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I had, perhaps, come to the ground of that frosty place where, in a fierce
New England January, Stevens, sometime in the teens of the century, had
turned in his mind the rhythms of a poem that was a single long sentence,
about not projecting anything onto the landscape and seeing what is there
and seeing what is not there.
But this paraphrase hardly settles the mystery of those last few lines.
They stay in the mind, like Joni Mitchell’s song. Away, away, she says.
Here, here, the poet says, and he says it takes a mind of winter to say it.
But where and what is here is the question he has been teasing us with
ever since.
decembe r 14
In Memoriam: James Laughlin
James Laughlin died last month. He was the publisher of New Directions,
which he started in the 1930s when he was still a student at Harvard.
He published Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Tennessee Williams,
Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth. He was probably the most important
literary publisher of this half century. And he was a poet, schooled on
the classics, which he studied in school—the frank, practical, sharp-
witted and plain-spoken poets of the Greek anthologies and the Roman
empire—and on the writers he published. His last book, The Country
Road (Zoland Books), appeared in 1995.
It contains poems, mostly, of aging, spoken by himself or by imagined
speakers coping with the afflictions of their late years. Some of them, like
this one, have a bluntness that can be a little startling.
The Least You Could Do
he told her, would be to forget
your pride of ownership for an hour
and let her come to sit by my bed
for that fraction of time.
What could we say in an hour
that would hurt you, or would take
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anything away from what you’ve had?
What looks could we exchange
that would harm you in any way?
It’s more than ten years
since we were lovers; in ten years
we haven’t seen each other.
Is it so strange that we want
to meet again for a last time,
to look at each other, to listen to
each other’s voices, ever
so gently to touch hands?
It’s the least you could do.
What makes me sit up and take notice is not the implied narra-
tive of the poem or its aggrieved tone, but that I can’t tell how much
it’s intended to wound the wife to whom I guess it’s spoken and how
much it’s a portrait of a desperately vulnerable yearning that doesn’t
care whom it wounds. Whatever else the poem does, it certainly renders
a living voice.
Among the poems in his Collected Poems is “Byways,” a sequence of
casually written anecdotal pieces. It is not innovative verse-making. I
think Laughlin must have borrowed its plain, straightforward style from
his friend Kenneth Rexroth, and it allowed him to tell stories from a
long and eventful literary life. Here is a passage about sneaking with
another of his authors, the Trappist monk and poet Thomas Merton,
back into his famous Kentucky monastery in the middle of some night
in the late 1950s. Merton had gotten leave for the day, which they spent
talking about Henry Miller and Djuana Barnes. They ended in a road-
house consuming “a red-eye ham, / I think they called it, with a bottle
of / St. Emilion to wash it down / And a few nips of cognac / To settle
the stomach.”
When we got back to Gethsemani
There wasn’t a light in the place.
Brother Gatekeeper was long gone
To his cot in the dormitory.
What to do? I remember, said Tom,
A place on the other side near
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8 Robert Hass / 1997
The cemetery where the wall
Isn’t quite as high as it is here.
Tom was right, the wall was lower.
I got down on all fours
And had Tom stand on my back.
Can you reach the top? I asked.
Just with my fingertips, he said.
OK, hold on if you can,
I’ll get up and push up your legs.
Tom was up, lying on the wall but
I couldn’t reach his dangling hand.
I thought of my belt. I took it off
And tossed one end up to him.
Brace your legs around the wall
And I’ll climb with my legs
The way Rexroth taught me on
Rock faces in the mountains.
Believe it or not, it worked.
We lay in the grass on the far side
Of the wall and laughed and laughed
And laughed. We have done the Devil’s
Work today, Tom, I told him.
No, he said, we’ve been working for
The angels; they are friends of mine.
Keeping very quiet, Tom went off to
His bishop’s room, I to my bed
In the wing for retreatants.
James Laughlin’s Collected Poems is also in print, as well as volumes of
his correspondence with his authors. Like many Americans of my genera-
tion, I got a good part of my literary education from reading the books he
published. He was an immense presence, and he will be missed.
