Lola Haskins on Writers Friendships

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 tell they’re 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 do people who work in other literary genres. 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 become 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 great 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, he built some windows for a church on a bumpy street in a barrio in Patzcuaro. Ger spent an especially long time on those- 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 do have, each of us gets a little bit.

BIO
Lola Haskins' most recent collection is The Rim Benders (Anhinga). Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems, is forthcoming from BOA in 2004. She teaches Computer Science at the University of Florida and is a 2003 NEA fellow in poetry.

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,

Introduction - Writers' Friendship / Writers' Enmity

A Web Del Sol series compiled and edited by Robert Sward.

[photo: Left to Right, Mike Neff, Joan Houlihan, Robert Sward - AWP Conference, Palm Springs, CA]

--

As visitors to Web Del Sol / Perihelion will see, we've transferred essays and poems from that website, our home for many years, to this new venue, which remains open to contributors on the theme: Writers' Friendship. Our thanks to Joan Houlihan for generously hosting us at Perihelion. Our thanks, too, to Mike Neff, a friend, colleague and founder of Web Del Sol. Mike Neff has been absolutely tireless in writing, editing and publishing quality work on the Web since 1995. He has done more for the small press and what we used to call "the little magazine scene" than anyone I know. He's a man of boundless energy and inexhaustible enthusiasm and, for me, one of the most generous people I've encountered, on or off the Net. Who more than Mike has applied his skills and knowledge of html and computer programming in this amazing way? And done so, steadily, for over twenty years? When I think of Writers' Friendship I think, what else? Mike Neff.

For those who haven't yet visited, "Web Del Sol is an online resource for writers featuring contemporary literature and poetry. Contains chapbook, photography, small presses, art, reviews, interviews... and is among the most content-rich literary websites on the Internet... it's a directory and host site, and..."

For more, see http://webdelsol.com

--

Queries and comments welcome!

Introduction

"Humility is not a virtue propitious to the artist. It is often pride,
emulation, avarice, malice—all the odious qualities—which drive a man
to compete, elaborate, refine, destroy, renew his work until he has
made something that gratifies his pride and envy and greed. And in
doing so he enriches the world more than the generous and good, though
he may lose his own soul in the process. That is the paradox of
artistic achievement." So says novelist Evelyn Waugh.

If Waugh is right, then what is it like for one writer driven by
pride, emulation, avarice and malice, to sustain a friendship with
another?

Writer and editor Ted Solotaroff claimed aggression is a writer's main
source of energy, "the fuel for all those stories and poems about
betrayal and bad luck relationships... plus anything else a person
wants to write about."

Years ago at the University of Illinois one of my professors observed
that a recurring theme in Shakespeare's plays was that of betrayal.
Much of the fuel for Shakespeare's poems and plays came, he said, from
the poet's own experience of betrayal and/or friendship gone awry.

Betrayal is one element. Another is jealousy.

In Some Instructions on the Writing Life, Anne Lamott speaks of
jealousy:

"...If you continue to write," Lamott observes, "you are probably
going to have to deal with [jealousy] because some wonderful, dazzling
successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry,
undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you.

"It can wreak just the tiniest bit of havoc with your self-esteem to
find that you are hoping for small bad things to happen to this friend—
for, say, her head to blow up... You get all caught up in such [a]
fantasy because you feel, once again, like the kid outside the candy-
store window, and you believe that this friend, this friend whom you
now hate, has all the candy. You believe that success is bringing this
friend inordinate joy and serenity and security and that her days are
easier."

"Just remember," Lamott suggests, "some of the loneliest, most
miserable, neurotic, despicable people we know have been the most
successful in the world."

But that raises the question: Do the good guys have to finish last?

As writers, can we take the jealousy and aggression we might feel and
use them to spur us on? Or do we let them frustrate and block us?

"How do writers and poets stand writers and poets?” This is
the place to check out Raymond Carver, James Houston, William Minor,
Lola Haskins, Laurence Lieberman, and others in our Writers’ Friendship, Writers’ Enmity
series.

Yes, one can erupt both into and out of friendship. I think of Julia
Cameron who, on a positive note, speaks of "before, during and after
friends... Those rare and wonderful people who love and accept us no
matter what our current creative shape or size...”

On the other hand, Lola Haskins, author of The Rim Benders, speaks of
Writers' Friendships in academia:

"I've heard stories... 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...

[Of friends and fellow writers]:

"...We buy each others' books and tell people about each others' work.
To be fair, we've often become friends in the first place because we
did like each other’s work. If you think about it, how much more
deeply can you know someone than by living with his/her poetry?"

--------------

The following has to do with aging, friendship and Strunk & White,
where one writer-teacher chose to turn for solace:

TURNING 60

The first 40 years of life give us the text; the next 30 supply the
commentary on it... --Schopenhauer

1. GRAMMAR AS HYMNAL

...Seeking solace in a review of grammar, I turned to Strunk & White's
Elements of Style. Standing at attention,
opening to the section on usage, I chanted and sang—
uniting my voice with the voices of others, the vast chorus
of the lovers of English.

We sing of verb tense, past, present and future.
We sing the harmony of simple tenses.
We lift our voice in praise of action words,
and the function of verb tense.

We sing of grammar which is our compass
providing, as it does, clues as to how
we might navigate the future,
at the same time it
illuminates the past.

As a teacher, I talk. That's present.
For thirty years as a teacher, I talked. That's past.
It may only be part time, but I will talk. That's future.

2. LIVING THE FUTURE PERFECT

I will have invoked the muse.

I will have remembered to give thanks, knowing our origins
are in the invisible, and that we once possessed boundless energy,
but were formless, and that we are here to know 'the things of the
heart through touching.'

I will have remembered, too, that there is only one thing
we all possess equally and that is our loneliness.

I will have loved.
You will have loved.
We will have loved.

--

"Turning 60" reprinted from The Collected Poems, Black Moss Press, 2006 (second printing).

--

Robert Sward has taught at Cornell University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and UC Santa Cruz. A Fulbright scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he was chosen by Lucille Clifton to receive a Villa Montalvo Literary Arts Award. His 30 books include Four Incarnations (Coffee House Press) and Heavenly Sex. His most recent books, The CollectedPoems and God is in the Cracks, are now in their second printing. Sward’s New & Selected, will be published by Red Hen Press.

Robert@robertsward.com
http://www.robertsward.com

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