Now & Then, page 2
which allowed me sometimes to present two poems rather than one, or a
longer poem, or to let my note turn into a very short essay. Sometimes I
found myself writing a little long and then cutting, and I have been able
to reproduce the uncut versions here. In two or three places, for various
reasons, I’ve patched and filled—rewritten a column or written a new
one in the spirit of the ones I was writing at that time. This book’s prede-
cessor, Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life, is basically an anthology. Now
& Then is more nearly a book of essays about poems and poets. It covers
the period from the early winter of 1997 to midwinter 2000, and, like its
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xii A Note to Readers
predecessor, it is attentive to seasons and holidays, to the turning wheel of
the year. Because of this, I was surprised, rereading the assembled pieces,
by how much it resembled a Book of Hours. The reader of it watches the
year turn, and the form invites short readings, meditations to be under-
taken daily or weekly in quiet times. And, of course, it would be pleasing
to me if it were read that way, since that’s the way in which I myself read
poetry.
I wrote the columns this way because the sense of time in them is one
of the things I like about newspapers. In my childhood three newspapers
came into our house every day, the local paper of our small California
town, the San Rafael Independent-Journal, and the morning paper from the
city, the San Francisco Chronicle, both of which were delivered by news-
boys on bicycles, and an evening paper, the San Francisco Call-Bulletin,
which my father brought home from his weekday commute. The papers
mattered to my siblings and me for their comics and, when we were a
little older, their sports pages. In the comics, time did not exist. On the
sports pages there were three seasons, football, basketball, and baseball,
only dimly related to the weather in California. My older brother and I
spent hours in the evenings imitating the styles of the sports cartoonists
in the papers. The artist for the Chronicle cast figures like the University
of California’s football coach, Pappy Waldorf, and the manager of the San
Francisco Seals, Lefty O’Doul, in the heroic mode, like the serious comics
Prince Valiant and Terry and the Pirates. The Call-Bulletin artist drew com-
edy like Blondie or The Katzenjammer Kids: round noses, whiskers, and
squiggly lines behind the baseball that skittered right through the legs of
the clueless shortstop. We labored over our productions, each in its season,
now in one style, now in the other. And our eyes must have drifted over
to the rest of the paper. I have a distinct memory of the Call-Bulletin call-
ing up a world full of dangerous Communist spies; in the Chronicle, movie
stars of the period like Franchot Tone or Monica Freeman were spotted
dining in what would be the last of the city’s supper clubs.
And there were other ways in which we were instructed in seasons:
stories on how to buy a pumpkin or to carve it, recipes for Thanksgiving
stuffing, Christmas ads, recipes for cranberry relishes. The comic pages
would have make-your-own valentines in February that could be colored
with crayons and cut out with scissors, and they would start doing Easter
stories in early April. I see now that this insistence was not unconnected
to advertising revenues. In fact, I think I saw it then. My daily walk to
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A Note to Readers xiii
grammar school took me down the four blocks of the main commercial
street of our town, and many of the merchants were parents of my school-
mates. I knew that back-to-school shoes were a very good thing for the
Chapman family, and so were summer sandals, and that they did good
business in dress shoes in the weeks before proms; and that one bought
basketball shoes and baseball cleats from Mr. Brusati in the sporting goods
store, each in its season, and new mitts as one’s hands grew larger. I went
to a Catholic school and we wore uniforms on weekdays, so at Mass on
Sundays one noticed, at a certain age and in a certain season, that the girls
had begun to wear sweaters, as if the world had suddenly burst into Tech-
nicolor. The sweaters were exactly the colors of the ones in the ads run
by the local department stores, in those years red, orange, goldish-orange,
and dull yellow, so that they made an equivalent to fall foliage when our
long, mild Indian summers came to an end and the air began to cool in
mid-October.
Newspapers imbed us in time—from the date on page one to the
smallest details of format. I have a vivid memory of one day helping a
friend to fold papers for his paper route and coming to what seemed like
the metaphysical realization that each day’s newspaper represented a day.
