Notes

“Explication 3”

The epigraph is from John Haines’s essay “The Writer as Alaskan: Beginnings and Reflections,” which I first read in Living Off the Country: Essays in Poetry and Place. It has been widely quoted and reprinted in other places as well. His biographers seem fond of quoting various parts of this essay.

“Explication 4”

The quote from Haines in this piece also comes from “The Writer as Alaskan: Beginnings and Reflections” in Living off the Country: Essays in Poetry and Place.

“A Song for Forgetting”

This poem is a golden shovel that incorporates John Haines’s “Poem of the Forgotten,” the text of which I took directly from the broadside that hangs near my gun safe. I am indebted to Terrance Hayes, who invented the golden shovel as a form in response to Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem “We Real Cool.” I first read “Poem of the Forgotten” in Haines’s News from the Glacier the first year I arrived in Alaska. The poem has lived many lives beyond books and the broadside. John Luther Adams set “Poem of the Forgotten” to music in 2004, and in 2013 the Alaska State Council for the Arts installed the poem on a plaque near the Northfork Public Use Cabin in the Chena River Recreation Area.

Thank you to Sandra Beasly, Julie Marie Wade, Tess Taylor, Peggy Shumaker, and Joeth Zucco for reading drafts of this manuscript. Sarah Doetschman, there is nothing I can do to thank you for your careful reading and brilliant reordering. I am so fortunate to call you friend and my poems are doubly fortunate to have you as an editor. With love and gratitude to T.J. O’ Donnell, for the years of presence, for being alongside for the living and the writing.