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A Conversation With Robert Hass

By Susan Ives

Poet Laureate Robert Hass has lived most of his fifty-five years in his native California. Its landscapes have greatly influenced his poems and his quest to connect human language to the natural world. Named America's Poet Laureate in 1995, Hass is the first writer from the West accorded that honor, succeeding such renowned writers as Robert Frost, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, Joseph Brodsky, Mona Van Duyn, and Rita Dove.

Hass sees the Poet Laureateship, he says, as a way to "blow on the coals" of America's tradition of nature writing. Earlier this year he hosted a landmark conference at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., called "Watershed: Writers, Nature, and Community." An expressed goal of the weeklong conference was to champion a concept of community values that extends to the natural world. He spoke of his work, and of the time-honored connection between American writers and the land, from his office at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is a professor of English.

Q You obviously derive much of your inspiration from the land. Can you speak of that relationship--between the poet's work and the natural world?

A Well, when I started writing, I was very interested--somewhat self-consciously interested--in using a sense of place in my work. One reason was my passion for natural history. I'd learned the same lesson from the traditions of natural history and the traditions in poetry that interested me--which was to pay attention.

So when I started writing, it seemed to be important to rediscover that sense of place, partly because Americans had been losing the organic relationship to, or intimate knowledge of, the places they inhabited. That seems to me destructive, and it was a conscious starting place for me.

Q The writer Olaus Murie speaks about one's "place of enchantment." Do you have a place of enchantment?

A At this point in my life, I have lots of places of enchantment. But I grew up in around San Francisco, and particularly Marin County, so those hillsides in the late summer with winds blowing through, shaking the wild oats...I love this place. I grew up gifted by this landscape. But I think everybody has their own sources of inspiration. For my wife, who's also a poet, junked car yards, and scrap metal yards--that's pure poetry material for her.

It makes me feel alive to be in the natural world. A well-known poem by Gary Snyder, about climbing the Sierras, begins, "No one loves rock, yet we are here." There's something about being in environments that aren't shaped by human will that makes me feel more alive.

Q A sense of place seems to be inspiring many writers at this time. We're seeing a lot of books and stories about home landscapes, personal places. Why do you think that's happening?

A It's always been a strong theme in American writing, but it's been largely overlooked in the academic world until recently. In the canons of literature, what are the books people must read? Everybody has to read Mark Twain and Herman Melville in school. How come everybody doesn't have to read John Muir or Aldo Leopold or Rachel Carson? Or why doesn't everybody have to read Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia?

If there's anything that's particularly characteristic about American civilization, it's that we developed this strain of nature writing that was a mix of science and literature. Thoreau and Muir between them put it right in the center of the American imagination. You can't make an account of the American experience without them. So nature writing is a very powerful tradition in American writing--not just in Thoreau but in lots of writers. Who would Faulkner be without Mississippi or Hemingway without northern Michigan?

Q Perhaps people are looking for some sort of identity that's rooted in the land at this time when we're so urbanized and mobile? A new sense of community?

A Yes, something like that. Our lives often require a mobility that doesn't allow for a very natural connection with the land or family or community. People are typically more deeply connected to their networks of business or professional associates than they are to any other institution, except maybe their children's schools. As a result, there's a tremendous hunger to "reinhabit North America," as Gary Snyder says. I think we haven't begun to learn how to live on this land, but that people are feeling a powerful need to connect to place.

Communities begin with some common love of place. In America, our common wealth has always been connected in one way or another to the land. You belong to Iowa because you're on the Iowa River, or to this bit of grassland in Washington because you're on Puget Sound. We need to see ourselves in relationship to the biological communities we live among. To make our communities work better, we have to begin by teaching our children to be nature literate.

Q Can you describe what you mean by "nature literacy"?

