Delayed Verbs: Occupying the Libidinal Space Between Action and Inaction in Robert Hass' SUN UNDER WOOD

Upon first reading Robert Hass' Sun Under Wood (New Jersey: Ecco Press, 1996), I was struck by the amount of delayed and infinitely delayed verbs throughout the poems.:

When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days--
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears--
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why hey had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one--
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence--can escape this violent, automatic
life's companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
(p. 39)

As a reader, this type of move can be either very frustrating or very liberating and pleasurable. On first reading, I was more inclined to the former. I couldn't hold on to anything, and felt that I was missing many of the beautiful images and descriptions because I was too concerned about what was happening to the subject six lines before. More than that, I couldn't see what point this was serving. Was it just to add tension? To force the reader to let go of certain images in search of other ones? Were the poems about some kind of mental constipation, a continual stalling of the poem which itself produced one? None of these seemed to quite fit with the content and/or the form. That is, until we looked at "Layover" more closely in class.

"Layover" begins with the speaker looking out of a window at the airport in Anchorage watching men load and unload luggage. The next stanza begins with a broader description of the landscape along with diction which lend the verse the air of social commentary: "the colonizer's usual prefab, low-roofed storage sheds" (25). His descriptions then go beyond what he could actually be seeing, to the nature beyond and in the mountains. The speaker's attention turns, in the third stanza, inward and contemplates his/her own inaction. "This is the day of diplomatic lull" (26). Coupled with the speaker's musings about the strangeness with which we discuss the subjectivity of countries--"Iraq has agreed. Russia has promised. A bleak thing"--his/her own inaction is highlighted. In the fourth and final stanza, the speaker's attention again turns to what is immediately visible: the loaders and the other people in the airport, ending on the beautiful line "the stale air; breathed and breathed, we have been sharing" (26). Although poignant, this last note is rather dire. A group of people, just waiting, sharing air, while horrible things are happening everywhere, things which, at least to some extent, these people are responsible for. But we've all heard this line before; nothing too new or interesting there. Except that the next poem in the series is entitled "Notes on 'Layover.'"

I won't bother describing this poem with as much detail as I did the last, but it importantly begins with "I could have said that" (27). Now, what this poem does is open the previous one to a whole new realm of possibilities. No longer does the poem read as a sad tale of one's dissatisfaction of group inaction, but one which asserts that the writing of the poem--or the thinking the thoughts within the poem--are themselves active endeavors. The speaker could have said this, he could have said that. His/her subjectivity has been restored and a reader is forced to recognize that neither observing nor describing are passive activities. However, they're not exactly pro-active either. What these two poems investigate and question is that very space between action and inaction, stasis and movement. More generally, Hass' lines do the same thing. By delaying the verb--sometimes providing it later and sometimes delaying it indefinitely--Hass' poems compel a reader to move along while staying in the same place. If one chooses to read linearly, than it comes with a price of tension and (in)attention to particular parts over others. To freely move in Hass' poems one must either skip from phrase to phrase, ignoring the narrative aspects of the work, attempt to force it into some grander scheme, or accept that one most both move and stay stationary, occupy a tense space between action and inaction, in order to touch the work at all.