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When Poetry Meets PoliticsWhat a new Pulitzer Prize winner tells us about age and public writing.

By Nathan Heller
Posted Tuesday, April 8, 2008, at 1:30 PM ET

Robert Hass' Time and Materials received a 2008 Pulitzer Prize for poetry on April 7, making it the first poetry book since 1983 to receive both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. As part of Slate's Book Blitz last fall, Nathan Heller explained how Time and Materials marked a sea change in Hass' approach to political poetry and a turning point in his career.

Time and Materials, Robert Hass' fifth collection of poems, is a book about hitting the cold water of late middle age, but the story it tells is not so much of decline as of reinvention. Hass is in the front lines of a baby-boom generation coming to terms with its past. He was born in San Francisco a few months before the Pearl Harbor bombing and came of age in a cultural landscape overshadowed by Beats, hippies, and the Vietnam War. He got interested in Eastern thought, got subpoenaed as an SDS adviser in Buffalo, returned to California in time for the first tech boom, and eventually taught at Berkeley. The zeitgeist stuck with him like an Al Capp rain cloud even through his 50s: In 1995, Hass—whose poetry features proud regionalism and plainspoken eloquence, not to mention a strong tropism toward sex—became poet laureate during the Clinton administration.

Yet until this new collection, Hass the poet has shied from tackling public issues head-on. His past four volumes (the first, Field Guide, won the 1973 Yale Younger Poets competition; the last, Sun Under Wood, earned him his second National Book Critics Circle Award) focus on the natural world, his private experiences, and the people and places he knows best. His genius lies in capturing not a situation but a consciousness of the situation. That shared consciousness is Hass' bridge to his readers, creating an intimate voice that feels open and unguarded—even when it's not. (Sex aside, Hass' work has a demure, sometimes evasive strain: He'd been publishing for 30 years or so before readers learned about his mother's debilitating alcoholism.) It also imbues Hass' life with a sense of familiarity, if not an outright pang of recognition. From the early poem "Spring":

We bought great ornamental oranges,
Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.
Browsed the bookstores. You
asked mildly, "Bob, who is Ugo Betti?"
A bearded bird-like man
(he looked like a Russian priest
with imperial bearing
and a black ransacked raincoat)
turned to us, cleared
his cultural throat, and
told us both interminably
who Ugo Betti was. The slow
filtering of sun through windows
glazed to gold the silky hair
along your arms. ...

These are not particularly fresh images: The tea is fragrant, the bookstore pedant has a beard, the afternoon light is gold. Hass, a student of the haiku masters, doesn't strain over description. His skill lies in the pacing of thought and images, which mimics the way an afternoon like this settles into memory—down to that distracted glance at the window.

His decision to write in this subjective mode wasn't purely aesthetic. Around the time "Spring" was composed, Hass said that writing "about myself and the world I knew, San Francisco and the country around it, in a fairly simple and direct way" was a response, in part, to Vietnam-era politics. "For a long time I felt a compulsion to direct myself to large issues," he explained. But then public life intensified, and he decided that writing outside the maelstrom was wiser, "a way of being human in a monstrously inhuman world, and that feeling human was a useful form of political subversion." In life, he remained an active liberal, and he mentions protest experiences in a few poems and essays. The descriptions are always uncomfortable, though. Hass in a napalm-plant picket is like a Puritan at a petting party: "Now the wind off the bay bullets your large cardboard sign. ... Pathetic, really, and holding it among the other signs ... you feel sheepish between gusts of affection for this ragtag army of an aroused middle class."

Why wouldn't Hass commit to political causes in his writing? The answer helps illuminate the poet's vexed, often distrustful attitude toward language—and what he's up to in the new book. Hass has described his overarching subject as the "immediate world," by which he seems to mean everything that needs no principles or justification to exist: landscape, memory, the natural order, love, physical desire. Theory and ideology, meanwhile, generally stir his impatience. Language tendentious enough to make persuasive arguments can't report human experience with precision and fidelity, as the poet must. Or, as Hass put it in a 1998 preface to Field Guide, "Orchestrated public violence of the kind that sends people off to war, off to die for a cause, needs to have a terrifyingly loose grip on language. The California landscape ... was a place for me where language did not belong altogether to desire, to human intention."

So it's surprising that Hass' new collection, his first since stepping down as laureate, makes poetry and politics bedfellows. Time and Materials has the look of a catchall, mixing occasional pieces, imitations, translations, and the long narrative poems that are Hass' tours de force. And while the book is, overall, unmistakably Hassian—aging Berkeleyites come to life in rocky West Coast landscapes and an erotic imagination of impressive stamina—its author is also readjusting his approach to language and poetic responsibility. Not only are there explicit anti-war poems of the sort he's disavowed; Hass seems to stray, at times, from his commitment to immediacy.

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Nathan Heller is a Slate copy editor.
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