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decembe r 21
Nativity Poems:
William Butler Yeats and Louise Glück
Probably the best known modern poem about the Nativity story is one
by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats:
The Magi
Now as at all times I can see in the mind’s eye
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear or disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
With all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary’s turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.
This comes from his book Responsibilities, published in 1914. He wrote
it, he once remarked, one day when he “looked up at the blue of the sky
and suddenly imagined, as if lost in the blue of the sky, stiff figures in
procession. I remembered that they were the habitual image suggested by
the blue sky, and looking for a . . . fable called them ‘The Magi.’” “The
bestial floor,” I’ve always supposed, is the stable at Bethlehem, and these
wise men are, in Yeats’s version, forever hunting for it as they march across
the sky.
A contemporary American poet, Louise Glück, in The First Four Books
of Poems (Ecco), has written what must be, at least partly, a response to
Yeats:
The Magi
Toward world’s end, through the bare
beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.
How many winters have we seen it happen,
watched the same sign come forward as they pass
cities sprung around this route their gold
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engraved on the desert, and yet
held our peace, these
being the Wise, come to see at the accustomed hour
nothing changed: roofs, the barn
blazing in darkness, all they wish to see.
I’m not sure I get this poem entirely. “The sign” must be the star at
Bethlehem. The “we” in this poem, the ordinary folk who watch the
Magi pass by, seem to be speaking with some irony. At least the linebreak
“these / being the Wise” makes you wonder how wise they are. And I
like it in this world of the ordinary mysteries—“roofs, the barn blazing /
in darkness”—that the townsfolk hold their peace. Peace to you in this
season and happy holidays.
decembe r 28
A New Year’s Poem
from the Korean Sijo Tradition
Here’s a New Year’s poem from eighteenth-century Korea:
A boy comes by my window
shouting that it’s New Year’s.
I open the eastern lattice—
the usual sun has risen.
Look, kid! It’s the same old sun.
Wake me when a new one dawns!
This is the classic type of the Korean lyric poem. It’s called a sijo. I’ve
adapted it as well as the following from the translation by Richard Rutt
in The Bamboo Grove: An Introduction to Sijo, which was published by the
University of California Press in 1971 and is still, as far as I know, the
best study of the form in English. Like the English lyric, the sijo began
as a song form. The earliest ones date from the fourteenth century, and
contemporary Korean poets still write them. They’re basically three line
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poems of about fifteen syllables to a line. The rhythm comes from the pat-
terning of phrases within the line.
And they get used for all kinds of purposes. Here’s a poem, probably
from the sixteenth century, that uses nature imagery to talk about wran-
gling politicians:
Can a swarm of these tiny insects
devour a whole great spreading pine?
Where is the long-billed
woodpecker? Now we could really use one.
When I hear the sound of falling trees
I cannot contain my sorrow.
The woodpeckers, of course, eat insects. Here’s one from a beauti-
ful sequence called “The Nine Songs of Kosan.” It was written in the
sixteenth century by the great Korean Confucian philosopher Yi I. The
songs were composed after he had retired from government service and
was living in Kosan, a place equivalent perhaps to the Blue Ridge moun-
tains. Here is the last poem in the sequence:
Where shall we find the ninth song?
Winter has come to Munsan;
The fantastic rocks
are buried under snow.
Nobody comes here for pleasure now.
They think there is nothing to see.
Confucian maybe, but it seems very much like a Buddhist joke. Here’s
hoping that there’s much to see in the New Year.
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1998
january 4
A Korean Poet: Ko Un
Modern Korean poetry, like the poetry of Eastern Europe, is inextrica-
bly entangled with the country’s history in the twentieth century: Japa-
nese military occupation from 1905 to 1945, during which time efforts
were made to eradicate the Korean language; a devastating civil war, made
more devastating because the war and the peninsula became a pawn in
the Cold War; the division of the country; a series of military dictator-
ships in the South, the Republic of Korea, accompanied by continued
Cold War tensions with the North; a U.S. military presence; a remarkable
economic recovery; and an intense grass-roots democracy movement that
often fought the government in the streets.
