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When he was a homesteader in Alaska, poet John Haines moved away from language and institutions to an older and simpler existence. In solitude, listening to his own voice, the events of his life reached into the past and the future. We live on the surface, he discovered. It is the land that makes people. If a poet will see, will feel, will interpret his place and then relate that experience to what he knows of the world at large, he will have a life in imagination, a vitality beyond appearances. John Haines is author of At the End of Summer: Poems 1948-1954; Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays; and The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer. He received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1991.
I am giving this book a hearty five star rating even though I have only read eight of the nineteen essays. For my money, two of the essays alone ("The Writer as Alaskan" and The Hole in the Bucket") are worth the price of the entire book - and more.On page 7 Haines says: "Ours is a derivative life." I believe much writing is derivative. Haines' writing in general, and in the two essays I refer to in particular, is deeply original, and original in a sense that matters profoundly. Two examples, one from each essay mentioned above.One, "These places have added to the sum of what I have been; and then, returning to some enduring stillness in my life, I find myself once more in a familiar setting of broad river and sunlit hill. Behind all I write there is a landscape, partly idealized, perhaps, upon which the human figure, my own or another's acts out a part of its life. That original place sustains me. It gave me a way of perceiving the world that I might not have acquired otherwise, and not least, a solitude in which I could learn to listen to my own voice. But as I have tried to show, I do not think that place, outer place alone can account for this. There must be another place, and that is within the person himself. When that interior place, formed out of dream and fantasy, and by intense imagination, finds its counterpart in a physical landscape, then some genuine human reality can be created." (page 12-13) [In the margin I wrote: 'Interior place + physical landscape = genuine human reality!]Two, "Most genuine poets have understood that one great quality of art, and it may be its most important quality, is that it enhances life for us. In more common terms, it gives us something to look up to. Things are changed, made visible in another, or ideal light; they are removed from the ordinary and become part of some very old, interior story in which we recognize something of ourselves. (page 67)
