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by Michelle Tupko

One of the most elusive moments in poetic history is when the miserable, old Rilke finds a kind of peace, when, as Robert Hass describes it, "Orpheus replaces the angel," (261). The taloned grip of the sweeping, dark divinity of Rilke's fascinating youth is usurped by the delicate strings of a lyre. Rilke is transported from the barren, windy mountaintop to the lush forest and the gushing stream, and it all happens in a small house where he lives alone. Rilke is a man whose inner life could not be discovered even by those closest to him, yet Robert Hass, in his essay "Looking for Rilke," tries furiously to describe what happened when the poet, in the terrible angelic embrace, told the angel to let go and was released.

This questioning of the mute is testimony to Hass' brilliant vision and most angering flaw. He sees almost to the quick of the matter, which few of us have seen or ever will, but he cannot leave things be at that point, cannot relinquish the treasure his vision has nearly unearthed. What sticks Robert Hass fast to the question of Rilke is that his metamorphosis was so revolutionary, changing the face of poetry eternally. The essay is more desperate than anything else Hass writes in Twentieth Century Pleasures because at the heart of his passion for poetry is a burning desire to get inside the essence of transformation itself. With the clear vision of a poet, Hass makes subtle distinctions between the nature of transformations in poetry: the change in the poet who is writing, the change in the reader who is absorbing, and, most interestingly, the change within the poem as a poem. This last distinction, of the poem as an object unto itself, rarely stands alone for observation in Hass' essays. Yet it is the poem as an event of language pushing itself to its own climax that generates Hass' passion for deciphering poetry.

In his essays about James Wright and Rilke, which are undoubtedly the two most clear, illuminating and comprehensive in Twentieth Century Pleasures, Hass seeks to locate the source of artistic creation, to excavate that deepest structure and construction of the poet's mind. When Hass is looking for the poet himself, he is not seeking out the meaning the poet makes in the poems. When Hass looks at a poem, his primary inclination is not to explicate its significance, but to expose it as a conduit. Through the poem, in an almost paradoxical reciprocal relation with language, the poet discovers himself. Each poem can be seen as a birth canal, a metaphysical tunnel, an entrance into reality which effects a distinct change in the man who travels through it. Although it is, in some sense, the poet who writes the poem, there is another sense in Hass of the poem changing the poet-writing him, as it were. The foundation of Hass' examination of transformation and metamorphosis is his conviction that the poem has a life of its own. A poem has the capacity to be independent from creation and interpretation. But to understand how Hass can come to the astonishing conclusion of poetry's autonomy, we must first examine the force with which a poem works through the poet himself.

Throughout "Looking for Rilke," Hass details the particulars of the poet's life, not because the places Rilke saw are important so much as how he saw them. Of the greater part of Rilke's life, which was filled with historical sorrow and anguish, Hass says, "This anger is probably part of the reason why the Elegies took ten years to complete. Rilke seems to have needed, desperately, the feeling which he found only in open, windy spaces." To locate the poet in a particular time and space allows Hass to begin the long process of decoding the subtle changes Rilke endured in the creation of his poems. Hass is not afraid to lay claim to knowledge of Rilke's soul, though he interestingly never uses that word to describe Wright's or Rilke's elusive passion and vision. While Hass will tread over the most sacred ground to extrapolate the essential image and force from a poem, he seems to be wary of naming the contents of the treasure chest before the map is complete and the hole is dug in the ground. More than any essayist writing about poetry, and perhaps more than most poets themselves, Hass is a man on a hunt, clutching the parchment with an 'x' and a complicated series of lines and scratches. To find his way to the source of the poet's imagination is, for Hass, to find a larger answer to the question of significance, both in poetry and in life, which are nearly inseparable to him. At the start of "Looking for Rilke," Hass is with a friend in Paris, unsuccessfully trying to find the famous café of Rilke's youth. Hass wants to eat breakfast at the café, hoping he can catch a glimpse of the incredible perceptions of the poet. Trying to find Rilke's life in Paris and come to terms with the way in which it became a channel for imagination is essentially the same thing Hass is doing in his essays.

