Volume 2, Number 3

An Interview with John Haines
by Arthur Coffin

1.    John Haines, poet, essayist, and teacher, was born in 1924, in Norfolk, Virginia. After studying painting in Washington, D.C. and New York City, he homesteaded, from 1954 to 1969, in Alaska, at Mile 68, Richardson Highway, southeast of Fairbanks. Mr. Haines is the author of numerous collections of poems and critical essays, among which the most recent are Fables and Distances, New and Selected Essays (1996); A Guide to the Four-Chambered Heart (1996); The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer, Collected Poems (1993, expanded paperback edition 1996); and a memoir, The Stars, The Snow, The Fire (1989). A collection of early poems, At the End of This Summer: Poems 1948-54, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 1997.

2.    In addition to two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships for poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship previously granted, Mr. Haines received a Literary Award in 1995 from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and, in 1996, he was guest lecturer at the Annual Summer Wordsworth Conference in Grasmere, England. Recent academic appointments include those at Ohio University, George Washington University, and the University of Cincinnati. He occupied the Chair in Creative Arts at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee in 1993, and, in 1997, he was awarded the Annual Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets. Mr. Haines lives in Helena, Montana, with his wife, Joy.

3.    Arthur Coffin: As you know, Mr. Haines, this interview is prompted by your frequent references to Robinson Jeffers throughout your writings. In “On Robinson Jeffers” (1989), you note that “for a number of years this poet was among those who stood behind my own verses—not in his case as a model, for so far as I know I never learned anything directly from him. But as one more example of the variety and power of poetry in English in the first half of this century, Jeffers for me held, and still holds, a unique place.” Before proceeding with the Jeffers theme, however, let’s look at some of the elements in your writings from which the references to Jeffers seem to arise. In The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness (1989), an eminently readable account, you write, “To do nothing, to be nothing: that would be a good life. Be still, like a stone in the sun” (p. 90). Elsewhere in the same book, speaking of hooking salmon out of a river, you write, “There was something grand and barbaric in that essential, repeated act. To stand there in the snow and cold air toward the end of the year, with a long hook poised above the ice-filled river, was to feel oneself part of something so old that its origin was lost in the sundown of many winters. . . .” (p. 142). Yet many of the letters, reviews, and essays collected in your Fables and Distances (1996) reveal an author who is a stern and articulate critic of contemporary poetry, academe, government bureaucracy, corporate power, and cultural instability. Does the apparent distance between these two stances show us two sides of John Haines: the first a desire to retreat to stable simplicity, the second the evolution of a poetic sensibility?

4.    John Haines: I might perhaps amend my remarks on Jeffers’ lack of influence on my own poems. There are a few early things in which at times I can detect a certain Jeffers tone of voice or outlook, as in perhaps an early poem like “To Remember Another Time” or Totem,” poems now collected in At the End of This Summer (Copper Canyon Press, 1997). I had certainly been reading Jeffers during that early period, and it would be surprising if I did not now and then echo some aspect of his work, though my verse forms were different, evolving under quite different poets. And, also, the many influences that were important to me then were mingled in such a way that it might be difficult to point to one in particular. And I would say that, yes, there are two side's to my nature, as poet and writer: the one who has known and thrived in an extreme sort of solitude, and the other who discovered at a later time that he enjoyed being in the classroom with students, liked teaching, and who over the years has gained a lasting friendship with many former students. The later phase of professional life came as a surprise, since as a high-school student I was quite shy in speaking up in the classroom and avoided doing so when I could.

5.    And I have come to like the city, as Jeffers never did, and to recognize its necessity for humanity: the urban community, whether small town or major city. London, for example, is a wonderful city, full of history, art, and many strains of people. Yet I continue to feel at home in the woods, especially in the northern forest where I lived for so many years, and which is still home to me and will remain so. More recently, I have gained considerable affection for parts of our eastern woodlands, in Ohio and West Virginia. I would never have thought that likely, say, thirty or forty years ago.

6.    One thing that helped draw me out of the Alaska isolation was the growing menace of the Vietnam War and the general Cold War atmosphere of the time. It was impossible, even at the distance I then lived, to ignore the political scene, with the death of JFK, and all the domestic and international tension of the time. That is, I could not write and leave this out of my poems; it was necessary that I find a way to include it. This, as it turned out, offended some of my readers who wished for more of the Winter News I had given them in my first book. Yet it is true that in an early period, when I had only begun to write, my poems frequently included social and political themes, as was expected of a poet of the time.

