Explication

3.

As a poet I was born in a particular place, a hillside overlooking the Tanana River in central Alaska, where I built a house and lived for the better part of twenty-two years.

—John Haines

Haines came to Alaska as a transplant, like me. But we’re not the same. My arrival in Alaska in 1994 coincided with him leaving after his storied battle to get an appointment at an Alaskan university ended in failure. He was packing his frustrations and heading south just as I drove a loaded Honda Accord up the highway. I came up to work on an MFA, a degree Haines didn’t believe was particularly useful.

I lived in a dry cabin for years, but it was in town. Hauling water involved a trip to the laundromat instead of the river. The post-pipeline Alaska I landed in was not the Homestead-Act Alaska Haines came to in 1947.

During my early years in Fairbanks, I only saw him from a seat in the audience at readings he occasionally gave with the local arts association. He seemed distant, his fame cloudlike—changing the color of whatever he floated over. Haines’s poems work toward the mythic layers of humanness. I was twenty-something, a poet from Outside, I felt an obligation to admire his work.

Haines believed that when a poet lived alone in the woods “an older consciousness of nature, overgrown by education, slowly begins to reassert itself.”

As if the only way for us to see our true-true selves is to walk away from each other.