Somehow, somewhere, a poet created a poem and was changed into a different man by the act-this is what Hass knows, and it is not enough. The poem is like a dark tunnel under the earth through which a poet travels and emerges with new knowledge. Hass is feeling his way through each tunnel, attempting to describe its rough spots, its smudged drawings, its smell. Reading a poem of James Wright's about a man lighting a cigarette at night in the shadow of desolate traintracks, Hass proclaims, "They were not written by the poet who is lonely and sick for home", they were written by the man who noticed that the poet, sitting in his room alone "nods when he writes down the imagined greeting of his imagined yardman" (27).

Separating the poet's mind in the act of creation from that of the created poem is only one of Hass' modes of marking the many layers of poetic impulse and effect, but it is the persistent mode in "James Wright" and "Looking for Rilke." In "What Furies," which is primarily about the work of Stanley Kunitz, Hass examines the poet in a more technical and theoretical sense, with less emphasis on the work itself. He discusses the distinction of meditative versus dramatic, or lyric poetry. Placing Kunitz' poetry in the category of dramatic verse-which "places itself in the center of the vast, packed, (tiny, finite) stage of the poem and suffers itself to be transformed. It goes into the crucible over and over again"-Hass begins a long investigation of the changes this voice has upon Kunitz the poet (94). Watching the lines of Kunitz's poetry untangle themselves diligently until they find comfort in the melodramatic transformation they have been destined for, Hass is able to conclude that Kunitz "isn't a poet of the palm at the end of the mind. . . . His subject is the long wound of becoming" (105). In addition to having an excellent sense about language and poetry, Hass knows a lot about poetic tradition and history. He often makes detailed reference to complicated and esoteric theories about the different voices, meters, line breaks and repetitions of poetry and how they contribute to a poem's overall effect. Any insight that Hass can glean about the process by which poetry is constructed helps him to come closer to a pure, accurate description of the ways it produces transformation in the poet, in reader, and in the poem itself.

In the essay about Rilke, there are the most astounding, revelatory analyses of the way in which the words and form of a poem transform the reader who ingests the poem. When Hass exhausts himself seeking for Rilke, or Wright, or any of the other poets he discusses, he turns almost systematically to describing the effect poetry has on him personally, and, by implication, on others. Of Rilke he says,

Look at how he bores into us. That caressing voice seems to be speaking to the solitary walker in each of us who is moved by springtimes, stars, oceans, the sound of music. And then he reminds us that those things touch off in us a deeper longing. . . . It is as if he were peeling off layers of the apparent richness of the self, arguing us back to the poverty of a great, raw, objectless longing. (231)

Hass is more than convincing and more than apt in his persuasion that Rilke touches us both against our will and with our consent. Either way, we are changed forever.

Robert Hass hears rhythms in the wind, sees images wandering the deep floors of lakes, watches the matter of his life turn in the form of time which contains it and is broken by it. His sense of the way in which the aspects of poetry and imagination inform and transform our lives shines through in nearly every investigation of his mind upon the words of other poets. He outlines rather earnestly, the places poetry resides in our lives. In his essay "Images," tells us, "It seems to me that we all live our lives in the light of primary acts of imagination, images or sets of images that gets us up in the morning and moves us about our days. I do not think anybody can live without one, for very long, without suffering intensely from deadness and futility" (303). Hass does not see poetry merely as an act of creation which changes the writer, but one which is an exchange of the very stuff of life between poet and reader, between giver and receiver. He observes himself absorbing poetic meaning again and again with the utmost clarity and severity. A few of his observations about the poetic structure of life are intensely humorous, among the only fantastically funny moments in the entire collection of essays. Consider this ruse, in "Listening and Making": "The two-beat phrase is a very American form of terminal irony. A guy in a bar in Charlottesville turned to me once and said, loudly, but confidentially, 'Ahmo find me a woman an fuck her twenty ways till Sunday.' . . . A woman down the bar doubled the two-beat put-down. She said 'Good luck, asshole'" (107). It is this kind of probing that makes Hass' essays so amazing. His vision catches the infusion of all movement and stillness with the source of light from which poetry itself springs and is itself a kind of transformation of the reader.