A By nature literacy I mean literally knowing the plants and animals of your region, knowing your watershed and how it works. It seems to me that this knowledge ought to be a fundamental part of our educational system, and it isn't. Everything is divided up into disciplines. Literature is over here, art over here. Now we're going to do science, now history, now mathematics. But when and how do we learn what we're walking on? That kind of knowledge should be taught, or else it's only absorbed accidentally, as I did from being outdoors. I'm only just now learning to be able to read landscapes.

Q How do you think we learn about our land as Americans?

A For the most part, I think we don't learn about it, or hardly at all. Schools try to teach kids what three parts Gaul was divided into and what the Roman Conquest was. But for the most part, they're not taught to be literate about the places they live in. We learn about it from experience, if anything.

There is a school in Oregon that now teaches kids--in increasing levels of sophistication through all eight grades--about salamanders, because these creatures are intimately related to the weather and the entire ecology of that county. You can begin anywhere, with the earthworm or the salamander. In theory, through increasingly sophisticated thinking about the interconnectedness of life forms, weather, and environment, kids will learn about other examples of humans encroaching on natural systems. This teaching method can give kids a pretty deep sense of the place where they live.

Q What's the basic job description of the Poet Laureate, and how have you shaped it around your own concerns?

A The job description is that you give a poetry reading and a lecture, and that you arrange a literary series for the Library of Congress. That's the whole job description. But if you agree to the job, in effect you get lots of invitations to speak and do other things. You become the proclaimed spokesperson for American writers for the year or two that you serve. It's a job that you make up out of the opportunities that are available.

Q Have you made the Poet Laureate job a kind of bully pulpit for the environment?

A Well, not so much for the environment as a political cause--it wouldn't have been appropriate--but for this tradition in American writing. You can't talk about American writing without talking about the land. The Library of Congress people were a little nervous about anything that might be interpreted as political advocacy, which was understandable. But as I argued to them, there's no way to make an account of who we are as a people without thinking about the way we've thought about this land. As Poet Laureate, I felt one of the things I could do was to call attention to and really encourage, to blow on the coals of this tradition of writing. How do you talk about Willa Cather and not talk about the prairie? How do you talk about the prairie without talking about sustainable versus industrial agriculture--preserving what made a prairie survive?

I see a natural alliance between the arts and environmentalism--both of which are under attack in the present political climate--and I'd like to strengthen it. People who are doing scientific or political work on environmental issues often feel cut off from, or in some cases distrust the literary tradition. They need to make connections with writers who are hooked up to one of the traditions in American nature writing. And literary folk should be able to turn to the political and scientific traditions.

Q One of your projects as Poet Laureate was a series of events called "Watershed: A National Celebration of Writers, Nature, and Community," including a conference at the Library of Congress that brought together many of this country's leading nature writers, poets, and environmental activists. What was the impetus for this program?

A I felt I should try to put something together that reflected me. Because I'm the first Poet Laureate from the West, with Western literary interests, it seemed like a natural thing to do. A second impetus was to try to offer a different perspective on community values, one that extends to the natural world. And a third was the educational mission of the laureateship. I thought I could tie all these to the notion of nature literacy. This was the grand idea. I knew that getting people together to talk for a week wasn't going to accomplish great goals, but it could at least raise the issues.

Q You chose the theme of "Watershed." Was this a metaphorical idea?

A In one way, it's a metaphor. It's dramatic to say, "This is a watershed moment." But it's also a fact. What we live on is a watershed. The depth of our ignorance of our relationship to place is always measured by our lack of understanding of our watershed. What it is, where and how it is. I've learned that when I'm in a new place and I want to figure it out its morphology, its geography, the first thing to determine is what watershed it's in. If you want to determine how appropriate a lifestyle is for the land you're living on, find out where the water comes from. In many ways, the watershed seemed like a core concept for basic nature literacy.

Q A number of young writers and artists attended the conference. How did you involve these children and what was the result?

