Great poets, great friends reunite for reading and discussion

There are few, if any, opportunities in life in which an individual is invited to eavesdrop on a conversation, let alone one between two poetry legends who are picking up where they left off.

The Heyman Center for the Humanities is hosting such a conversation in the Davis Auditorium of the Schapiro Center at 6:15 p.m. on Monday. Robert Hass, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former United States Poet Laureate, will read a selection of his work, and then participate in a discussion with Barnard English professor and fellow poet Saskia Hamilton.

Hass and Hamilton first met when Hamilton was a student at Kenyon College. Instead of going abroad her junior year, she traveled to California to study with Hass, and had an enlightening semester under the tutelage of a writer she admired greatly.

While she does not feel that her writing and Hass’s are very similar, Hamilton said, “The older I get, the more I hear other poets in my own writing.” She believes that there is a genealogy in poetry, much as there is in music, in which one piano student’s teacher was the student of another, who was taught by another, who learned from a famous pianist. This genealogy exists not only in the sense that teachers’ instructions are passed on through generations of students, but also in the sense that there is always some sort of connection to a past idea, whether or not one chooses to acknowledge it. Hass, for example, was a generation younger than the beat and objectivist poets. While he does not draw directly from their trademark styles, his and most poets’ work since show hints of their influence.

Hass has also translated haiku—as seen in “The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa”—and the work of his colleague, Polish poet and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Czesław Miłosz. Hamilton edited “The Letters of Robert Lowell” and co-edited “Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.”

Hamilton emphasized that writers do not just look to other poets for inspiration, but also to different arts altogether. Hamilton nods to music and visual arts as examples. She said that lines of poetry “work in silence”—not unlike a dramatic pause in a symphony­—while the way words are arranged on a page is sometimes just as important as what they communicate.

No matter what the medium, Hamilton said that “one of art’s—and poetry’s—values is being apart from use and value.” Poetry is not necessarily utilitarian, but it is beautiful. This very idea could be to the discussion’s detriment. Because poetry continues to suffer a decline in popularity, critically admired writers like Hass and Hamilton remain relatively unknown to the general population, and events like this one are kept from being as widely attended as they could be.