Jack’s guest is Lola Haskins. Her new book is Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare. Wikipedia:
“She was born in New York, and raised in northern California. Lola Haskins has lived in San Francisco, Greece, and Mexico. She now divides her time between Northern England and North-Central Florida.
She has published fourteen books—the outliers being a poetry advice book, an exploration of fifteen Florida cemeteries, and a book of prose-poem fables about women, illustrated by Maggie Taylor.
Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, The London Review of Books, Georgia Review, Southern Review.
She taught computer science at the University of Florida for 28 years. Then, from 2004 until 2015, she was on the faculty of the Rainier Writer’s Workshop, a low res MFA program based at Pacific Lutheran University.”
Jack writes:
Lola Haskins’ book, Asylum, is haunted by the institutionalized (“asylum”) poet John Clare, who functions here as her muse. She regards both herself and Clare as “an army of one” that soldiers on. The book is extremely wide-ranging stylistically (haiku-like “music boxes,” a sort of unrhymed sonnet, etc.); the poems are often riddling (you have to guess the connections) and sometimes funny. One begins as a parody of Frost (“Something there is that doesn’t love a squirrel”) and goes on to parody Christopher Smart’s poem to his cat, Geoffrey. In another there is a swan and there is an old Saxon woman: what is their relationship? Haskins taught computer science for 28 years: there is frequently something binary about these poems. Nature—often named in a fanciful, myth-making, sometimes animated way—is a constant presence, as it is in John Clare’s poetry. Haskins has an excellent poem about a Florida river. She also asserts that “the sun wants only to be touched.” There is in addition the constant juxtaposition of the past (Clare, Romanticism, the Nineteenth Century and even further back) and the present. She has a poem about Tom Stoppard’s play, Arcadia, a work which also juxtaposes the past and the present, though she refers to Stoppard only as “T.S.” Another reference we have to guess. A sense of mortality is present too—the author, like me, is no spring chicken—and a parodied (?) desire for heaven. There’s a poem that is “after” the Catholic French poet Francis Jammes: “I am Frances Jane and I am going to heaven.” Another poem is called “Dead Stars.” Still another punctuates its stanzas with the words “dot” or “dash,” words which are played upon within the stanza: they turn out to be Morse Code for SOS. Clare’s “I Am” is relevant to it all. Is poetry a port, a haven, an “asylum” or is it a madness (“asylum”)? There’s an interesting typo in the book’s opening sentence: “The quotes in this book are taken from the diary the poet John Clare kept in 1841, describing his escape from Dr. Matthew Arnold’s private insane asylum in Epping….” Not Matthew Arnold: Matthew Allen. But as you read on you wonder whether it is a subtle joke rather than a typo: “Wandering between two worlds, / One dead, the other powerless to be born.”
This is the opening poem of Haskins’ book:
Mortality
Every thrown stone falls.
But there is a moment first
as it hangs in the air
that the blurred hand
that tossed it will not come again,
thinks the stone as it flies.
And this is “Altar”:
Between Rhylstone and Cracoe the plague stone lies,
tangled in nettle and fern, where once the villagers in
the one that had not sickened left sustenance for their
neighbors in the other—turnips and potatoes, tobacco
and vinegars, and woolen mantles, cotton shifts dyed with
tea, caps, scarves, trousers and skirts for those cold with
fever—then crept off home to sit by their firesides from
whence, though they found no tokens on their breasts or
backs nor risings under their ears or armpits, they swore
they could feel in their chests the coughs that poured from
the dying like the blood of Christ. And in the mornings
while their own babies slept, the pale faces of children—
they all saw them—would drift over their roofs like mist
off the hills, then vanish as if they had never been.
Part One of Two