Doctoral Student Lutz Stichl meets Robert Hass
In early August, Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass granted an interview to our Department’s doctoral student and former staff member Lutz Stichl. Currently Oberstudienrat at Städtisches Gymnasium Rheinbach, Stichl is at work on a thesis about Hass’ poetry and poetics. The dissertation is supervised by Professor Dr. Ludwig Deringer. Hass, who has served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997, met Stichl in his hometown Berkeley, California.
In the interview, Hass elaborated on the role of Buddhism in his coming of age as a poet in what presented itself in hindsight as a complex reception process involving Poundian Modernism, Beat counter-culture, and the search for a secular-religious perspective on life. Amongst other topics of discussion were poetic reflections of Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, the relationship of metaphor and metonymy in the poetry of Milosz and Hass’ own oeuvre and – more generally – how to devise “a language that attends to being and becoming” in poetry and prose.
A publication of the interview is planned in the wake of the publication of Stichl’s thesis.