NEWS OF THE NORTH FROM JOHN HAINES 285“I have often felt that we write at our best... out of an ancient and durable
sense of our earthly life and experience.” That way “our everyday lives and
events may at times return us to an older mythological source.” He thanks Pablo
Neruda’s Heights of Macchu Picchu for retracing la gastada primavera humana,
our “exhausted human spring”—not as an Eden but a fresh source.
Like Wordsworth, Hardy, Yeats, Frost, Jeffers, and others, Haines as poet
was born from his chosen milieu. “The trails I made led outward into the hills
and swamps, but they led inward also.” Finding plain words for the ways of
weather, plant life, animals, and himself, his poems and prose still verge on
dream, his dreams, taking us down and back toward myth and the totems we
live with. In “Horns,”
I went to the edge of the wood
in the color of evening,
and rubbed with a piece of horn
against a tree,Building the homestead, ca. 1961.
Courtesy of John Haines.