ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 24, 1997 TAG: 9703250045
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE THE ROANOKE TIMES
HE HAS visited schools and Rotary Clubs. Given interviews. Written his own weekly newspaper column and, in his own words, "been on airplanes, to the ruin of my family life, for the better part of two years."
And, incidentally, kept his day job.
If Robert Hass, poet laureate of the United States for just a few more months, has failed to leave a lasting imprint on the country's cultural landscape, it isn't for lack of trying.
Hass, whose official duties as poet laureate conclude later this spring, stops in this week at Roanoke College, where he will meet with students and give a public lecture and a reading.
Asked recently to assess his two-year tenure, Hass - who also is an essayist, critic, grandfather and professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley - said: "I certainly did the best I could.
"You ask yourself, 'Was it worth it?,''' said Hass in a telephone interview from his office at Berkeley the day after returning from yet another trip. "What you end up saying is, 'It's better to have tried.'''
And tried. Indeed, given the job description, Hass' efforts have gone far beyond the call of duty.
The poet laureate position, started in 1937 as an advisory chair in poetry at the Library of Congress, requires little of its occupants beyond a single lecture and a poetry reading per year at the Library of Congress. It carries a $35,000 stipend.
Previous laureates include poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren and the Russian-born Joseph Brodsky - who advocated placing poetry anthologies alongside the Gideon's Bibles in hotel rooms.
"The poet laureate has very minimal duties, by design," said Prosser Gifford, director of scholarly programs for the Library of Congress. Whatever use the laureate makes of the office beyond the basics, Gifford said, is up to her or him.
Hass - like his immediate predecessor, Virginia's own Rita Dove - has not only used his office, he has all but worn it out.
Dove was reportedly hospitalized twice for exhaustion during her two-year stint - which included appearances on "Sesame Street" and "A Prairie Home Companion."
Hass seems to have his own compass set on middle America: He has spoken to dozens of civic groups, not only in the nation's cultural hubs but in the likes of Kansas, Maryland, Tennessee - and Southwest Virginia.
He comes to Salem at the invitation of Roanoke College English Professor Robert Denham - who heard Hass give a talk on Western culture a decade or so ago.
"It was just pretty close to brilliant, I thought," said Denham, who runs the college's Donald L. Jordan series of lectures in the humanities. "I was kind of blown away by it."
When Hass was appointed poet laureate, Denham recalled the lecture and wrote to Hass about speaking here.
By that time, he said, Hass had an agent - and a $6,000 fee. "I didn't quibble," said Denham of the latter.
Hass, a native of the San Francisco Bay Area, will spend three days in Salem, giving a public lecture Tuesday and a reading Wednesday.
The 56-year-old writer is the author of four books of poetry, most recently "Sun Under Wood," published in 1996 by Ecco Press. "Sun Under Wood" won a National Book Critics Circle award last week.
His first book, "Field Guide," won the Yale Younger Poets competition in 1973 - while a 1984 book of essays, "Twentieth Century Pleasures," also won a National Book Critics Circle award.
In "Twentieth Century Pleasures," he describes winning a gift certificate to a bookstore in the eighth grade - and using it to buy a collection of American poems.
"To my disappointment, almost everything in the book was incomprehensible to me," Hass writes. "But there was one poem I liked. I liked it so much, if 'like' is the word, that it made me swoon, and made me understand what the word 'swoon' meant. ... It was the first physical sensation of the truthfulness of a thing that I had ever felt."
The poem was "Domination of Black," by Wallace Stevens. And Hass was on his way.
His father was an insurance lawyer; in his new book of poetry, Hass talks about his mother, an apparently hopeless alcoholic. The poem "My Mother's Nipples" includes these lines:
"I said to myself:
some things do not blossom in this life."
And ends:
"I tried to think of some place on earth she loved.
I remember that she only ever spoke happily
of high school."
Hass, meanwhile, was educated in Catholic schools, at St. Mary's College and at Stanford University in the 1960s, where he reportedly started an alternative newspaper, Commitment: A Journal of Asylum.
He has spoken elsewhere of being influenced growing up by the Beat generation of American writers - of reading Jack Kerouac and the poet Allen Ginsberg, who was an unemployed market researcher in San Francisco when he penned "Howl."
In an interview a year ago with a Bay Area newspaper, Hass said, "The fundamental thing is that growing up here made it seem possible to be a writer; it seemed like a thing you could do, there were writers around."
In addition to writing his own poems, Hass has edited collections of Japanese haiku and co-translated several volumes of poetry by Lithuanian-born poet Czeslaw Milosz.
In his interview with this newspaper, Hass talked about his tenure as the nation's poet-in-chief - in which he has campaigned not only for poetry but for basic literacy.
Hass, who often features the natural world prominently in his own poetry, also has focused on the environment. He arranged the conference "Watershed - A Celebration of American Nature Writing," which brought together 26 poets, prose writers and ecologists at the Library of Congress.
The event was so successful that Hass began asking himself how he might take the environmental message further - particularly into the schools. To that end, Hass said, he put together a teacher's guide to teaching about the environment. Hass' approach encourages children to write poems or paint pictures about the part of the world they live in, and also to read what has been written about it by their regional writers.
"I had the idea if we could get kids involved in reading their regional literature, it would make us more intelligent stewards of the place we live," he said.
But perhaps his most successful venture, said Hass, has been the weekly poetry column he writes for The Washington Post. Hass introduces a poem a week in the newspaper's Sunday Book World tabloid. The column has been picked up by several other newspapers.
The response, said Hass - who suggested the column himself - has surprised him. "They [the Post editors] said they've gotten more mail about it than any other recent feature ... It's been very gratifying. People have loved reading poems every week."
On the other hand are those who can't read at all - the last and "most consuming" issue on Hass' agenda as poet laureate, he said.
Once upon a time, according to Hass, when America was young, New England was the most literate place on Earth, largely because of the emphasis its first settlers placed on reading the Bible. As recently as the turn of the century, people were eager to be (or at least appear to be) well-read. Cheap editions of classic works of literature abounded.
Things have changed, of course. In an interview with The New York Times, Hass cited statistics showing half of the eighth-graders in Texas read at a fourth-grade level.
Hass said the decline in literacy is mostly evident in the inner cities and other places where schools are strapped for money.
Still, Hass said, the problem goes deeper than funding. "Obviously, it comes down to social problems that education can't fix. Our faith in education sometimes demands too much of it."
Hass declined, however, to blame the drop in literacy on perhaps the easiest culprit - television. TV, Hass believes, is an extension of an oral culture that has been around for ages.
"Oprah Winfrey is oral culture like `Beowulf' and Homer were oral culture, before they were written down."
Poet Laureate Robert Hass will speak on "The Cultures of American Poetry" at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Olin Theater at Roanoke College in Salem, and read poetry at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the school's Antrim Chapel. Both events are open to the public at no charge.
LENGTH: Long : 154 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. As this country's poet laureate, Robert Hass hasby CNBcampaigned not only for poetry but for basic literacy.
2. cover - "Sun Under Wood" color 3. poems "Forty Something" and
"Sonnet"