Reflection on Robert Hass

Written for class, a brief reflection about my experience of imitating his poems:

          It was such a pleasure to do this project; I discovered Robert Hass last year while randomly browsing through a bookstore as a shelter for the rain, and I haven’t been able to put him down. His poems spoke to me mainly because they naturally occur at a pace, tone, and structure that, if I were a poet (and an award-winning one at that), I would be stylistically stamped as. For some of his works, I liken him to being the male Mary Oliver. His imagery of California landscapes and waterscapes is astoundingly clear “The kids bring from the sea/ intricate calcium gifts---/ black turbans, angular green whelks,/ the whorled opalescent unicorn.” I haven’t come across a poet that writes so nuanced and breathtaking about such a local landscape. It is a joy to read his joy in nature.

            Even more appealing to me are his poems about love, or more accurately, moments of love. Hass never ruminates over Love with a capital L, but rather is interested in re-creating detailed moments of action, connection, and exchange. I find these poems so special because they fossilize fleeting moments of flame, but still acknowledge the fluidity of time and the ephemeral nature of life and love.

            I collected four of my favorite ‘love moment’ poems for imitation. Another selfish motivation for this endeavor is that not too long ago I’ve fallen completely in love with someone special and I’ve been itching to artistically capture some of the moments we’ve had together. This provides a perfect starting outlet.

            As for the imitation of craft, I’ve focused on five pinpoints of style that are uniquely Robert Hass: imagery, tone, writing about place, pace/readability, and sound. The thing that stands out the most is his beautifully-crafted images. His descriptions are almost impressionistic, and always original: “dusk was a huge weird phosphorescent beast dying slowly out across the bay.” They also ground the reader in the central/northern Californian locale, an element of craft I tried to reproduce. Manhattan and specifically Inwood, is my California. My poem “Happiness,” was inspired by a late-Fall walk through Inwood Hill Park, the only natural park in Manhattan and one that still mystifies. It is a place where Native Americans used to live and where the trade-off of Manhattan happened between the Dutch, the Indians, and a handful of beads. While Hass focused on seeing “a pair of red foxes across the creek/eating the last windfall apples in the rain” I imagined “Manhattan, before that fated/day of the bead trade, when land belonged/to no one, just the gazelles, galloping/disappearing through thick branches.” Powerful imagery for Hass resides in evocative details and locality.

            Trying to emulate Hass’ tone for me came naturally. In the four poems I’ve chosen, the tone is hard to describe; it’s a mixture of contentment, reflection, intimacy, contemplation, and optimism. It came naturally for me because my poetry seem to gravitate towards subject matters that use this type of tone, and my natural writing voice is also reflective and intimate. Likewise, writing on love and nature (the good stuff of love and nature) again instinctively puts me in a tone similar to Hass’

            An element of craft I admire is Hass’ pacing and readability. His poems are long sentences, simply structured but crafted with poetic and lyrical details. The simplicity of sentence structure mixed with poetic detailing results in sentences like this: “We bought great ornamental oranges, Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.” Or, “our house waited and our books/the skinny little soldiers on shelves.” Hass’ depth of detail results in a careful, cherished reading of words that slow down the reader’s pace to dwell on individual imageries; the pace is then picked up again and moves along because of the simple sentence structure of what happens next. Imitation of his prosody required a more intuitive understanding of his poems. I generally had an overall sense of his style and then emulated it naturally. However, I did make sure to include detailed imageries in the lines he did, and slow down the pace with shorter lines, shorter syllables….etc

            Finally, the more elusive element to emulate is his use of sound. There are obvious pleasant assonances and alliterations, but overall, the way his poems sounds also has to do with the tone, the pacing, the sentence structure, and the subject matter. Again, I included sound devices like “this song brings back memories/hazy days of sand and salted bodies,/phosphorescent jellyfish,/peeling summer skin.” But the general way his poems sound when read out loud is hard to capture and pinpoint exactly what drive the internal rhythm of his poetry.

            Overall, I was attracted to Hass because of his writing about intimate places and moments. He captures these memories without suffocating them or imposing greater narrative structures in retrospect. He describes memories in an impressionistic way, painting in the poem evocative details of treasured images and emotions.