A Personal Remembrance of John Haines (1924–2011)

Many years ago I set out to know a country, to settle in it as deeply as I could and, as it turned out, make of that living knowledge a book. As a writer, I could do nothing else. In the end I could not separate art and nature, the country and the writing. They depended on each other, and with good fortune would make a single work.

—John Haines, Fables and Distances (1981)

My introduction to the distinguished Alaskan poet and nature writer John Haines occurred in March 1988, when the late Tom Auer, founder of the Bloomsbury Review, handed me a letter that John Haines had sent him to give to me. Haines had learned that I had been offered a professorship at the University of Alaska. He wrote amicably, as one author to another, to provide an advisory about the academic landscape at that provincial school. His observations about the writing faculty proved to be accurate. Soon I received unsolicited letters from others, all with the same cautionary theme. Being an optimist, I moved to the Far North.

As a result of living and teaching in Fairbanks for six years, I became friends with John. During that time many of his finest works were published, including the now classic book of nature essays, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire (1989), and his collected poems, The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer (1993). Although John was often away, teaching on one- and two-semester contracts at universities in the Lower 48, I enjoyed my periodic visits to his homestead, which was located on a birch- and spruce-covered hill overlooking the Tanana River about sixty miles southeast of Fairbanks. It was an honor, two years after I arrived in the subarctic, to feature his writing in my collection of northern literature, A Republic of Rivers: Three Centuries of Nature Writing from Alaska and the Yukon.

I have a box of letters that he sent over the years, the most recent mailed on January 3, 2011, to accompany his last work, Descent (2010). He kindly sent the book because it includes an interview I conducted with him for the Bloomsbury Review a decade ago. What struck me most as I read his obituary in the New York Times, as well as articles in the Alaska papers, was first how factually inaccurate they were, and second how remote and disconnected the comments were from the human being I knew for twenty-three years.

The Times, for example, reports that the author had five wives (the record confirms four). The Times also alludes to Haines’s “famously cantankerous personality.” John Haines was less deserving of that appellation than many other writers I have known, and that includes the over two hundred authors I published over three decades in eighteen edited collections (among them were three Nobel laureates, six Pulitzer recipients, and an American president, most of whom, like Haines, had dynamic personalities).

Haines considered himself chiefly a poet. To my way of thinking he was just as accomplished as an essayist, as can be seen in such works as Living off the Country: Essays on Poetry and Place (1981). He was not, to be sure, a central or commanding figure of his time, but my sense is that literary historians will categorize him as a “neglected master” of his era. His peer group included such friends as Wendell Berry, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Hayden Carruth, Tess Gallagher, and Raymond Carver. Among his many influences was William Carlos Williams. Haines treasured a letter of praise (1953) from Williams, the father of postwar American poetry. He carefully preserved the document, just as Walt Whitman kept his note of encouragement (1856) from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Dr. Williams’s letter to John Haines can be read in A Gradual Twilight).

Authors routinely perceive themselves differently than posterity does. Thoreau, for example, who produced quite a bit of forgotten verse, regarded himself as a poet and political activist who kept field journals in the manner of the Roman Stoics he emulated. I, for one, wish that Haines, the bard of...