7.    Coffin: You have visited many campuses—more than most faculty members—both as poet and faculty member, and you are often critical of what you see there. You deplore what you describe as “academic prudence carried to extremes,” and you fault “contemporary American poets” for their “characteristic self-absorption” and “the absence in their work of social and political comment—indeed, of any intellectual content—especially when compared with oustanding examples from the work of traditional masters and from many of our prominent moderns” (“What Are Poets For?” Fables, xiii). Provocatively, you also observe that “Contemporary poetry and theory are like a head without a body.” You add, “The gathering of poets and writers into the university is a symptom and cannot be a cure” (Fables, pp. 134-35). As one who has been on a number of campuses, what troubles you about this movement to the campus and what appear to be the causative factors?

8.    Haines: As for the gathering of poets and writers in the university, I have remarked on this at one time or another, and I don’t doubt that the temper of my comments has earned me a few enemies among academic poets—those, that is, whose careers and reputations are based almost entirely on their institutional affiliation. What we have lost is that independence of experience and outlook so characteristic of poets in the past. Our poets have at times been teachers, yes; but they have also been diplomats, lawyers, doctors, editors, librarians, businessmen, journalists, etc. One of the major French modernists taught mathematics, and there have been other similar instances.

9.    But the question has a much larger, more pervasive context, and that has been the growing intrusion of corporate policies and attitudes into all walks of our common life. The professionalization of Letters is a part of this development.

10.    One effect of this, as I pointed out in my Hudson Review letter (letter to the Editor, The Hudson Review, 23 Apr 95), is the proliferation of poems and books of poems as a product. I am often sent dozens of books of poems for review, and one prominent feature of these is the sameness of tone, of language and subject matter, in book after book. Rather than contributing to this situation, poets, it seems to me, should find ways to oppose the trend, and I doubt that this can occur within the academy, and for a number of reasons, some already alluded to. I see some signs that a few of our younger poets and writers are beginning to move in that direction, toward a greater independence, if only because the number of graduates now exceeds the job market. There is one prominent aspect of current poetry in academe, and that is the “workshop.” Can we imagine Jeffers, for example, or Wallace Stevens or Rilke, sitting in a typical poetry workshop and discussing their poems, as so many of us now are expected to do? Or Words worth—the idea is, I think, absurd.

11.    Coffin: In your essay “On Robinson Jeffers” (Fables), having indicated how powerful a role Jeffers had in your own development, you write, “I myself am no longer as sympathetic to Jeffers’s philosophical outlook, his ‘inhumanism,’ as I once was, and portions of his longer poems in particular I now find hard to accept for their excess of passion, even while I admire otherwise the energy, the narrative drive, and the accuracy and resonance of his imagery. But as I can overlook Yeats some foolishness, and pardon Eliot his loyalties, I can forgive Jeffers a point of view I do not entirely share, and forgive also the crudity and arrogance of voice in which his truths are sometimes uttered” (p. 57). It would be useful if you cited instances of Jeffers’ “crudity and arrogance of voice.”

12.    Haines: In respect to the “crudity” I referred to, I was thinking of some of the later poems, those, let us say, in The Double Axe in which Jeffers is preaching at times a little too harshly. And not that the poems are bad; they are clearly stated in their viewpoint, and they contain passages that are memorable. But they are, perhaps, too harsh, and lack that lyrical element I find in a poem like “Ave Caesar.” I am thinking here of poems like “Moments of Glory” or, perhaps, “Diagram.” On the other hand, there is that, to me, wonderful short poem, “Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind,” with its comment on the military power so much in evidence at the time. There, art and opinion are, so to speak, wedded. It’s hard to imagine one of our poets now writing anything like it. But, given the wartime in which they were written, when for many of us there was clearly the right and the wrong, the good and the evil, with an enemy to be defeated, it is understandable that some people, readers and editors, were put off by such writing. It is rather a tribute to Jeffers’ publishers at the time that they published The Double Axe, despite their disagreement with the poet’s views. Today, the poems would be unlikely to find a publisher.

