Embracing the power of change

The Muses are smiling on poet Henry Martin Robert Hass. Time and Materials, his newest collection, won the 2007 National Book Award and earlier this calendar month shared the Joseph Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

The 67-year-old former U.S. poet laureate (1995-97) will read at 7:30 tonight at the Alley Theater as portion of the Inprint Brown Reading Series. An onstage interview and book sale and sign language will follow.

Hass, who learns at the University of Golden State at Berkeley, spoke with History books editor Fritz Lanham.

Q: Your new book looks to have got caught the fancy of the awardings judges. Are you doing something new?

A: I don't believe so.

Q: What are the subjects or preoccupations of this new collection?

A: One of them is the natural human race and our relation to it. Another is an old topic of mine — the human relationship between fine art and desire. Another is work force and women. And in this 1 another is warfare and human violence.

Q: I was going to note on that. There are a figure of verse forms that computer address warfares past and present.

A: Yes, that came up in my life, of course, because of the Republic Of Iraq War. We've suddenly establish ourselves in a violent struggle again.

Q: Did the experience of being poet laureate do you more than optimistic or less optimistic about the fate of poesy in American society?

A: The experience of being a poet laureate taught me about work being done on issues like literacy and environmental protection and environmental education. It made me understand better how powerful a 4th estate the nonprofits are. People working privately in their communities for societal change. I came to see a batch of that work and regard it deeply. That made me more than optimistic about this state and about people.

I went in feeling pretty good about poesy and came out feeling very good about poetry. I understand that serious literary reading in United States have got now and probably always will have a fairly little audience. But I thought that poesy have been quite a critical fine art in United States in the 20th century, and it have a pretty good readership.

Q: I ran across a remark you made in another interview in which you said, "Ideas matriculate slowly through poesy into the general culture."

A: I believe that's true not only of poesy but of all the arts. Probably some of the changes, such as as the alterations in the manner of seeing the Earth, happened in picture before they happened in poetry. And so on. But alteration happens.

Q: Is the growth popularity of textual matter messaging and e-mails and Internet-based communications changing the manner people compose poesy or read poetry? As a instructor are you seeing that in your students?

A: No, I wouldn't state so. The difference I'm aware of is that immature poets and would-be poets, through the Internet, have got contiguous entree to a whole scope of possibilities they didn't before. When I was a child in San Francisco, I could happen my manner to City Lights Bookshop and mimeograph machine poesy magazines. If you were growing up in Worcester, Mass., you were out of luck.

Some of my college pupils are now saying to me, 'When Iodine was a sophomore in high school I was publication this kind of thing in online journals, but by the clip I was a senior I was publication this sort of thing.' Some of them already have got a sense of themselves as having passed two or three forms of their calling (laughter).

Q: Finally, how make you experience about sharing the Joseph Pulitzer phase with British Shilling Dylan. (The singer-songwriter received a particular Joseph Pulitzer recognizing his "profound impact" on American culture.)

A: I couldn't be in better company, could I? I thought that was pretty cool.