But Hass falls short of the intensity of a man like Rilke, both as a poet and an essayist. He has chosen not to be crushed beneath the weight of the boulders of passion and image which caused Rilke to stalk the streets of Paris clutching a white iris, scowling and tormented. If Hass works and works and works it out, unearthing the buried bones of the question, he will find an answer, however provisional, to satisfy himself. Explication of the poetic impulse, categorizing the nature of transformation, defining the boundaries of his investigation all allow Hass to divide significance into neat portions, measure it out, fill both sides of the scale. He sees James Wright bathed in darkness and then in light, a man of the mind and then its enemy, sheltered in the "dark of sex or the dark of nature or the spirit's darkness" (28). Searching out the reasons for his own feelings about the young illiterate boy in Truffaut's film Wild Child, Hass concludes, "So much light, so many centuries of the evolution of light, to render the pathos and beauty of that darkness" (29). Body and Mind, Life and Death, Rhythm and Form, Inner and Outer-it is too painful for Hass to sustain the perpetual interpenetration of these complements so he puts them in their places, on opposite sides of a forever tilting lever, and sits back a moment, a free man.

Deeper even than Hass' need to oppose lightness and darkness are his juxtapositions of more subtle and inscrutable ways of reaching understanding. Rhythm has "direct access to the unconscious, because it can hypnotize us, enter our bodies and make us move . . . . [It] is always revolutionary ground. It is always the place where the organic rises to abolish the mechanical and where energy amounts to abolition of tradition" (108). This rhythm, associated strongly with the darkness of Wright's passion of the non-mind or Rilke's hideous God, or with Stanley Kunitz's introverted, self-referential "I," is very nearly the antithesis of Form. Form is that "coming into existence of imagination as a shaping power, that 'irradiates and exalts all objects'" ("One Body" 70 ). The idea of Form is for Hass infused with light, and moreover, the light of creation, the first and original creation. Rhythm is the dampness, the hiddenness of nature which wells up from the soul and reclaims the imposed order of the world in the name of mystery. In fact, Hass writes two essays, one called "One Body: Some Notes on Form," which make Form into that brilliant illumination, a mind coming into the dazzling exaltation of being. Of this formation Hass conjectures, "Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation," again returning to the irresistible notion of our own transformation in an encounter with poetry (57). Form is the force in poetry which seeks completion and resolution. In "Listening and Making," an essay essentially about rhythm's incessant pounding through poetry and life, Hass explores everything which is not mind, the "animal intelligence" of which "when we are most possessed by it, we are least aware of it. . . . The part of the mind which needs to learn from it, to be able to reflect on it, is absorbed by it" (26). If rhythm is the nature of particular things, without the power of perspective or discernment of meaning, the darkness of non-being, the mindless beating of the heart again and again until death, then form is the quintessential generalization, the beginning of all meaning as we know it, derived from the old organic rhythm but suffused with knowing, bereft of yearning but also of any original significance-void of a soul. This is the meaning Hass finds consistently in poetry, that rhythm and form and the extent of their implication are lovers who never become one, who push against the eternal division which both enriches and obscures life.

Hass' sense of rhythm is like the passing days, the erupting and escaping of sun on the horizon which eventually, inevitably turn a cocooned caterpillar into a butterfly. Rhythm means transformation. Likewise with form and image, and this is why Hass discerns them persistently in his analysis of poetry. Hass has come to recognize that a poem in some sense escapes the poet. It is given a meter, a series of line breaks, a conglomeration of words, and somehow flies away. The poet has been transformed by the time the poem is complete. In fact, that is why the poem is complete. The reader is transformed at a different point in time, but one with definite coordinates. But the poem itself also undergoes a phenomenal change. Amazingly enough, underlying Hass' thorough spelunking of poetry's underwater cave is the notion that the poem takes a shape of its own independent of any external human will. Robert Hass' respect for poetic form and poetic force come directly from seeing the poem as an object. The poem warrants veneration or contempt, demands some reaction to it as an individual entity.

