Common Language: Robert Hass in Conversation- Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More
American Poet: Some poets and critics have disparaged the emergence of new media on the literary scene, saying it marks the death of the written word. How would you respond to that?
Hass: First of all, let me say that the written word is far from dead. The situation that we re in is curious, because in many ways the written word is thriving as it has never thriven before. I mean--if you take a somewhat longer historical view--hardly anyone could read before 1800. Hardly anybody could read, and hardly anyone got a college education, or was able to study very much literature. And then, during the nineteenth century, there was a concerted campaign in the United States and Europe to teach people to read, and by the twentieth century many people could read, although very few received college educations, and even fewer had access to education in the arts. Now--although it's evident in just these last two generations that the number of children that are learning to read is declining--there are still an extraordinary number of literate people. Far more people than ever before are entering universities. There's more training in the arts, particularly in creative writing and in literature, available at every level. There's hardly a community college in the country that doesn't have an active and lively creative writing program. There are more bookstores, the bookstores carry more books, and more books are being published. More books of poetry, I'm sure, are being sold and read--even if you adjust for increase in population--than ever before in American history. And yet, we have this fixed idea that the written word is dead, and that it's declining. So the really interesting question is "Where does this idea come from?"
American Poet: And where do you think it comes from?
Hass: I think it has three sources. One is that during the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries, the print medium had a monopoly on information and, until about 1910, a monopoly on entertainment, or at least the kind that could be disseminated nationally, as opposed to theaters. The print media were the creators of celebrity. We have in our collective consciousness the idea that we've lost a great readership for poetry since the days of Frost and Hemingway and Eliot and so on, when what's really happened is that radio and television became the media of celebrity creation. We remember a time when the magazines created the cultural stars, who were often to some extent writers. The engines that create fame are always interested in their own kind. Now, writers are practically nonexistent as stars.
A second reason has to do with the fact that as more people have gone to college, education has become far more specialized. There are more and more people who go through school without getting a literary education, so we don't have that in common in the same way. A much smaller percentage of the population received an advanced education in the past. There are more lawyers and doctors who haven't read poetry then ever before. It's a bad thing when a country doesn't know its own poets, doesn't know the words of its own poetic tradition.
Number three, I think, is that all during the nineteenth century (when poetry and serious fiction were an important part of what people aspire to through literacy), poetry was published widely in newspapers and magazines, and it was geared to its audience: bourgeois, sentimental, and didactic, for the most part. Modernism was born in some ways as a reaction against that kind of writing (we may have lost our historical sense of this) so in a way Modernism was notoriously anti-popular. You could say it wasn't true of Williams, but at the same time he did want to publish in all those hot New York experimental magazines. I think that the papers and the magazines stopped publishing poems partly because the poems that they were publishing weren't hip anymore, and the new poems were too hard to understand.
American Poet: In a sense, poetry closed itself off from the world.
Hass: Yes, I think in a way it did. I think the modernists rose up to bite the hand that was feeding them just at the moment that the hand was being withdrawn. Pound was in that way kind of missionary--he really thought that he was going to change the reading habits of a country. But I also think that they had a more "classist" idea of who was going to read and who wasn't going to read. We feel like fewer people are reading because we really imagine that everybody should. But the modernists imagined a small upper-middle class as their audience, and they were trying to improve the taste of that small upper-middle class. There were writers like Sandburg, of course, of whom that wasn't true.
American Poet: Overall, do you feel that this was a mistake--something we should now be trying to address?
Hass: Well, it's hard to say that such a rich and inspired tradition of writing was a mistake. It's a tradition I belong to and a tradition that I pledged myself to. So, no, I don't feel that. Milosz, in his eighties, looks back across all the generations of experimental writing that he's lived through, from Valéry and symbolist writing and the early surrealist writing of his youth, through many of the forms of modernism, and as an old man, having seen an awful lot of the horror of the twentieth century, has an ideal of writing poems that are as plain and accessible as possible. So it's interesting to me to have been in Berkeley at a time when there was this terrifically interesting postmodern poetics that was if anything even more difficult for ordinary readers than modernism, at the same time that I was translating this old poet who had tried on every avant-garde movement of his time and had come to the conclusion that they were mostly the vanity of wounded artists who hated the middle class that they grew up in.
I think that an awful lot of American writing since the 1950s was in some ways anti-modernist, and that one of the reasons that poetry is undergoing this small boom is that people are turning to it and finding it surprisingly accessible, despite many years of education by teachers trained by New Critics to think that poetry was the best way to teach children analytic and interpretive skills in school--which could certainly kill off anything, you know? Somebody did a survey of college freshman and asked what was the single poem that they hated most in high school, and by a great measure the single most hated poem was Williams's "Red Wheelbarrow." What does that tell you? It tells me that such an innocent poem has been used by thousands of schoolteachers who asked "why does he say glazed with rainwater?" and "why are the chickens white?" So I'm sure there's also a pedagogy issue. Still, there's no reason that we should not have a difficult and demanding art.
But back to the question of the spoken word movement--I think it's very healthy for an art to have strong popular roots. Any art. I'm glad that people are reading all those terrible novels on airplanes. It means that people are reading. When Brodsky died, many people were quoting him when they would call me for statements, as saying "poetry is the last defense against the vulgarity of the human heart." And I know what he means--but at the same time, literature needs to be rooted in a vulgarity. Then it can act like a Jacob's ladder to other things. Basho's definition of aestheticism: it's like a tree that bears blossoms but no fruit. You want to make sure that your art is fruit-bearing.
