Here's some sad but inevitable "Winter News." According to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, John Haines, the man who will go down in history as Alaska's most successful middle-20th century poet, died Wednesday in Fairbanks at the age of 86. Many Alaskans considered Haines cantankerous, rude even, but it's indisputable that he did something no one else did before him: He became the first great poet ever produced by Alaska. Because there was absolutely no precedent for the literary art he wanted to create in the state when he began, he literally blazed his own trail -- a sharp, often surreal, dream-time trail that all subsequent poets of and by Alaska must at least recognize if not travel. Alaska's literary landscape is as different now without him as it was after he started writing.
The News-Miner reports, here, on Haines' passing, and its columnist Dermot Cole passes along an interview snippet about why Haines, someone who trained as a visual artist, chose instead to write when confronted with the inscrutable qualities of sub-Arctic light.
To learn more about Alaska's most significant poet and to read some of his representative work, head to his Poets.org page, his Poetry Foundation page, and if nothing else, read an important 1990 introduction to one of Haines' collections, written by former U.S. Poet Laureate Dana Gioia.