Time & Materials

ROBERT HASS: Well, I don’t know what they represented, but they were a way of checking in with myself, inside that life, that is, I could be — you know, I could be on a train heading from New York to some place in New Jersey, and see the lights burning out over the grasslands, and say to myself, “Secret, there’s fire out over the grasslands.”

But what I am not sure I understand — and maybe this is what distinguishes poets from the rest of us — is, why the need to describe trees? What is the burden on you that you must come up with a way to describe the world?

ROBERT HASS: My mind goes straight to my dear friend and mentor, Czeslaw Milosz, who…

JEFFREY BROWN: Great poet.

ROBERT HASS: … great poet, and he was born in Lithuania in 1911. And he lived through much of the worst violence of the 20th century in Europe. He lost so much that I know — I came to understand about him.

One of his poems begins, “Reality, what is it in words?” I came to understand about him that he’d lost so much that he felt like everything he didn’t get down — if he didn’t get it down, nothingness won, you know?

JEFFREY BROWN: If he didn’t get it down into a poem…

ROBERT HASS: Yes, nothingness won. He had this sense that, if art doesn’t somehow preserve our memory of the gift of life on Earth we’ve lost, so something like that.

- Robert Hass, 2008 Poet Laureate