They came and went, like days. And—another leap—the Sunday papers
with their fat formats and their color comics represented weeks. It was an
idea that I couldn’t even think of a way to communicate to my friend, but
it made me slightly dizzy, as if I had glimpsed some truth about the great
wheeling movement of the stars and the planets and the world of events
that the papers treated as a matter of such urgency.
So this, it turns out, is a book about time. I put off assembling these col-
umns for several years because, in truth, I was tired of them after four years
of weekly deadlines. But assembling them now, I was surprised by how
this work of just a few years ago feels almost as if it belongs to another
era: here in September of 1998 is Mark McGwire, rounding the bases after
having broken the single season home run record. And here is the United
States bombing of the city of Belgrade. Here is the moment when it
seemed to the world that Israel and the Palestinian Authority were within
a hairsbreadth of a peace agreement. Here is a young Pakistani-American
poet writing about the Arabic language and the inability of the West to
see the Muslim world (in 1999). Here is the story of the White House
intern and the impeachment trial of the president of the United States.
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xiv A Note to Readers
And here is the coming and going of the millennium. There are essays
here on summer Shakespeare and the Christmas music in department
stores. There is—for the millennium—a mini-history of poetry in the
English language. The book has, in the flow of time, a curious air of nor-
mality, of life and its interests and brutalities going about their business.
I am one of those people who did not believe that the world changed
on September 11, 2001, who think that the idea that the world changed
was a propaganda tactic of the militarist wing of the Republican Party, a
hijacking of the meaning of the hijacking to recreate a Cold War men-
tality in our country. In 1998 and 1999 we were already at war with
Iraq. That war consisted in establishing no-fly zones over the Kurdish
regions of northern Iraq and the Shia regions of southern Iraq to protect
those populations from the predations of Sadaam Hussein. Meanwhile, we
imposed an economic embargo on the Sunni dictator’s regime, and the
United Nations monitored his armaments, a policy of containment that,
from our present vantage point, seems remarkably clear-headed. In any
case it was, for Americans, a quiet war, and you will not find it here. There
are no Iraqi poets in the pages that follow. They were not on my radar and,
though Penguin Books had published a volume of modern Arabic poetry,
there was no book in translation then available of Iraqi poetry. There is
now, Iraqi Poetry Today, edited by Saadi Samawe and Daniel Weissbort and
published by the Modern Poetry in Translation series of King’s College,
London. It appeared in 2003.
But the time in these pages was not without its dangers and anxieties.
At the center of the book is W. H. Auden’s great elegy for William Butler
Yeats. It was written in the winter of 1939, and it carries in it the cold and
terror of a violent century. What one gets from it now is a deep sense of
moral intelligence, a sense of what language is like in the hands of a poet
at a time of genuine crisis. It is level, a little cool, passionately engaged,
but engaged in the act of finding both measure and accuracy in speech. It
made me aware that we have been living, not in a time of increased dan-
gers (except for the ways in which the recklessness of our incursion into
Iraq has made the world more dangerous), but in a time of enormously
heightened rhetorical violence, in which the politicians and the press,
particularly the television news channels, have collaborated. This realiza-
tion had the effect for me of making the poems, as I reread them, seem
admirably measured and sane. They do not always succeed—I was trying
to give people a sense of the breadth and range of poetry, both old and
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A Note to Readers xv
new, and I often turned to whatever came into my hands—but most of
the poems were trying to get the weight and shape of experience right.
All through the book readers are invited to the quiet and intensity of
reading, not exactly as if it were the blessed water in a medieval baptismal
font in an old church, the entire violence of the world carved onto the
outside of the font—that is the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer’s
figure for the wish of poetry—but something more like a haiku of the
eighteenth-century master Buson. It is a poem about a particular kind of
Book of Hours, a cheaply printed, cheaply bound farmer’s almanac. The
poem goes like this:
This old almanac
Gladdens my heart
Like a sutra.
It would be pleasant if a book of this kind shared the qualities of alma-
nac and sutra, in the way that poetry can seem both to penetrate time
and penetrate our days, more deeply than our walking-around conscious-
ness usually does, and to lift us out of it, out of the turning wheel for a
moment, so that we can see ourselves and the life around us more clearly.