The conflict between the protesters and the government culminated
in a massacre in the southern city of Kwangju in 1979 in which over
five hundred people, mostly students, were killed. It was the Tiennamen
Square of that decade. To get a sense of the magnitude of it: there are forty
million Koreans, so it was as if the U.S. National Guard had shot down
2,500 students at Kent State in 1971 instead of four. After Kwangju, the
memory of that event became the focus of the pro-democracy move-
ment, which finally bore fruit in 1992 when the Republic elected a presi-
dent, Kim Young Sam, who exposed financial scandals and prosecuted the
perpetrators of the massacre. Last week the leader of the movement for
decades, Kim Dae Jung, was elected to the presidency. It’s a remarkable
story, it’s not only a story about the Korean economy, and it’s not over.
And Americans, who bear some responsibility for the violent turns in
modern Korean history, know very little about it.
One of the prominent literary figures in the movement to resist
government suppression of the Kwangju incident and to bring about
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democratic reforms was a poet named Ko Un. In the 1970s and 1980s he
was arrested four times, imprisoned, tortured—as a result of which he lost
his hearing in one ear—and ultimately pardoned. He had been a student
in the years of Japanese occupation, a Buddhist monk when he began
to write, and, after his return to secular life, another of the twentieth
century’s alienated urban poets until he joined the democracy movement
and became an active dissident. While he was in prison, he conceived
one of his major projects, to write a poem about every person he had
ever known. Called Ten Thousand Lives, two volumes of this monumental
work have been published. Only a handful of the poems have appeared
in English translation, but they are remarkably rich. Anecdotal, demotic,
full of the details of people’s lives, they’re not like anything else I’ve come
across in Korean poetry. It’s to be hoped that a fuller translation of them
will appear.
In the meantime a book of Ko Un’s short Buddhist poems is just out
from Parallax Press, Beyond Self: 108 Korean Zen Poems, translated by Kim
Young Moo and Brother Anthony. Here are a few of these brief, tough-
minded poems in the “crazy wisdom” tradition:
Echo
To mountains at dusk:
What are you?
What are you are you . . .
A Drunkard
I’ve never been an individual entity.
Sixty trillion cells!
I’m a living collection
staggering zigzag along.
Sixty trillion cells! All drunk.
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A Friend
Hey! With the clay you dug out
I fashioned a Buddha.
It rained.
The Buddha turned back into clay.
Clear skies after rain are pointless.
Ripples
Look! Do all the ripples move
because one ripple started to move?
No.
It’s just that all the ripples move at once.
Everything’s been askew from the start.
A Shooting Star
Wow! You recognized me.
A Moonless Night
No moon up
yet the two hundred miles
between you and me
shine bright all the night long.
That dog that’ll die tomorrow
doesn’t know it’s going to die.
It’s barking fiercely.
One hundred and eight poems because there are 108 beads on a
Buddhist “rosary,” and in the old learning 108 karmic bonds of passion
and delusion.
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16 Robert Hass / 1998
Note: Several volumes of Ko Un’s work are now available: Ten Thousand Lives,
translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Gary Gach (Green Integer); Flower
of the Moment, translated by Brother Anthony of Taizé and Gary Gach (BOA
Editions); and The Three-Way Tavern, translated by Claire Yoo and Richard
Silverg (University of California Press).
january 11
In Memoriam: Denise Levertov
Denise Levertov died just before Christmas, of cancer, in Seattle. She was
seventy-four and one of the defining poets of her generation. Her passing,
so soon after Allen Ginsberg, reminded me of some lines she wrote in the
1960s about William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound:
This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.
The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones
have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving over a hill . . .
This comes from the 1964 volume, O Taste and See (New Directions).
Here is the title poem from that book:
O Taste and See
The world is
not with us enough.
