On Japanese Haiku Masters, His Poetry, and 25 Years of Working with Milosz: A Visit with Poet Robert Hass

Robert Hass, a Bay Area native, is one of the most prolific and celebrated American poets of the last half century. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995–1997, and has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, MacArthur Fellowship, and Wallace Stevens Award.

Among the early influences on Hass’s work were the Chan-Zen leanings of Beat poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lew Welch. Later, Hass would publish The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994). Hass also translated and worked closely with Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz for many years.

From the introduction to Hass’s Essential Haiku:

What is in these poems [haiku] can’t be had elsewhere. About the things of the world, and the mind looking at the things of the world, and the moments and the language in which we try to express them, they have unusual wakefulness and clarity. Perhaps the best way to get to it … is to read them as plainly and literally as possible. In the end, the best advice to readers of the poems may be the advice Basho gave his writers: “Prefer vegetable broth to duck soup.”

From the great haiku poet Kobayashi Issa (d. 1827):

Don’t worry, spiders
I keep house
casually.

Except from Hass’s eight-page poem, “Santa Barbara Road,” in his book, Human Wishes:

Household verses:“Who are you?”
the rubber duck in my hand asked Kristin
once, while she was bathing, three years old.
“Kristin,” she said, laughing, her delicious
name, delicious self. “That’s just your name,”
the duck said. “Who are you?” “Kristin,”
she said. “Kristin’s a name. Who are you?”
the duck asked. She said, shrugging,
“Mommy, Daddy, Leif.”