A One hope in getting all these writers and community environmental activists together was that the conference would have a ripple effect. Another way to ensure this is to get to children in the schools. So we set up the "River of Words" national poetry contest, and invited children from kindergarten through senior year of high school to submit works about their watershed--poems, paintings, or drawings. We received about 8,000 poetry and art submissions from all over the country, from every state in the Union, I think.

The contest's aim was to encourage nature literacy. A wonderful organization called the International Rivers Network helped me put together a teaching guide, with suggestions drawn from teachers' experience about how to organize grade-appropriate field trips and other experiments to give kids a sense of their watershed. We gathered various teaching models like the one in Oregon and assembled them into a packet for teachers. The idea was to model a kind of education in which kids would express their feelings for nature in one art form or another. Then, when this art was publicly displayed in libraries or art centers, it would become part of the whole community. I hope it will become part of every school curriculum to prepare kids for the contest by doing some kind of watershed education.

Q As Poet Laureate, have you been involved with other activities that connect poetry and the land?

A We've done a lot of events around the country. One was a daylong event in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. There were several thousand people there, including lots of writers and activists. And there was a "river of words" sculpture by Shane Eagleton, a wonderful wood carver who went to the park after a big winter storm, when hundreds of trees fell. Out of the broken tree shapes he made great curving slabs, then shaped them into a 50-foot-long "river" of wood, and I made a kind of poem with a phrase for each of the pieces. I had to shape the phrases for each so they fit on each piece of wood. On a long bough, I put "long water always flowing, always in silence, always in surprise." On another of these broken pieces I put "water read mind." On another one, "she fought the current." Or just odds and ends of water-related phrases. People can make rubbings on the sculpture, or make their own poem by reassembling the lines--kind of a wood mural version of magnetic poetry kits that people put on their refrigerators. The sculpture will be taken to Earth Day and watershed events in the future.

Q I once heard you say that you wanted to make a difference. Can you do this as a poet, through your writing?

A I think one of the things that nature poetry does is to open people to imagining something larger than a social or political movement. We could hope that would also make us better stewards of the places where we live, but I don't think poetry is moral. That's why I never really think of myself as an environmental writer, going out and telling other people why they should save nature. Poetry is wilder than that. You don't know what's going to come to you. You can't monitor it. Poetry that modeled appropriate behavior in relationship to nature would not be interesting because it would be ransacking itself for acquired judgments of what's appropriate. What makes poetry interesting doesn't come from the socialized part of you that knows what appropriate behavior and appropriate thoughts are.

Q What do you chiefly hope to accomplish as Poet Laureate?

A This was new territory for me. I thought that if I was going to serve in this position I could try to convey to people a sense of how exciting American writing is at this time, and how much it speaks to the way we live on the American earth. Even though this is a temporary job for me, I hope I can beam a little bit of attention in certain directions.

I do hope that we can find a way to sustain the "River of Words" contest and make it a national annual event. It could actually make a difference, in that when we talk about community, our children would immediately understand that it has to do with the place they live, how they live there, what they value. Wouldn't it be great if the next few generations of kids understood that part of what they're going to be doing with their lives is helping to create a community and its values? And that natural ecosystems will be a big part of how the community shapes its own future?

Q You mentioned that you had been "gifted" by your landscape. Did you mean a gift as in a talent, or something that you're giving to other people?

A I think that they are sort of indistinguishable. They say writers are gifted, which usually means that they have some talent. But they've also been given a gift--they read something if they're writers, or heard something if they're musicians, or saw something if they are painters, that shook them and transformed them and made them want to create. In that way they were gifted and they have to pass on the gift.

In a similar way, I'm sure that many people who are involved with the Trust for Public Land are moved by a kind of creative spirit. Something of such significance has happened in your relationship to place or to the natural world that you have to find a way to pass it on. The sense of urgency about not having that lost to future generations. Everybody who feels something this strongly has been gifted and is trying to give the gift back.

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Land & People, 1996
Susan Ives is Vice President and Director of Public Affairs at the Trust for Public Land.