Thank God for Robert Hass and his clear unintimidating prose. Here, he is using a scene from the Wizard of Oz to discuss Robert Creeley' s poetics in Twentieth Century Pleasures (Harper Collins, 1984):
I am thinking of the scene in which the wizard, a stern face on a huge screen, booms out his mighty definition of himself: I AM OZ; and Dorothy's little dog Toto, the only creature in the room not scared witless by the impressiveness of it all, trots up to the curtain and pulls it back, revealing a nervous man fiddling desperately at a control panel and speaking into a microphone. Language has such power that poets are always both the image on the screen and the figure at the controls who tries to act as a medium for that powerful projection.
In this case Bob is Toto I think and for the last three days I've felt a bit like the tin man, the scarecrow and the lion all rolled into one. That big fucking face on the screen!
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