13.    Coffin: You write that “in any sense that might be critically useful, Jeffers is not a private poet.” “His poems can be read, often enough,” you continue, “as addresses, speeches to the people. He had the public voice and, as Radcliffe Squires remarked to me once, something of the common touch. He was not afraid of the large, the general statement, he did not shrink from the employment of ideas, nor did he draw back from the risk of cliché. Like Neruda in another language, he took the chance of writing badly at times in order to write greatly. . . . Jeffers, on the other hand, took the real risk of assuming that he had something of importance to say and, like Yeats under very different circumstances, could imagine both himself and his audience” (Fables, p . 56). Because beauty is so often in the eye of the beholder, would you cite instances in Jeffers’ poetry in which you feel the poet wrote “badly at times in order to write greatly.”

14.    Haines: Poems I would point to as representative of a one-sided view might be “Greater Grandeur” and “Moments of Glory.” Certainly, in their directness of statement such poems have a certain force, though it is easy to understand how, in the light of Germany’s defeat and the restoration of at least a partial world peace, many people would be offended by so bleak an attitude. There was, and is, certainly, more to be said of Truman, of Churchill, and Roosevelt, than the rather simplistic characterizations we find in these poems. Yet, when all is said and done, I can still admire the forthrightness of a mind and talent willing to speak with honesty and clarity. And as verse, I think the poems hold up.

15.    We might wish for something like this today from our poets, taking into account the political and corporate corruption so obvious, as well as the growing dominance of a media-culture in which all ethics and traditional values tend to be set aside in the quest for “news” and profit. One wonders what a Jeffers would have to say were he alive today. Or might he have simply chosen to remain silent, turned away in disgust?

16.    Coffin: Reviewing John Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont, you find “a facility that seldom comes to rest on anything; an incoherence to match the incoherence of our time.” You continue, “But let me quote from a nearly forgotten essay by Robinson Jeffers: ‘ . . . it is not necessary, because an epoch is confused, that its poets should share its confusions.’ (‘Poetry, Gongorism and a Thousand Years,’ 1949). On the contrary, rather than imitating the disorder of his times, the greater artist will seek to impose on it, on the material it presents to us, another and preferable order. It seems to me that this is what the representative poets of our time, whether we are speaking of Stevens, of Eliot, of Rilke, of Yeats, or of innumerable other poets, managed to do, each in his own way; and it seems to me further that it is the first responsibility of the serious writer to do so” (Fables, p. 41). Drawing on the works of Jeffers, demonstrate briefly how he imposes “another and preferable order.”

17.    Haines: I am speaking here of esthetic order, of a certain satisfaction that is also ethical. Certainly, it is clear enough in Jeffers that he is describing, or directing our attention to, a natural order that is opposed to the disorder of human society—that in Nature, rightly perceived, is an intelligence we disregard to our peril. From this perception, as our thinkers have traditionally attempted to do, might be derived some true sense of a human order, of a civic society that might endure in the face of inevitable conflicts and upheavals. To accomplish this, we will be compelled periodically to question existing structures and procedures, etc. Well, the true poet, and Jeffers is surely one, will find some way to do this, intellectually and artistically, to correct our impressions, revise our ways of looking at things. And this is what Jeffers attempts in so many of his poems, in, say, “Ave Caesar,” in which, in a short poem, he sets forth for us a view of our history very much against the common patriotic grain. Or even in another short poem, “Praise Life,” where he says “. . . the praise of life / That forgets the pain is a pebble / Rattled in a dry gourd.” Perhaps what all of this comes down to is, as I stated it not long ago in a poetry review, “If poets cannot be teachers they are merely entertainers, and of passing importance” [(“Poetry Chronicle,” The Hudson Review, Autumn 1998)].

18.    Coffin: You characterize “Poet Without Critics” by Horace Gregory, poet, critic, and translator, as “the best commentary on Jeffers known to me.” Like Gregory, you do not shrink from the critical task of identifying that which is flawed and that which is praiseworthy. In several pieces, you praise Jeffers as a model of intellectual courage who spoke “to a certain largeness in us, as to a congregation; his voice, at once personal and public, has authority” (Fables, 57). Elsewhere, you write, “No one is working on the scale of Jeffers for the simple reason that no one writing at this time has the conviction, the passion, or the skill to write that way. And if such a poet were writing today he would do exactly what Jeffers did and invent his own idiom and his own forms” (Fables, p. 62). To what, then, do you attribute Jeffers’ lack of popularity among general readers of poetry and in secondary school and college classrooms?

