguished Professor in Poetry and Poetics at the University of California Berkeley.

source: Wikipedia, Library of Congress