Lola Haskins - Writers' Friendship

When I meet someone on a plane, and they ask what I do for a living, I
say, well, I teach Computer Science for a day job, but my profession is
poetry. What usually happens next is that their eyes glaze over and I
can see them mentally checking their watches to see how much longer the
flight is going to take. Then, unless they think to ask me something
about computers, usually to do with whether they should scrap their pcs
for the latest hot-lick models, they tend to develop a sudden, burning,
interest in Sky Mall. If I’d been some other kind of writer, a
novelist or a screenwriter for instance, I’ve always thought it would
have been better, but maybe not, because to most people watching cars go
airborne over the top of Gough Street, heading down towards the bay,
screenwriters seem as irrelevant as tinsel on last year’s Christmas
tree. Be that as it may, I think it’s fair to say that we poets find
ourselves at the bottom of the interest scale with most of the non
reading public.

One of the consequences of that is that we have fewer chances to
connect with audiences than people who work in other literary genres do.

So, being in the minority and being relatively poor, even in the
literary world, we help each other out whenever we can, right? Well,
in my experience, not necessarily.

For example, when I meet some poets, I get the feeling that they’re
sizing me up to see if I’m any threat. If the verdict is that I’m not,
then they relax. If they decide otherwise, they clam up and start
looking over my shoulder for someone more useful to talk to. Sometimes,
it goes much farther than this, perhaps even to the point of paranoia.

For instance, a few years ago, when two poets came to my town to teach
in the writing program, I thought, great, more poets, and bought their
books. But not only have they not been polite to me, without ever
exchanging more than ten words total with me in all the years since
they’ve come they put me down to their students on a regular basis. So
why are they doing this? I’ve decided it’s because they’re protecting
English, which they see as their territory. It seems such a pity, but I
know it’s not an isolated case. I’ve heard other stories like that,
where certain writers seem to have peed on their four corners, to make
sure interlopers are aware that only they, the purveyors of urine, and
their students are welcome within their borders. And if someone tries
to cross that line, he or she finds out what that odd odor means and, to
mix a metaphor, in spades.

Luckily, this isn’t universally the case, maybe not even generally so.
Over the years, I’ve met some hugely generous people, to name only a
few: Andrea Hollander Budy, Nick Samaras, Jo MacDougall, Frank Gaspar,
Maurya Simon and, more recently, Ruth Schwartz, all terrific poets and
all genuinely happy when any of us gets lucky. We buy each others’
books and tell people about each others’ work. To be fair, we’ve often
became friends in the first place because we did like each others’ work.

If you think about it, how much more deeply can you know someone than
by living with his/her poetry. And sometimes -- in the ancient
tradition-- we talk in poetry. For instance, a few years ago, Andrea
and I had a poetry conversation, with the goal being neither of our
greater glory but both of our greater growth. During that exchange,
Andrea wrote some lovely poems which wended their way into her most
recent collection, and I profited too, spinning off her intelligence in
directions of my own. Nick Samaras and I are now doing a similar thing-
we send each other a poem a month, which we then critique back and
forth until it falls to rest. Nick’s a fine critic, and I’ve learned a
lot from him. And those are only a couple of examples. I have many
wonderful friends and teachers among other poets. In fact, like many of
us, I feel friendship, even kinship, to writers I’ve never met, just
from their work.

But the most important of my own friendships are the warm, live ones.
It’s a wonderful feeling not to need to explain why I do what I do,
because they already know since they’re the same, and in that mutual
knowing I feel the sort of acceptance which I can’t always, in the last
analysis, get from those closest to me. In fact, sometimes I think of
my friendships with other writers as a kind of home base on the field of
my life.

I’d like to leave you with an analogy. My husband makes beautiful
stained glass. And because he wants to give something back, he donates
windows to poor churches. We go to Mexico often, making that part of
our trips, and when Gerald’s finished a project, we prospect for
another. A few years ago, it was a church on a bumpy street in a barrio
in Patzcuaro. Ger spent an especially long time on those windows-
there were eight, and he designed them beautifully, with an Indian
woman in the foreground and colors which seemed just right for the
bright plastic streamers which adorned the inside of that church. When
the windows were ready, we took them to the sacristans in Patzcuaro, a
couple named Adolfo and Josefina, to explain how install them and help
them do it.

It wasn’t an easy job because the windows weren’t set up to
receive glass, so there was a fair amount of improvisational
engineering- a sort of engineering skat- to be done before we could
start the actual installation. The three of us, Adolfo, Ger, and I had
been working for several days, and neither Adolfo not Josefina had said
a word about the windows. Now, I knew how hard Ger had worked on them–
months and months in the barn. So, though I felt guilty about it, I
was also beginning to feel let down and a little annoyed. More and
more, I wanted someone besides me to admire those windows. Or at least
thank Ger for his trouble. But then one day Josefina and I were
sitting at the table in her tiny house with its glass-less windows and
its dog on the roof, where they lived with their eight children, and
she said: You know, we don’t have much, but everything we have, each
person gets a little bit.” And then I understood why they hadn’t
thanked us. Because, of course we’d shared what we had. And that felt
right to me, and I think it’s how we poets should be to each other too,
how my dear friends are already and how I’d like to be too: we don’t
have much, but everything we have, each of us gets a little bit.

--

Lola Haskins’ poetry advice book, Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to
the Poetic Life (Backwaters Press) appeared in 2007, as did a collection
of her fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor, Solutions
Beginning with A (Modernbook). Her most recent of eight books of poems
is a new and selected called Desire Lines (BOA, 2004). She continues to
do as much radio as she can and to collaborate with other artists, her
most recent collaboration being poetry with dance and cello called Of Air
and the Water, performed at the Hippodrome State Theater, Gainesville, FL,