It’s my hope that this book will in a small way serve both these purposes
for its readers, and that it will encourage some readers to read, now and
then, more widely and deeply in the enormously exhilarating range of
available poetries.
I was very lucky in my collaborators at the Washington Post, Jennifer
Howard, who made sure I did not miss a deadline, and Maria Arana, Book
World’s current editor, herself a distinguished writer whose eye to my
often hurried prose was a great gift. I need to thank them here and to
thank Jack Shoemaker for encouraging me to make this book, Roxanna
Font for bringing it into existence, and Kristen Sbrogna for the patient
work of proofreading and permission gathering.
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Now & Then
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1997
decembe r 7
Wallace Stevens and Joni Mitchell
It is getting on to winter, and I almost cannot say so to myself without
thinking of that lyric from Joni Mitchell’s Blue:
It’s coming on Christmas
They’re cutting down trees
They’re putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace—
With its surprising chords and its sudden, unexpected leap to the
chorus:
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on.
It is a song about romantic loss and about Christmas blues. People of my
generation will also remember that it is about the mood of the country
during the Vietnam War, when so many of the young felt helpless before
the violence their government had unleashed across the world.
The season and that leap in the song made me think of one of the most
haunting American poems of the twentieth century. It’s Wallace Stevens’s
“The Snow Man.” It comes differently to its unexpected conclusion. It
seems to arrive there almost inevitably, in the unwinding of its syntax, and
leaves most readers blinking at what they have come to. Here it is:
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4 Robert Hass / 1997
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
This comes from a really splendid new edition of Wallace Stevens, Col-
lected Poetry and Prose, published by the Library of America. It’s the best
single volume of his work to appear, though it isn’t as beautiful as the old
Knopf hardback Collected Poems. But all the poems are in the Library of
America edition, and the essays on poetry, and selections from the letters,
and the aphorisms, the best known of which, I suppose, are “Money is a
kind of poetry” and “The greatest poverty is not to love in the physical
world.” But there are others: “The tongue is an eye.” “A poem is a pheas-
ant.” It would make a resplendent holiday gift.
That takes care of my seasonal duties. Now look back at that wintry
poem, bright as ice. In college, I remember, we argued for hours about
what those last lines meant, as if the chill of the poem and its enormous
clarity would not quite let go of us. In the way that Joni Mitchell’s song
has its historical context, so, I suppose, does Stevens’s poem. He belonged
to the generation of writers—all of the modernists did—who had to
address the ways in which the Christian idea, or at least the Protestant
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1997 / Now & Then 5
and transcendentalist idea, of a divinity in nature had lost its hold on their
imagination. “We live,” the woman in his poem “Sunday Morning” muses,
“in an old chaos of the sun.” When Stevens went to college in the early
1900s, aestheticism was in the air. He was a boy from solid Lutheran and
German stock—Pennsylvania Dutch, as it was called—and his mother
could still speak the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect to the farm women who
came to Reading to sell their produce on Saturdays. He has what must be
a poem to his mother, explaining his conversion to French poetry:
Explanation
Ach, Mutter
This old, black dress,
I have been embroidering
French flowers on it.
Not by way of romance,
Here is nothing of the ideal,
Nein,
Nein.
It would be different,
Liebchen,
If I had imagined myself,
In an orange gown,
Drifting through space,
Like a figure on a church-wall.
He was going to have to manage in a world without angels, and he
thought about this subject for the rest of his long life as a poet and an
executive of the Hartford Insurance Company. He was sure that the solu-
tion to the problem of the loss of what he called the “romance” of the
ideal was imagination, which in one of his rare essays he calls “the Neces-
sary Angel.”
In Hartford this autumn, a friend drove me by the offices of the Hart-
ford Insurance Company and the house where Stevens lived. I had read
that he walked to work, and, taking what seemed the shortest way, I
tried to walk his walk to work. It led through a park, and I thought that