19.    Haines: I can’t verify on personal experience that Jeffers no longer interests students of American poetry. Once, surely, that was not the case. I recall that in an introductory course I taught at the University of Washington, in the summer of 1974, we covered a wide range of British and American poets. At the end of that summer quarter, while discussing some of the work we had covered, several students in the class told me that they liked Jeffers best of all. And, surprising in quite another way, a few of the women in the class remarked that a week of Sylvia Plath was more than enough!

20.    But certain trends in our time, surely related to the gathering of poets in the university, with all the corresponding academic cautions, and with a somehow related narcissism so evident in our society, would tend to make many students uncomfortable with so outspoken a poet as Jeffers. However I think it unlikely that Jeffers would ever be “popular” in the classroom in today’s America. For one thing, his work requires a reader to think, and few are willing to do so. I wonder also about the effect that the use of language in a technocratic society must have on students unused to hearing poetic speech, but accustomed mainly to print on the page, or worse, to words on the screen. My experience, at any rate, is that students no longer listen, no longer hear, and are unable to pay sufficient attention to the cadence of verse lines when spoken. But I would not want to generalize too much here, as there are bound to be notable exceptions.

21.    Coffin: In your response to an academic correspondent who took issue with one of your reviews in the Hudson Review, you wrote, “What does dismay me is a mentality, all too prevalent now, that insists on the choosing of sides. According to this, if I respect Eliot I am somehow disqualified from also respecting Williams. Or if I cherish the poems of Wallace Stevens I must consign Robinson Jeffers to the dustbin” (Fables, p. 101). Choosing sides has been a sensitive issue in Jeffers criticism and scholarship, would you expand on the point you raise in your letter?

22.    Haines: I think the best answer I could give to this question would be to quote from a letter I had recently from Wendell Berry, in which he expresses regret as to the organization of poets into “sides.” He is doubtful of “schools” in general, and he refers to Blake, in saying that there is no competition among true poets. He also cites the fact of many younger poets now being “professionals,” and so they must search for something to write about; whereas, the true poets are “those who have been found by their subjects.”

23.    Well, it seems inevitable that a poet like Jeffers, whose views and opinions are so clearly expressed, and often against the common grain, would tend to divide readers into those who have no trouble in agreeing with him, and those who have trouble in accepting what he has to say, or the way he says it. I can see this factor in Jeffers’ favor: he does not leave you wondering what he thinks on a given subject, or how he feels about our human state in nature and in history. With his unusual conjunction of place and time, of subject and verse form, Jeffers certainly answers to Wendell’s definition of being “found,” and in the truest sense. Those who prefer their poets to be soothing and merely lyrical in their praises, will have to look elsewhere.

24.    Coffin: Your years of residence outside of Richardson, Alaska, near Fairbanks, have left their impress on your verses. Often the poetic landscape is darkening and gloomy (there is much less explicit evidence of the very long, sunlit, subArctic days), and frequently you tell the reader how much you prize silence—even the silence between two people sharing an isolated cabin. One can imagine a graduate student springing on these aspects of your work to support the thesis that you were depressed. Granted that one must be kind and firm with graduate students, what direction would you give this person (aside from advising a change in subject)?

25.    Haines: I find the suggestion rather odd. It might be as easily assumed that Jeffers was depressed in his withdrawal from urban America, and in writing some of those poems in which he looks on humanity, or America, and finds little to hope for. As for silence, well, when you consider the sheer volume of noise in modern society, from TV in the rooms, vehicle traffic, air traffic, and all the mechanical noise from one appliance or another—silence, or quiet, whether in one’s working space or neighborhood, or in the woods, can be of enormous significance; and I mean that silence in which it is possible to hear many things often disregarded. It may be difficult to convey to a contemporary urban dweller what that quiet was like in the Alaska of my early days. Certainly, there was noise at times: dogs barking, gunfire when hunting, and occasional traffic on the road—but overall, removed from the city, and at a time when road and air traffic was far less intrusive than it is now, and with no radio or TV at hand, one might learn to listen (and also to see) that greater world that surrounded and contained everything else—the river in its summer flood, the winter ice and snowfall, owls on the hills, wolves crying, wind in the trees overhead, and so forth—another language with its own syntax and resonance. But I can easily imagine a similar quiet prevailing on the coast of Carmel before the community expanded, houses were built, and the urban scene intruded more and more. I don’t see that any of this signifies depression. Perhaps in what has been called the “entertainment state,” in all the media noise so common now, some people would see withdrawal as a sign of depression or mental illness. If so, then Jeffers was depressed, and Thoreau; Wordsworth was depressed, as well as Rilke, if you want to say so.

