It’s 1976, and Pan Am still has direct jet service from New York.  We get on the plane at Kennedy, and seven and a half hours later we pass over the zigzag pipeline snaking across the tundra and land in Fairbanks.  It could be anywhere on the globe.  We have no feeling of having traveled to a particular place, no sense of a difficult journey, obstacles overcome, a passage, a goal achieved.  For a poet this is surely the wrong way to do it, but we’re modern people, we’re mobile, and we expect the convenience of jet travel when we want to get to anyplace far-off.
       
Moving to Alaska was easy, being Alaskan harder.  Over thirty years later, I’ve seen only a fraction of this vast state, but I’ve built my house here, learned to ski cross-country, and one winter I changed three flat tires at minus fifty.  I have to admit, though, the New York I brought with me still makes me, in a sense, a New York poet.  The twenty-first century is too far advanced in me for any easy nostalgia for Robert Service.

The other day, as I shoveled out the mailboxes along with my neighbor, a German electrician—the one who wired my house—we paused after every few shovelfuls and looked out on the frozen Tanana River, where skiers and snow-machiners cavorted.  Occasionally you see dog sleds out there too, and in summer several stern-wheelers ply the river with their cargo of tourists.

Beyond the river: a hundred vacant miles of low spruce and then the Alaska Range, mountains that rise to thirteen and fourteen thousand feet, and—visible on the way out from town, though not from here--Denali (“The Great One”), at twenty thousand, is the highest point in North America.  Though mid-February, it was thirty above, and we shoveled in down vests and shirtsleeves.

I came here vowing to myself not to appropriate too casually what was not, after all, my native material.  I had it in mind to hold back and live here a while before writing about anything Alaskan.  I stuck to that resolution for about two weeks.  I couldn’t help myself, so much was new and interesting.  Within a month I’d written a poem and an article about my first days in Fairbanks.  Though other people have liked the poem, I distrust it because it seemed to come too quickly.  But in a way, I suppose I’d been preparing to write that poem for a long time.  Seven years earlier I’d written another poem which seems to me now to foreshadow what moving to Alaska means in a sense deeper than geography:
 

     The Twenty-Six Years War

       Where is the land beyond landscape?
       Slipping across the border
       distant herds of snow.
 
       Leaving the map behind, with its
       diagrammed cities, four-square
       musics, and all that predictable violence,
 
       here clouds become ideas, as black
       as headlines, and even less discreet.
 
       I am learning a language
       of otters and elk,
       of distances
       and profound insecurities.

       Why do we kid ourselves?
       Where teeth rot and stars fail, even sex
       is a perpetual war with the dying.
 
       Here the stone
       seashell is my mother, I do not deny
       it, here I am open, alone
       advancing into the sky.
 


From Belle Harbor, where I spent my first four and a half years, you could see in the night sky the reflected glow of Manhattan.  It was less than ten miles away as the crow flies, and I remember a dream I had more than once about that glowing place, a city of pleasure and light.  It was a fairy-tale city, constructed of children’s blocks piled magically high, and it was the first place that impressed me deeply enough to become a subject of writing.

Later, in New Rochelle, a singularly moderate and—to me—uninteresting suburb, I remember another magical place, a railway cut down below street level, with a station that had belonged to the Putnam Line (defunct) of the New York Central.  There were no tracks there anymore, no booths or benches, though the ladies’ room—a dark alcove without door, toilets or sink—could still be explored in its damp, crumbling state.  The station was an exciting, even daring spot for me in those curious preadolescent years.

These two examples from my childhood could stand for many others.  I’m sure everyone carries these special, magical places around at a deep level.  For writers they are a payload, there to be mined for the precious ore they bear.

 
But what happens when we grow up?  Do places lose that special power, that charge they have for us as children?

It’s not that the character of places changes, obviously, but that we ourselves change.  Our education makes us practical, but in the process we lose something, some capacity to explore ourselves through place.  Other things take precedence.  At the most banal level, we choose a house on the basis of what school district it’s in and give up the woods or the railway cut that might have had more meaning for us and our kids than the entire curriculum of the fifth grade.  In the effort to be sensible, mature adults, we overlook the emotional or spiritual powers that lie about us.

For there is a spiritual component to place, something our less mobile ancestors were more attuned to.  But basic human nature hasn’t changed, and if you open yourself to it, a certain locale can get into you, can lodge itself deeply in your mental world.  Then, if you are a writer, it will become a natural setting for your work.

