'To Make a Friend or Sonnet'

Some deny that true friendship can flourish on the internet, that genuine intimacy, trust and affection thrive only in the physical world. I was once sympathetic to this idea, which was more revealing of my own digital backwardness than of the nature of friendship. My thinking changed slowly as I formed enduring friendships with readers and writers of varying degrees of affinity, thanks to this blog. We devote a lot of attention to the opposite of friendship – the cranks, trolls and other solipsists who haunt the blogosphere and beyond. Digital friendship deserves an endorsement. 

I’ve lived in five states and worked at many places. In my experience, work and school are the most likely places where friendship (and romance) can germinate, but it’s a commonplace to say making friends grows more difficult with age. The poet Helen Pinkerton (1927-2017) was in her early eighties when we began exchanging emails and telephone calls. I was almost sixty. Cynthia Haven (another friend) brought us together.

 

Helen and I exchanged hundreds of notes. At first, our common interests were the focus – poetry, literature in general, Melville specifically, Étienne Gilson, the Civil War. When she was almost ninety, she read Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and we had lengthy exchanges over it. Soon we spoke of our families. She always wanted to know what my sons were doing. When I returned to Houston in 2011, before my wife and sons could join me from half a continent away, Helen was my reliable confidant. The friendship, sustained exclusively by way of electronics, was as gratifying as any I have known. We never met in person.

 

I’ve just read “The Poetry of Helen Pinkerton,” published by the poet Timothy Steele in Literary Matters. His mingling of biography and critical insight is true to all my dealings with Helen. Steele quotes her former teacher, Yvor Winters, who said of her, “No poet in English writes with more authority.” Steele’s poem “Song at Seventy,” especially the final stanza, seems pertinent:

 

“So I plug onward, aiming

To make a friend or sonnet,

Desiring an alliance

Of justice, peace, and science,

Hoping my death’s not shaming

But not much dwelling on it.”