The Bard of Berkeley

A conversation with Robert Hass, Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, on haiku, war, Czesław Miłosz, and the responsibilities of writers.

Photo © Miriam Berkley

I first met Robert Hass in June 2009 over a wonderful dinner at Yoshi’s, a restaurant and jazz club in San Francisco’s Fillmore District that since shut down. The good news is the original Yoshi’s, an Oakland landmark since 1972, is still very much alive—as is the 81-year-old Hass. The interview below took place at a difficult time for the nation and my family. The number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq had dropped from 904 in 2007 to 314 in 2008, while U.S. deaths in Afghanistan more than doubled from 155 in 2008 to 317 in 2009. My wife and I had just suffered a second miscarriage and had traveled to the Bay Area, my boyhood home, to help mend our broken hearts, if only for a few beats at a time. Hass had no way of knowing—and still doesn’t to this day—but our dinner with him helped us heal, perhaps more than anything else on that trip. He was charming, almost boyishly so, and more excited about my wife and her gifts as a chef and ceramicist than my questions. T…