Lunchtime guest Bob Hass
One of the little-known pleasures of Bay Area life is the Heyday Books lunchtime conversations series in Berkeley. Great company, light lunch, and excellent speakers – Robert Alter, David Ulin, among them. Because of the series, I’m running up my mileage back and forth to Berkeley, which, apart from rising gas costs and wear-and-tear on my old Honda, is always a good thing.
And so I made the trek last month to hear Robert Hass, whose latest collection, Summer Snow, is getting a lot of attention. I wrote about that here.
I recognize that not everyone will be able to zap over to San Pablo Boulevard on a weekday. So I have coaxed publisher Steve Wasserman and his assistant, Emmerich Anklam, to provide an alternative, and they have. Lucky for all of us, the Hass event is the debut entry on the Heyday’s brand new Soundcloud page here. Steve moderates the discussion.
You never lose some friends.
Bob is always a fascinating speaker, and he spoke about the dangers to our environment, friends who have died, and the unusual process of putting together Summer Snow. One of his favorite topics is Czesław Miłosz, in fact, that’s how we met. I get plenty of opportunities to talk, so I generally like to be quietly inconspicuous at these events, but an hour into the talk about lost friends and the poems of Summer Snow, he asked for one last question and I couldn’t resist the chance.
My own trepidatious question around the 59 minute mark. Could he read one of his poems about Milosz? In particular, the one about the Miłosz’s tomb at Na Skałce? He hesitated. It was long, he said, counting the five pages. But then, with the encouragement of the crowd, he read the poem, “An Argument About Poetics Imagined at Squaw Valley After a Night Walk Under the Mountain.”
It was an astonishing, dare I say unforgettable, reading. Everyone was moved. One person was crying. Listen for yourself.
One hitch: the battery on the recording device died before the poem ends. So I include the final lines for you below:
One small fly in the ointment:
You described headlights sweeping a field
On a summer night, do you remember? I can quote to you
The lines. You said you could sense the heartbeat
Of the living and the dead. It was a night in July, he said,
In Pennsylvania – to me then an almost inconceivably romantic name –
And then the air was humid and smelled of wet earth after rain.
I remember this night very well. Those lines not so much.
Tags: Czeslaw Milosz, Emmerich Anklam, Robert Hass, Steve Wasserman