But this magical connection with a specific place doesn’t ensure that the writing will be good.  I once drafted a novel based on a summer I’d spent fossil-hunting in Wyoming.  Great material, I thought.  And I found that I could write endlessly about the landscape—the fields and orchards bleeding into badland, the buttes and canyons, the storms brewing high up in the mountains, the mountains themselves, and the sky, hundreds of miles wide.  In fact, my draft gave altogether to much of that landscape and not enough of something else—character, tension, drama.  Without the landscape there would have been no impulse to write, but that in itself did not make the writing good.  Later I went over that material and found whole chapters becoming paragraphs as I tried to reduce the novel to what I simply could not leave out.  Pushing the process further, I took what seemed the strongest paragraphs and worked them into a poem.

This is certainly not the most economical way to write: pages and pages out of which only a few details survive.  But there is a benefit.  The writing process teaches you what details are really essential.  Better to start with the welter of life than with some bloodless abstraction.
 

Several winters ago my family and I drove a hundred and fifty miles northeast from Fairbanks over frozen tundra through blowing snow to the town of Central.  On the way, a flock of winter-white ptarmigan crossed the road.  Only their black eye-spots showed up against the snow, dots blurring and dancing, like watching TV in its early interference-plagued days—like that, but also strange beyond description to see those eye-spots lifting and hovering, vaguely attached to the white-on-white of hundreds of chicken-sized birds.

From Central we made our way to Circle Hot Springs, where a 1930’s vintage hotel set among low spruce drew visitors to its large, open-air swimming pool.  Here, in minus-ten-degree cold, we swam comfortably.  The hot springs provided water at over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, too hot, where it entered the pool, for swimmers to linger.  Mid-pool, you could loll comfortably on a black inner tube in eighty- to ninety-degree warmth, while evaporating water condensed over your head and fell as tiny flakes of snow.

No writer can fail to be influenced, and many are overpowered, by the beauty and strangeness of this huge state.

More than half the population of Alaska is urban, though you might never guess this from the poetry we produce.  Perhaps it’s because our cities, like other cities, are hard to love.  I suspect it is also because cities by their very nature are difficult to come to grips with, though that is one of the tasks modern poetry—from Whitman to Frank O’Hara—has set itself.

Nature is our nature, always.  We are usually alone in it.  We are its consciousness.  In nature we expand, we become mountains, glaciers, and rivers; we encounter the other in its purest form—bear, moose, hawk, raven, mosquito.

In cities we are only one of many.  Tall buildings cramp us, wall us into a narrow grid of possibilities, a grid inhabited by thousands of others like us.  Instead of expanding, we are fractured, becoming many.  It's like a hall of mirrors giving back oneself in a grotesque multitude.  In plate-glass storefront windows this reflection is literal.

Nature offers us clear pools where we can gaze at our own image undistracted as we wait for a fish to nibble at our hook, but in cities it is not acceptable; we must glance surreptitiously, as we are hurried along by the crowd, to see that our dress is appropriate, our hair in place.  We feel judged, slightly embarrassed, and we can’t trust our own natural impulses.

That’s one aspect of the city.  Another is that it changes all too rapidly.  Buildings are torn down and new ones take their places; stores close, move a few blocks, and reopen under new management; whole neighborhood go to seed.  And the city’s boundaries keep shifting.  Meanwhile, over there the mountains remain the same, stable, enduring only the seasons, and returning always to their former state.

If nature is of God, cities are unquestionably man-made.  They are planned, of course, but whatever people plan and execute is full of error and accident.  How can poetry deal with the accidental and the botched?  Even a dying tree is perfect in its dying.  Nothing about a city is perfect.  That wonderful little restaurant—you know the one—where they have a few tables out on the sidewalk and usually a jazz group or folk singer, and great food: oh, that was last year.  Now they’ve gone over to hard rock, added a bar, shut down the kitchen; you can probably still get a sandwich.

For some people this flux means, paradoxically, that cities are alive, vital, organic.  Nature, by contrast, is static, dull.  “If you’ve seen one mountain or moose, you’ve seen ‘em all,” was what my mother, who lived on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, said on her one visit to Fairbanks.

