Haines Eason Answers Some Questions

SIR: What would be your ultimate literary goal?

HE: Right now, my goal is to publish my first full-length collection of poems. Thinking long term, I want to find a station in life that allows me to write and publish at my own pace and more often than not. That, and the sense of peace required to not sweat who out there in the writing world is getting what—some job, some award.

SIR: Who in your life has been most influential in your poetry career and why?

HE: D. A. Powell, surely. We’re out of touch now but were once quite close. He taught me most of what I know of verse, and showed me that there’s a certain kind of life that leads one into the making of poetry. He showed me that poetry is not necessarily life, but a life choice, a way of being. He is an amazing writer and a dedicated teacher. He found me, and he set me free.

Then, Karen Volkman (and there’s no order to this, really), my poetry writing/workshop professor and advisor at the University of Montana, got me started just by example in the lyric tradition. Her book Spar was quite important to me early on. I spent many futile hours trying to imitate her leaps and turns. Fruitless endeavor, but great practice.

And, of course, Carl Phillips and Mary Jo Bang here at Washington University in St. Louis have had a significant impact on my work. From Carl I think I can say I’ve learned how the classical can be alluded to and even built into one’s work elegantly; from Mary Jo I’ve adopted a love of the sinister, the beautifully macabre.

SIR: What has been the most helpful criticism you have received?

HE: Stop talking through the land—stop treating it as a character in my poems. When I lived in Montana, I was obsessed with Montana. Its mountains, forests, rivers, wild mining towns, sprawling farms … these things were the stuff of legends, at least to me, and so, in my early poems (I really began to write when I moved to Montana) I treated the land as a character—a substitute for humans with which to reciprocate feelings. The advice behind this advice? Sometimes it’s best to be direct; let scenery be just that.

SIR: What is one book you have not read, but want to?

HE: There are countless, but recently I keep staring at a four volume set of Beckett I’ve had for years. The pressure is mounting, and I think there might be a showdown this summer.