TOP41-DES38
This Old Poem #41:
The Poets Laureate Special Edition #4:
Robert Hass’s Happiness
Copyright © by Dan Schneider, 12/14/02

  In a prior essay I described the rapier of Don Moss’s wit forever defining Robert Hass’s place in poetry in this fashion: ‘As a poet, he makes a good next door neighbor.’ Some people emailed me after that quote appeared & decried my attacking such a nice, sweet fellow- or rather for letting Mr. Moss do so. My reply- fuck you, I can do worse! While I’m sure RH would make a pleasant neighbor 1 gets the sense, from reading his poems, & -even more so- his online interviews that RH is making a strong bid to be known as the Forrest Gump of the poetry world. He just comes off as so much of a grinning idiot that it’s difficult to take him seriously. In fact, this TOP is probably according this ex-U.S. Poet Laureate (1995-1997) far more critical analysis than his work deserves. Anyway- here is how he represents himself to the online world: 

Robert Hass was born in San Francisco in 1941. His books of poetry include Sun Under Wood: New Poems (Ecco Press, 1996); Human Wishes (1989), Praise (1979), and Field Guide (1973), which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. He has also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Czeslaw Milosz, most recently Facing the River (1995), and is author or editor of several other collections of essays and translation, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry (1984). He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in California and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. 

  RH is also 1 of those Western Intellectuals infatuated with the notion ‘West is bad, East is good.’ He has supplemented his own growing corpus of poetastry with an equally soporific translation portfolio. Don’t you just love a dullard who insists on draining your patience bilingually? Let’s check out the titular poem: 

Happiness

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window
we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain—
they looked up at us with their green eyes
long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things
and then went back to eating—

and because this morning
when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad
to coax an inquisitive soul
from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,
I drove into town to drink tea in the café
and write notes in a journal—mist rose from the bay
like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,
and a small flock of tundra swans
for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass
in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,
they are also called whistling swans, are very white,
and their eyes are black—

and because the tea steamed in front of me,
and the notebook, turned to a new page,
was blank except for the faint idea of order,
I wrote: happiness! It is December, very cold,
we woke early this morning,
and lay in bed kissing,
our eyes squinched up like bats.

  You know what RH is attempting- don’t you? He is so self-consciously trying to achieve a poetic ‘moment’. Note how he has to not just tell, but show that he is telling you his point: ‘to symbolize the wakefulness of living things’, ‘mist rose from the bay like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention’, & ‘they symbolize mystery, I suppose’ [here’s where he tries to dazzle & confuse you by being elusive- ya missed that 1, no?], & ‘the faint idea of order’, which naturally flows in to a non-sequitur which is meaningless, but which RH tries to imbue with depth by his need to tell you all that this poetic percipient is pondering- hey that’s more musical than anything in the poem! Ask yourself, why does RH think that tying the banal poem with the banal end in such a banal fashion must produce a true poetic synergy? I don’t know. Perhaps he is so rapt with the lines- ‘I wrote: happiness! It is December, very cold,/we woke early this morning,/and lay in bed kissing,/our eyes squinched up like bats.’- that he cannot see how truly dull his poem is. Let’s try to salvage this dreck. We’ll nip & tuck, & append the last line up to become the title. Let’s looksy:

Our Eyes Squinched Up Like Bats

From the steamy window we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek
eating the last windfall apples in the rain— they looked up at us
with the wakefulness of living things and then went back to eating—
when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad
to coax what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter. I drove
into town to drink tea in the café and write notes in a journal—
and a small flock of tundra swans for the second winter in a row
was feeding on new grass in the soaked fields; whistling swans.

Because the tea steamed in front of me, and the notebook,
turned to a new page, was blank except for the faint idea of order,
I wrote:

  Okay, the title is a definite improvement, & the longer lines serve to let the remaining images play off of each other, obviating the need to condescend & explain what the hell they mean. & isn’t it more interesting & poetic to have her ‘coax what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter’ rather than ‘coax an inquisitive soul’? In the rewrite the couple’s relationship is a bit more defined & this lets a reader imbue more into it from the images the speaker throws up. Granted, this is still not pulse-pounding poetry, but it is more interesting. Also the original 1^st 2 stanzas have no real reason for being broken, the 2 flow into each other & the original ‘and because this morning’ is not that compelling a start to the 2^nd stanza. But the biggest improvement comes from dropping the italicized speaker’s diarizing. Is not the end much more satisfying by NOT knowing what probable banalities this not-too bright speaker is entering into his journal? This brings us back to the revamped title. Since we’ve appended the original’s end to the very top- Our Eyes Squinched Up Like Bats- the whole tenor of the poem is changed. Instead of the dull Happiness, which suggests the speaker is narcotized, as well as a dilettante, the new title gives a double suggestion that this is a dream, albeit still a dull 1, or the speaker straining to discern what he sees. In other words, the title implies imagination &/or action where the original’s was lacking.
  Okay, you got me, I did not savage RH worse than Don Moss did. Perhaps I am getting soft in my old age? Or maybe RH’s terminal narcosis is rubbing off on me? On these speculations I can only- [sound of sawing wood]

Final Score: (1-100):

Robert Hass’s Happiness: 62
TOP’s Our Eyes Squinched Up Like Bats: 70

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