I had the great fortune to hear Robert Hass, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winer in poetry and a former US poet laureate, read and lecture at the 2008 Rosenberry Writer’s Conference at the University of Northern Colorado. With a sensitivity that relies on the senses themselves, Hass’ work can take on political subjects that even the most talented poets shun. And the most difficult social issue for a poet to broach with any authenticity right now is global warming, the lurking danger that has been called the greatest crisis facing humanity. The danger of course is that poetry will become polemic—how can you be true to language when you echo a rallying cry, no matter how sincere? How can you be true to the ambiguities and contradictions that are a natural part of human nature yet still speak out on a political issue? I am sometimes frightened by the all-encompassing rightness of the green movement. It has the potential to become a dangerous trap to free thinking. There’s no reason to argue against global warming, yet there is also the danger that the dialog can be overpowered by the apparent infallibility of the cause. Too much earnestness can be undermine free thought and it can absolutely destroy art. But Hass pulls it off. The poem “State of the Planet” from his most recent book Time and Materials grapples with global warming not with a high-pitch of impending doom and self-righteousness, but instead through the “red satchel” of a schoolgirl, an incantation to the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, a rock in a Mexican desert. The result is a poem of incredible power that resonates with conviction and the tangible sense of what it is like to live on this possibly doomed planet. This is what a true national poet must do, speak to our global condition, to the terrors and challenges that face us right now, yet also speak to us simply as the complex, sensing, confused human beings that we are.

In Hass’ words:

Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth,
To set aside from time to time its natural idioms
Of ardor and revulsion, and say, in a style as sober
As the Latin of Lucretius, who reported to Venus
On the state of things two thousand years ago–
“It’s your doing that under the wheeling constellations
Of the sky,” he wrote, “all nature teems with life—”
Something of the earth beyond our human dramas.