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Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005

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Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005 by Robert Hass is his first collection of poems to emerge in past ten years. Hass is a familiar name in the contemporary world of poetry. He has been awarded National Book Critics Circle Award twice, and was the poet laureate of the US from 1995-1997. He is a professor at University of Berkeley and is presently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has co-translated the work of Nobel-winner, Czeslaw Milosz. The present book has lapped up a National Book Awards nomination, and received rave reviews from the poets and journalists alike.

What is a poem? Is it a piece that must be interpreted on basis of what it contains, or based on who has written it? Is the identity of poet important? Do his past achievements bias us to read his poems more favorably? Great poets and artists, irrespective of their reputation during their lifetimes, manage to produce works that transcend time, space, language and meaning. The toolbox is words, workstation is a solitary, barely visible corner chair and table, and the audience is firstly the writer's innate desire to create, and then maybe, a slew of readers who open the book. For a poet with the credentials of Hass, the audience is ensured, and what I wish to examine is if his poems justify the applause for a reader like me. I wish to read his poems with a wonder and appreciation that reviewers have expressed everywhere.

Here is excerpt from one of the poems "State of the planet", and this is representative of typical lines in Hass poetry and the arguments I am about to make:

"Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth,
To set aside from time to time its natural idioms
Of ardor of revulsion, and say, in a style as sober
As the Latin of Lucretis, who reported to Venus
On the state of things two thousand years ago....."

In reading poems by Hass, I found myself at lines which gave me intense feelings: I ravish the first three lines in this example, and then I begin to wonder why does Hass need a mention of Lucretis. Throughout the book, I wonder why he needs to evoke so many names and places that unless it is an erudite reader and a world traveler, the references are entirely lost on the reader. We, as beginning poets, are often asked to write self-contained poems, where images and metaphors stand on their realization by readers. We, as beginner poets, are asked to shun the abstract words, and the mention of painters, philosophers, poets and mythical figures, for cameos contaminate attention. In the poems by Hass, these rules are set aside. We watch paintings by Vermeer, we hear of Czeslaw Milosz, Horace, Whitman, Stevens and Nietzsche. We are at times in Mexican desert, in Bangkok and then we are entirely in the world of Dostoevsky. While at times, I enjoy these interludes, I want to know how Hass or the critics would react to a Hass-like poem written by a poet without Hass-like reputation.

Time and Materials strikes to me as a fairly unusual set of poems, where my own sensibilities as a poet are set aside. I am thrust into long, winding sentences, abstract and quirky details, forty-fifty line poems without stanzas and ten-fifteen words before line-breaks. Here as an example, I quote a line from Hass (and I loved this line): "The human imagination does not do well with large numbers." In another poem, he says, "It must be a gift of evolution that humans/Can't sustain wonder." So given he expresses these sentiments in his poems, I cannot comprehend why he has chosen this style. But a poem "Bush War" (featured in Best American Poetry last year) contains some remarkable and honest reflections on past wars, and strikes me an example of how the Hass-poems can work in spite of their verbosity.

Hass has translated great Haiku masters in the past. His own poems carry many Haiku-like phrases - where an apt image illustrates an emotion and an idea tersely. There are poems where he lets me breathe, stop, gasp, repeat lines to myself. There are lines where I shake my head vigorously and cannot appreciate the idea, the wordplay, the metaphor. I judge him more harshly than I would judge most poets, for he is one of the foremost poets of the country. After Robert Frost, America has not produced a poet who can transcend borders and cultures, and perhaps his poems can provide us a notion of why. Overall, I would still ask you to read Time and Materials, savor the humane moments and the montage of experience plastered all over the poems. I will leave you with the opening poem of the book:

IOWA, JANUARY

In the long winter nights, a farmer's dream are narrow.
Over and over, he enters the furrow.

"Time and Materials," the new collection of poems by Robert Hass is serious and reflective, but also playful and passionate. The themes of these poems are various; sex, war, art, the planet, the relationships between men and women, and language itself are all explored by Hass.

However, two of the dominate themes in the work are time and the nature of memory. Hass's examination of time and the materials of memories suggest that many of our recollections may contain more dreams and imaginations than we realize, and that over time the experiences we have, or think we have, are unintentionally revised and rescripted.

In, "Mouth Slightly Open," one of the shorter poems in the collection, thought and belief tumble together to create the possibility of an experience, a waking dream that leaves the subject, an oft-repeated `you', with only the memory of a possibility.

The body a yellow brilliance and a head
Some orange color from a Chinese painting
Dipped in sunset by the summer gods
Who are also producing that twitchy shiver
In the cottonwoods, less wind than river,
Where the bird you thought you saw
Was, whether you believe what you thought
You saw or not, and then was not, had
Absconded, leaving behind the emptiness
That hums in you now, and is not bad
Or sad, and only just resembles awe or fear.
The bird is elsewhere now, and you are here.

