Here’s hoping Sam Hazo doesn’t read this
Sam Hazo is 93, sound as you could expect, his intellect still at the full dimensions of its notable capaciousness, his voice the soundtrack of thought, life and authority.
His family, his friends, his thousands of former students, his fellow poets know what a joy it is to speak with him, an experience shared by Brooke Shields, Saul Bellow, Seamus Heaney, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut, Queen Noor of Jordan, Anthony Hopkins, Gregory Peck and, among too many additional luminaries to list, Princess Grace of Monaco.
Honest to God.
That was all part of Hazo’s International Poetry Forum, which flourished in Pittsburgh for more than four decades, a global magnet for poets, writers, artists, musicians and actors to a space, Hazo envisioned, “where poetry could speak for itself in a public setting.”
But if speaking with Sam Hazo is a joyous thing, writing about Sam Hazo, by counterpoint, is decidedly not. There’s an uneasy if self-flattering suspicion that he’ll read it, for one thing, and even a cursory inspection of your writing by one of America’s greatest poets, essayists, lecturers and teachers can be a little unnerving if not much, much worse.
No one can testify to this better than Janine Molinaro, the Chair of the English Department at La Roche University and the author of “Before the Pen Runs Dry, A Literary Biography of Samuel Hazo.” She described to me as great fun the research for a project that would eventually sprawl to five years. But inevitably something wicked this way comes — a day when you’re going to have to sit down and write something that Sam Hazo will read about Sam Hazo.
“I felt completely paralyzed by the enormity of it,” she said. “It did feel crushing. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that terrified in my life as when I handed the manuscript to Sam.
“Now I think he has read it more than I have.”
A Pittsburgh native and a student of Hazo’s at Duquesne, it should be noted that Molinaro brought all of this upon herself. She felt it was needed, and she was right, because even though Hazo has written prolifically — novels, plays, essays and volume after volume of his towering poems — the next, called “The Less Said The Truer,” coming this fall — there’s been no scholarly treatment of the source of it all.
“I discouraged her,” Sam said. “She defied me. She showed me things about myself that I didn’t know.”
Don’t get it twisted; he’s delighted by it, but they both overcame a shared hurdle. As one scholar to another, they didn’t want a book that was, you know, scholarly. Most literary biographies are done after the subject is, in Sam’s words, “safely dead,” and tend to focus on the work rather than the person.
In this book, Molinaro’s genius is in the juxtaposition of Hazo’s poetry to the mileposts and crossroads of a fascinating life and family, but its highest value is in, perhaps inescapably, what Hazo has always taught and continues to profess.
“I agree with that statement, ‘Knowledge is nothing, imagination is everything,’” said the guy who might have half a dozen academic and honorary degrees under every couch cushion. “You could know enough to win $5 million on ‘Jeopardy’ and still make the dumbest decisions in the world about your life. If it doesn’t convert itself into imagination or into talent or into judgment, it’s a waste of time. There are many people who think they’re educated because they know more than they knew last year, but unless that helps them know themselves better, they’re not growing. There are many people who are illiterate who might be much, much wiser.”
Anyone who reads Molinaro’s beautiful project should prepare to have their minds changed on at least a few things. My own view of poetry, for example, is that it is simply beyond my comprehension, like Shakespeare, economics and the designated hitter. And while my understanding of the potential of the written word compared to Hazo’s should be measured in parts per billion, I thought I was absolutely correct about one aspect of writing, about which this book proves me dead wrong.
Cliched phrases such as “words cannot express,” “words could never describe” and “there are no words” to whatever, I thought, should never be used, particularly by writers, because that’s the job — finding the words to describe anything and everything. They do exist. So find them and shut up about the perils of your little task.
In these pages, that sentiment is so wrong it’s embarrassing. Regarding Hazo’s poem “Silence Spoken Here,” Molinaro writes that in “beautifully expressing Hazo’s philosophy of poetic silence, this poem presents a situation where no words exist to say what must be said,” and Hazo explains, “The implication of the very title is that silence is itself a language with a vocabulary that is not heard as much as it is sensed or felt. It is something akin to the silence that still exists after the poem is over. The poetry is in the silence.”
Some of the “silence” in and around the pages of “Before the Pen Runs Dry,” is intensely personal. No one can walk away from Molinaro’s work thinking that she and Hazo haven’t put everything on the table here. That, too, is part of his philosophy.
“Why are we here except to share?” he’s said. “Whether you’re a chef or a poet or a teacher — if you don’t share insights, wisdom, affection — why the hell are you here? Just to keep it to yourself? Who gains from that? Even you don’t gain from that?”
When Hazo graduated from Notre Dame, he thought he might like to work in newspapers. Sometime in the early ‘50s, he worked at the Post-Gazette for a few months, but, naw, we couldn’t use him. In the decades since, he’s contributed a ton of essays and op-eds, and he is the reason the Saturday paper had a poem on the op-ed page. In one interview, he explained the Brooke Shields thing.
“When Brooke Shields appeared in the Forum’s ‘Turn of the Century Impromptu’ with James Earl Jones and David Conrad, many assumed that her fame and beauty precipitated the invitations,” Hazo said. “What they did not know was that she knew French literature, spoke French fluently and had a degree from Princeton with French as her forte. I asked her to begin her portion of the program by reading without preliminary remarks a poem by Jacques Prevert. As soon as she began, I noticed that many in audience had a look of awe and discovery. At the reception after the performance, she stayed over so as to be able to converse with all who waited to meet here. In fact, she was the last one to leave.”
As it happens, that’s kind of what I got from Molinaro’s book. Awe and discovery. And God I hope Sam doesn’t read this.