Hass On Prose Poems Political Poetry And

Hass On Prose Poems, Political Poetry, And "Rusia En 1931" Essay, Research Paper

Excerpts from an interview with Hass by the Iowa

Review in 1991

Question: Why a prose poem, and what is a prose poem?

Hass: I haven’t arrived for myself at any very satisfactory

formulation of what a prose poem is. Certainly it has something to do with condensation .

. . I don’t know how to define it in terms of genre, and when I was working, I guess

I just stopped trying to think about that. What I did think about was what the

conventions of the prose poem were. At the time that I was starting to write them, the

prose poem, as it had been revived in America, was used almost entirely for a kind of

wacky surrealist work, and I think that nervousness about using prose was that then you

had to put a lot of what people thought was poetic—that is to say, wildness

and imagination and free association—into it to make sure that it was poetry, because

if it got too near the conventions and sentence sounds of expository prose or narrative

prose . . . then it really wasn’t poetry. So almost as soon as I started working, I

got interested in those boundaries: what the prose poem wasn’t supposed to

sound like . . .

It almost seemed like photography to me, and it gave me a feeling that I wanted to

experiment with the form . . . I wrote a whole lot of them, and I got interested in

textures, the way that you would with a given palette . . . I felt excited because I knew

it [a particular prose poem, "Churchyard"] was exactly what the prose poem

wasn’t supposed to be. It was too much like the sound of expository prose. . .

Later, something else occurred to me: I was working in these forms because they had a

certain outwardness that verse didn’t have. I think I was at a time . . . when things

were going on in my life that I didn’t want to look at, didn’t want to feel. And

I wanted to keep writing, so I unconsciously started writing prose to avoid the stricter

demands of incantation. When I was doing it, it seemed to be exploratory; in retrospect,

it seems a sort of long escape . . .

. . . the whole time I was working on the prose poem I knew that somehow I never

particularly loved the idea of the prose poem. But it was interesting to me to

think about a larger form that might mix verse and prose . . .

Question: I wonder what your thoughts are about being a poet in

America in the ‘90s, and particularly in terms of politics.

Hass: Well, it’s a dilemma to know how to be political now and

also how to think about politics, but it’s a dilemma whatever you are . . . When I

was in graduate school, I was very involved in politics. In Palo Alto, a group of us

started a newspaper, a community self-help organization, and a free university, and there

was a polticial organization that went with all of this. When I finished all my graduate

work, I had to make a decision, whether to stay there and figure somehow to make a living

while continuing this work, or go be a professor and get on with my life as a writer . . .

The job, itself, my own writing, and the kind of emotional issues I deal with in the

writing all took me away from politics outside my immediate community . . . The social

world returns a bit in Human Wishes . . . I think that if you’re somebody who

thinks about that stuff, it enters your writing. And for some writers—if you’re

South African or something like that—it’s an inescapable subject. The problem

for American writers, particularly for white male American writers, is that it is an

escapable subject . . . I think we’re all haunted by the martyrdom of Mandelstam out

of a kind of bad conscience . . .

Anyway, I think about politics a lot; I go through periods when I don’t think

about it at all, but then at other times I think about it a lot, and I’ve written

about how one things about it. I don’t think that there’s any easy solution to

the present retreat . . .

I think political writing is problematic . . . People say that being antipolitical is

ultimately subversive, but there’s always Oppen’s example hovering over

one’s head, saying that subversive is a dime a dozen, all artists think they’re

subversive. Don’t flatter yourself . . .

So it’s puzzling. I know what I hate, but I know less and less about how to change

it. That’s why I said in "Rusia en 1931": "Poetry proposes no

solutions: it says justice is the well water of the city of Novgorod, black and

sweet." Mandelstam’s great political ideal was the Italian city-state, and the

most Italian city-state in the Russia of the Middle Ages was Nizhni Novgorod, and it was

famous for being a free place because they didn’t tax you for the well water.

Anybody, citizen or not, had access to the well water at any time. It was his image of a

just, small society. And I think that’s right; I think the task of art is to over and

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