In the poem titled, "Then Time", Hass treats time as both a subject and a technique. The subjects of the poem, a man and woman, slide from the present (which becomes the past) to the future (which becomes the present), going from exhausted lovers "very busy wringing out each other's bodies" to old acquaintances having dinner, each silently reminiscing on what they were to each other and who they have become. At one point, "She asks him if he thinks about her. `Occasionally,' / He says, smiling. `And you?' `Not much,' she says, / `I think it's because we never existed inside time.'" Hass seems to be suggesting that the young are able to break free from the measured march of time to somehow live, however fleetingly, outside the constraints of the past, the present and the future of their lives.

This poem is a testament to Hass's prowess as a poet. He not only manages to distill the lifetimes of two subjects, their passion and their disillusionment, down to their respective essences, but he structures the poem in a way that reveals the paradoxical nature of time. By concentrating on two brief moments separated by twenty years, Hass brings the readers attention to both the fleeting and endless nature of time.

Mention must be made of the style of the poems. Hass has a love of language that manifests itself in a willingness to play, sometimes subtly, sometimes not, with syntax and semantics. A few good examples of this playfulness are the poems, "Breach and Orison," "Time and Materials," "Poet's Work," and "A Swarm of Dawns, A Flock of Restless Noon." In the latter poem, Hass even points out that, "The syntax is a little haywire there."

When he is not playing with the syntax or semantics of the English language, Hass seems to have revitalized the run-on sentence. This phenomenon can be found in the poem above, "Mouth Slightly Open." The first eleven lines of the poem are one sentence! Nails on a chalkboard for grammarians, but Hass changes these once egregious grammatical errors into breathtaking lines that work to quickly pull the reader through the poems. Many of these poems are like wild horses at full gallop, beautiful, powerful and unrestrained, and Hass has offered the reins to his readers. So take them up. This slim volume of poetry will not disappoint.

If I only had to buy one book of poetry this year, it would be "Time And Materials" by Robert Hass. I say this because Hass is poet who can combine soulful meditation about his physical existence in a world surrounded by danger from humanity's destructive forces, to his own private personal inner thoughts of joy and sorrow from having lived his life between that hostile world and the world that creates art.

I like to think that if Baudelaire were born and raised in San Francisco in the 1950s, he'd write poems like Robert Hass, poems that have this double edge of horror and ecstasy, this fear and wonder at the movement of time, this repulsion and this attraction to nature, to beauty, to the body--those "evil flowers."

Because, as Hass writes in my favorite poem from this collection, "Art And Life," a poem that looks like prose but that reads like verse:



There is nothing less ambivalent than animal attention
And so you honor it, admire it even, that her attention,
Turned away from you, is so alive, and you are melancholy
Nevertheless. It is best, of course, to be the one engaged
And being thought of, to be the pouring of the milk.



And what amazes me is that Hass's meditation on life as art puts the reader into the mind of the poet wishing he were part of the painting, inside the act of artistic creation, inside a human wish to be part of something so simple, a fluid gesture of time caught at the threshold, a woman pouring milk in Vermeer's famous painting.

Hass continues his meditation in this poem to take in his surroundings, the world that rubs up against this painterly light-filled, time-frozen world of Vermeer, to place himself like Prufrock in a public space where people go about their waking lives while the poet dreams and imagines who the caretakers of this painting are, the plain people eating in the museum cafeteria who reveal their vulnerability:

...I wondered
Who the restorer was. The blondish young woman
In the boxy, expensive Japanese coat picking at a dish
Of cottage cheese--cottage cheese and a pastry? ...
...She seems to be a person
Who has counted up the cost and decided what to settle for.
It's in the way her soft, abstracted mouth
Receives the bits of bread and the placid sugars.
Or the older man, thinning brown hair, brown tweed coat,
Brown buckskin shoes like the place where dust and sunset
Meet and disappear...

The genius of Hass, like the genius of Vermeer, is in his ability to create metaphor that captures human fraility and emotion in his descriptions of small, animal gestures like a woman's hands breaking off pieces of bread, or a man's pair of sad shoes. It is in those small gestures that we all live. Hass has been sketching those fine details ever since his first book of poems, "Field Guide" was published almost forty years ago. He is a poet that I return to over and over again because I gain from reading him a better sense of my own art of living.