Interestingly, in Alaska, the moose have adapted to the cities.  They cross the expressway to invade gardens.  Sometimes in winter they bed down under the big spruce in our backyard.  Alaska is pipelines across mountain ranges and floatplanes on tundra lakes.  It’s log cabins with outhouses on downtown city streets.  Alaskan cities still display their frontier roots and even the wilderness doesn’t always keep its distance: occasionally bears and even caribou—though not residents like moose—visit their former territories.  On a recent fall migration, one unfortunate caribou got its antler’s tangle in a friend’s volleyball net.  Last summer we slowed, then stopped, as a huge beaver dragged itself across Chena Pump Road.  Foxes in the driveway, porcupines waddling through the backyard, eagles circling above the river.  On a bikepath near my house, I was recently menaced by an angry least weasel: this smallest mammalian carnivore, no bigger than a vole, reared on its hind legs, prepared to fight off my two-wheeled intrusion into its territory.  Even a fluffed-up chickadee checking out the bird feeder at minus forty can make you feel this place is pretty wild after all.  What is special about Alaska is its mix of the urban and the wild without that Death Valley of suburbs in between.

I teach in the graduate writing program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  Most of our students come from out of state.  Many came here for the challenge of it and, as I did, for a sense of something distinctive in their lives.  Some are born travelers, having been previously to Africa, India, New Zealand.  Others had never been outside their home regions before.  A letter of application from a southern California woman announced, “I’ve always dreamt of living in Alaska.  I’m sure it’s my fate.”
 
​
When I got out of college over forty years ago, somebody was doing a survey on the graduating class.  They wanted to know what I imagined my life would be like in ten years.  Did I plan to live in the city, the suburbs?  Did I expect to marry?  How many children?  I said I never planned to marry but to have dozens of children.  I would live in the city—preferably Manhattan—or else way out in the country.  The one place I didn’t want to settle was where I was living right at that moment—in the suburbs.  For me city and country are complementary, and I’ll be delighted if some airline goes ahead and reinstitutes direct nonstop service between Fairbanks and Kennedy.  Incidentally, six months after answering that questionnaire, I got married.

Although I’d been writing for years, I’d never consciously written about a place I was then living until I bought a house in rural New York State.  I’m sure it had as much to do with my inner development as with outer circumstances.  Living in that big old farmhouse, I found that writing about the details of my environment was a way of placing myself.  Perhaps it’s that the self seeks its own image in the world: a willed reflection.  By the time I moved to Alaska, I’d caught the habit.  A number of years ago I composed a twelve poem sequence called “Above the Tanana,” one poem a month, each set at the same location, a ledge overlooking the Tanana River with a view south to the Alaska Range—the same one I see from my mailbox.  Since I know that descriptions of landscape by themselves can be boring, each poem in the sequence is dedicated to an important person or a group (or, in one case, a dog) in my life and the poems meditate on these relationships.  The first poem written was for my wife.
 

 
         Above the Tanana: May 
              for Nancy
 
 
            Here are the pasques, those
            purple-arising yellow-hearted flowers
 
            brave as spring. And far below,
            a duck, small bursts of wing-power
           
            motoring along.  Perched on a root above
            the slough, we watch the melt of ice
 
            flow west, a tent of wood that piles
            on a bar, a dark bird looping larklike
 
            down—so artless, unintended
            like that kiss to which our lips
 
            were given twenty years ago. There
            on the banks of an urban river
 
            I fixed you in my heart and you
            were young as tenderness itself.
 
            A raven passing overhead: he chortles,
            caws, and sings, coaxing his mate
 
            along. I add them to my list. Birds
            to what purpose? Seeds of a garden
 
            rooted in the mind. I knew when I
            first saw you, I could outwait the facts.
 
            Now, where mountains, sharp and white,
            are rimmed with sky, where river ripples
 
            stipple dark and light, here on this
            shelf—hushed, we can almost hear
 
            the tune the earth is singing to itself.
 
 
Of course not everything I write comes in response to my immediate environment, and I’m happy that it doesn’t.  I want my writing to take in the range of imaginative experience, to address the issues of history, of the arts, and of personal relationships.  But it would be much poorer if it could not include the place that is nearest at hand—rural or urban—the most profound use of which is as a metaphor for the self in its deepest, meditative self-knowing.  All places used in this way are mythological and reach between people, across decades, across continents.

MOVING TO FAIRBANKS: NOTES ON POETRY AND PLACE was included in my essay collection, Forms of Feeling: Poetry in Our Lives (Salmon Poetry, 2012).