blueprints

84 | robert hass
shelves. I had associated them with the provincial byways of literature and
had passed them by.
So my own education in these traditions was random, spotty. I knew
that some part of my project was self-education. I was not alone in this. A
whole generation of courses in American environmental literature has
sprung up in the last ten years, born, I am sure, from the same perception
and the same sense of urgency. And there is even a professional organization
of writers, teachers, and scholars, the Association for the Study of Literature
and the Environment (ASLE), who gather each year to talk about this new
work. They were thinking, are thinking, that our ways of thinking about the
planet and its life need to be part of formal education in the humanities and
not just in the sciences. Our disciplines—with the traditional chasm
between humanities and the sciences that C. P. Snow described in Two Cultures—did
not fit the world we had made and were confronted by, and it
was time to do something about it.
Around this time and in this state of mind, I came to the peculiar and
temporary job of poet laureate of the United States. The poet laureate’s
position is an annual appointment at the Library of Congress, and it entails
three responsibilities: to give a poetry reading at the Library, to give a lecture,
and to curate and host an evening literary series in the Madison Building
on Capitol Hill in the fall, winter, and spring seasons. In addition to
those responsibilities, there were opportunities. One of them, I discovered,
was to host some kind of symposium on a literary subject. There was a small
budget usually available for that purpose (which came from the laureate
endowment, not from taxpayer’s money, a distinction I discovered was
important to many taxpayers when I found myself taking questions on
C-SPAN). I thought immediately, because I was the first person west of the
Mississippi to hold the laureate post, that I should do something to reflect
the literary traditions of the West, and I proposed the prospect of a symposium
of writers in the natural history and environmental tradition. I
returned the following week to find that there was no budget available for
a conference, but I had already gotten to like the idea and asked Prosser
Gifford, the Library’s director of cultural programs and, I knew, an avid
sailor with an interest in marine ecology, if I could go ahead with it if I
found the money myself.
This would have been September 1995. It was an interesting time in
Washington, DC. During the midterm elections the previous fall, the
Republican Party had seized control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in