26.    As for the second part of your question, the fact of the long summer daylight is important, of course; but set against this, the long winter darkness carries with it an overwhelming weight, becomes at times the fact of existence in the far north. I never found the winter darkness depressing. It was mysterious, seldom total darkness, alive with the long twilight of morning and evening, the starlight and the auroras, a world in itself, set in contrast to its summer counterpart. The dramatic association of these extremes is one of the things that make arctic and subarctic life so compelling at times. There is nothing like it in more temperate zones.

27.    These are some of the facts I would direct your hypothetical student’s attention to, though I am skeptical that the question would in fact arise. Why should it? And here I should say that in spite of the “darkness,” of much of my published work, I have my lighter side, and have often written comic verses, little of which has been published: ballads, limericks, parodies, rhymed couplets, etc. This can be verified by friends to whom I’ve sent such work, as well as by occasional readers. Among other things, it can be a kind of exercise in using the forms of verse to give voice to ideas and feelings not otherwise expressed in one’s more serious work.

28.    Coffin: In several of your more recent poems, you turn to the history of painting and statuary for your subject. The poems themselves, as your notes to them confirm, represent reordering or restructuring these histories, as any narrative must. What compels you to undertake such a task? And why in verse, instead of prose?

29.    Haines: First, there is my background as a student of art, of painting, and sculpture. Even when not deliberately drawing on that experience, or meditating on the life and work of a particular artist, I can now recognize in many of my poems an unconscious reference to certain works, or to a pictorial scene that I might once have rendered in a visual art form. This may be due primarily to what I would describe as a natural inclination—an artistic sensibility, let us say—a strong visual sense coupled with a dramatic sense, so that in my best work I have been able to combine a satisfying verse structure, a matter of lines and stanzas, articulation of syllables and consonants, etc., with a visual impression that, when successful, as in, say, “Meditation on a Skull Carved in Crystal,” somehow manages to create a kind of whole. And, of course, there is the thought that must be there, the intellectual content that holds it all together. But I do not wish to speak of my work in a way that might seem to presume that I believe I have been consistently successful in all this. I leave that to a future critic, to the readers to come, if there are to be any.

30.    I’ve had no studied program in all of this, but it seems that at a certain later period in creative life that early background in art came to a focus. I had, let us say, exhausted certain themes in my poems—nature, wilderness, the Alaska experience—that had nourished me for so long. I turned back to the work of a few artists, to specific works, in which I discovered a new esthetic and intellectual dimension, in which I could combine history, art, nature, autobiography, and so forth. An instance of this would be my long poem sequence, “Days of Edward Hopper,” in which I was able to bring together images from Hopper’s work and certain episodes from my own life. This is not something I could have predicted; it happened, and at a time when I needed new themes, new energy from one source or another. But all of this is part of a mysterious process, and I do not feel comfortable in analyzing it. It was a gift, one I did not anticipate. Why in verse and not in prose? There are two related answers to this question. I was from the beginning more inclined to think in my verse forms, in poetic images, rather than in a deliberate prose argument. And, second, the appearance of a poem on the page—in its stanzaic pattern: the shape of it, with its line breaks —might, if I was lucky, illustrate something in the work, the life and time, I was attempting to write about. In other words, it was an instinctive choice, one I did not question.

31.    Coffin: If you were assembling a syllabus for a course on American poetry in which you wished to embrace Robinson Jeffers, what titles from Jeffers would you include, assuming that you could name six to ten titles and that the length of the individual poems is not a consideration?

32.    Haines: Let me give you ten and a few more, all unranked. I’d include: "Night," "The Loving Shepherdess," "Shine, Perishing Republic," "Science," "Rock and Hawk," "Ante Mortem," "Soliloquy," "November Surf," "Shane O’Neill’s Cairn," "Rearmament," "Ave Cesar," "Birth-Dues," "Return," and "Hooded Night."