Robert Hass's most recent collection of poems "Time and Materials" is perhaps his most self-reflective collection to date. Its contents appear as a long series of gentle solicitations. They appeal directly to the reader's thoughts and emotions and guide them toward Hass's own unique brand of enlightened despair. No poem consists of just one single idea or viewpoint but an entire host of provisional positions that all tenderly amend one another as the poem unfolds. The effect is a level of personal intimacy between writer and reader that is rare even for poetry.
The overall sentiment is one of cautious contentment; cautious because it is a contentment which is plagued with the paradoxical desire to be shared. This longing for a deeper communion is felt throughout the book and it has the effect of fixing any final resolution in a sort of permanent suspension. It is as if a separation between the true emotion and the expression of that emotion is inconceivable for Hass. In "Time and Materials" a feeling is only as authentic as its communication and the result is poetry written in search of an emotion as much as in expression of it. This search places the writer and the reader in a similar position to one another. They find themselves parsing the same lines; searching the same thoughts; chasing after the same elusive understanding. Hass writes in search of this communion because he knows that we read out of the same pursuit. What he expresses we interpret and what he interprets within himself our imagined impressions can provide expression for. This can help explain why there is a continual shift away from the page and into the projected mind of the reader on the part of Hass. It also accounts for the high level of intimacy mentioned earlier.
The broad scope of the poetry in this book makes any generalizing statements about it nearly impossible. The subjects include everything from consciousness, to economics, to cucumbers; and each of these topics is handled by Hass with an equally startling degree of intensity. Hass manages to treat every event in human experience as a potentially revolutionary one. However, unlike many poets, Hass is careful to keep this revolution in a state of pure potentiality rather than exhaust it in some illusory actualization. This is because it is here, when an idea is still in its infancy, that Hass shows his greatest fascination with it. The beauty is in the inception of the idea, not its fulfillment. Hass presents this beauty by cataloguing his own rapidly evolving relationship towards it.
Much of this book deals directly with the art of writing poetry. In "Time and Materials" the poem becomes the object as much as the medium. However, Hass is never content to let the significance of a piece end here. A poem that begins with a metaphor for literature soon reveals that literature itself should also be seen as a metaphor for something else. What often happens is that, as a poem grows increasingly self-reflexive, it inevitably exposes itself to the same metaphorization that any other poetical subject would undergo. As this happens, the traditional roles of tenor and vehicle are effectively broken-down and what remains in their place is a much more reciprocal form of reference that privileges neither side of the relationship. This technique is especially effective for a poetry that wants to speak directly to the act of interpretation (as Hass's poems often do) but that wants to do it without deconstructing itself to the point of unintelligibility.
"Time and Materials" is not the most shocking, cutting-edge, earth-shattering poetry that you will ever read. That's been done before. This is a poetry about balance, but it's a balance that still makes room for the occasional period of imbalance. One might even say it is a poetry about the balance between balance and imbalance. This sort of thing may not always make for the most tantalizing read, but what this poetry lacks in excitement it makes up for in substance.

While there aren't a lot of surprises here, Hass deftly portrays the relationships between experience and idea, language and representation. With a classical eye and a post-modern toolbox, Hass both praises and addresses the inadequacies of language as a tool for representation--and rarely does language seem as powerful and relevant as it does in this collection.

In my opinion, this book displays a broader range than any of Hass's other original collections: he elucidates metaphor/language as well as he did in Praise, he uses broad linguistic styles to create surreal settings as in Sun Under Wood, and he plays with eros and politic as he did in Human Wishes. But, somehow, I find this collection more readable than his previous collections. Although occasionally paradoxical (using language as elegy for language), something about these poems is more generous than much of his prior stuff.

If you like his previous work, you should like this.

This is simply astonishing poetry;Hass is,without question,the finest poet writing today in the United States.His work is elegant,fearless and humane.Whole passages are touched by genius,especially when he writes-urgently - of the madness of war. No historian or statesman has ever placed the multiple holocausts of the twentieth century in more clear-eyed perspective than does Hass in his poetic forms.In April,this book received the Pulitzer Prize for 2008. When today's poetry is catalogued and discussed in fifty years,this poet will be regarded as a laureate.Set aside your copies of past masters.Here is poetry that sacrifices none of the richness or musicality of the English language,while speaking to the present day in all its' maddening ambiguity.

Robert Haas, former poet laureate USA, has a problem: he doesn't write enough. But then that may be our problem. His readership hangs on every poem, every word in every poem. And they (WE, US)WANT MORE.

Not high flown nor lofty, his verse covers his chosen terrain, ordinary things from the ground-view vantage point. It takes us over the moguls and the pot holes with enough bounce that we know these rough spots are there but we're not jolted skyward out of our seats.

Obscurantism has had its day with the passing last century's lords of the obscure, Pound, Eliot, Stevens and their ilk.

Haas, Collins, are the 'ilks' we clamor for today.

I'm thrilled that Hass won it, as no one deserves it more. It's been a decade since his last book, and the contemplation of time and materials he experienced has constructed this continually delighting and surprising book, which I'd put up there with Field Guide and Praise as my three favorite books by Hass, who has become one of our most vocal ecological poets.

No arguing the point. Hass is good. Very good at times. Though the overall impression is that we have, ultimately, heard all of this before. And some times better.

Robert Hass, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco, 2007)

Robert Hass is a former Poet Laureate of the United States, which should tell you all you need to know about the quality of his work. And <em>Time and Materials</em>, the first book he published after his laureateship, does not disappoint in that regard.

"In one version of the legend, the sirens couldn't sing.
It was only a sailor's story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
by a music that he didn't hear--plungings of sea,
Wind-shear, the off-shore hunger of the birds..."
("Envy of Other People's Poems")

If there is a complaint to be had with the book, it's that the poems here feel safe; it didn't feel to me as if Hass was pushing any envelopes. Still, that's not necessarily a bad thing when your work is this good (and you make it look this easy; trust me, it isn't). If you're a fan of Hass', or of modern poetry ("modern" in the sense of "traditional free verse" rather than "various avantgarde movements") in general, then you will probably find this an enjoyable read. It'd also make a good intro to modern poetry for a novice, one thinks. *** ½