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

By Michael Judge

FROM THE ARCHIVES

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. The dinner went so well, in fact, that we took in the show at Yoshi’s that night—jazz giant Herb Alpert and his lovely wife Lani Hall. I remember saying goodbye to Hass at the end of the evening, shaking his hand outside the club on Fillmore Street and thanking him profusely.

The next time I saw Hass was in 2018 when he’d come to the University of Iowa where I was teaching journalism to receive the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin for his delightful essays in A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. Hass, to his credit, said next to nothing about the book and his own writing. Instead, he spent the entire lecture educating the audience about Newton Arvin, the distinguished literary critic and Capote’s former lover, who was thrown out of Smith College in 1960 after he was arrested by local police for possession of “obscene pictures” and “lewdness” and sent to a mental hospital for being a “homosexual.” Hass’s research was impressive, and he seemed to be on a mission to explain how far things had come in his own lifetime in regard to LGBTQ+ rights, and, perhaps, how far we still have to go. At any rate, I approached him before the award ceremony, not knowing if he’d recognize me. Surprisingly, he did. Smiling broadly, he offered me his hand, and said, “Michael, good to see you! How’s your wife?”

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The Bard of Berkeley

June 27, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — One benefit of being a poet—as opposed to, say, a politician or talk-show host—is that you can be the most celebrated person in your field, a virtual rock star among those who study, read and write poetry, and still remain anonymous in just about any public setting.

The thought occurs to me as I stand outside one of this city’s finer Japanese-fusion restaurants (a fancy joint called Yoshi’s) chain smoking and awaiting the arrival of Robert Hass, a poetry rock star if ever there was one.