The fundamental problem that arises because of this unique view of poetry is that it is nearly impossible to give untainted evidence of the words' autonomy. Every attempt Hass makes to show the poem's own internal transformation is stained by an inadvertent digression to the reader's or the poet's transformation. Of a poem by James Wright, Hass notes: "Even the stanzaic structure of the poem participates in the ritual. The first two stanzas separate the bodies of the men from the bodies of the women and the third stanza gives us the boys pounding against each other, as if they could, out of their wills, effect a merging" (43). Hass is caught up in the poem itself, in the way it creates meaning with only the tools of its own form. This meaning stands apart from Wright as a poet, and from Hass as a reader. The poem is a scene which is happening in a time and rhythm all its own, like an event of history, like a fact. The poem is undeniable, but only for a moment. Hass cannot sustain his communion with the consciousness of the poem for more than a few lines, and then falls into the confusion of some other invasive vision, in this case, the poet's. Three lines later, James Wright emerges and again the poem becomes his creation. "This is, in other words, the poem Wright has always been writing" (43). Inevitably, Hass reduces the poem again to a created thing, to a means for human revelation. What is most frustrating about Hass' essays is that they cannot quite cut to the quick of meaning. Hass shies away from the intensity of transformation when he comes too close, and the result is an over-analysis, a profusion of meaning, a sort of apology for being blown over by the strong winds.

Haiku is an obsession of Hass' which appears in every single essay he writes. What is compelling about the haiku form is that it is so terse. In one moment, seemingly without the reader's consent, it reveals the truth. Reading haiku, one has little choice but to participate in the revelation. There are three lines of few syllables and after that the blank slate of a white page. The poem begins and ends in the silence of an empty sheet of paper. The transformation of a haiku is its form, its rhythm, and its image. Everything in a haiku works toward one goal: metamorphosis. The most detailed explication of haiku comes in "Images," where Hass quotes ten or twelve in a short period, examining the way they use image abruptly, powerfully, almost perfectly.

The man pulling radishes
pointed my way
with a radish. (274)

In this poem, the poet is nominally present in the first person, yet seems not to be there at all. What grips the reader is the image of a man holding a red radish outstretched against the colored leaves of autumn. Somehow, the poem escapes the poet. Similarly, the poem escapes the reader. The words provoke a sudden, immediate reaction, a kind of gasp at the beauty of the moment, but even this is lost. What remains-the only thing that remains-is the image itself, presented in a particular form with a particular rhythm. Hass is constantly struggling with himself as to how to present haiku in an understandable way without profaning its magnificence. Haiku is notoriously resistant to interpretation and explication precisely because it is such a Being. In the same way a human personality cannot be explained by a mere few paragraphs, a haiku cannot be taken apart without an implicit admission of its profound complexity. Hass occasionally rebukes himself for forcing his way under its thick skin. Later in "Images," after describing a near-death experience on a mountain hike, Hass reflects on the work he has been doing on the essays in Twentieth Century Pleasures and concludes that he made "a too-technical analysis of Basho's yume wa kareno wo kakeme guru" (280). Hass himself points to the one main flaw in his method of understanding poetry: that he explains the inexplicable, or tries to.

An essayist of pristine and astonishing vision, Robert Hass makes subtle distinctions about the internal transformations of poet, reader, and poem which are beyond the scope of most artists' comprehension. Hass' words are evocative and eloquent, yet elusive enough to draw the reader into the metamorphosing enigma of poetry. Although it sometimes tries one's patience to see him persistently shy away from the burning core of transformation itself, the insights he does provide are overwhelming, hearty, and satisfying. Part of Hass' confusion of the change in the poet and the change in the poem is due to the fact that he himself, as a reader of the poems he explicates, is in the act of changing. To watch Hass change, sometimes from sentence to sentence, is to be given the rare privilege of watching him work. The ruminations of Hass' essays are reflected in the constant shifting of the "I" who is writing the words on the page. To watch Hass discern meaning as an essayist, reverberate meaning as a poet, and to undergo the confused transformation of meaning as a man is one of the astounding and extraordinary pleasures of reading his work.

Works Cited

Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasures. New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1984.

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