William Stafford

Diana introduced me to William Stafford poems. [ed. Note: Funnily enough I thought I hadn’t heard of him but exploring more I found that at some point I sat with his book of poetry The Way it Is and didn’t appreciate what I was reading. I don’t know that I would yet but it might be interesting to revisit having the sense of his life and intent.]
His poem, When I met my muse isn’t promising much to me with its title but recanned as a wooing poem, wow.

I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. “I am your own
way of looking at things,” she said. “When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand.

I love the nails squeaking out of the rafters trying to hold the cottage together as the ceiling threatens to blow off from the blast of inspiration. How spectacular is that. He’s got some wonderful rhythms in his poems:

Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don’t understand till we do it, we
have to carry on. [via]

I seem to have an attraction these days to messages that are telling me everything is adaption, impulse, improv. It seems the 17 poems at that site are the wee-est of samples. He eventually published 57 volumes of poetry(!!)
I like how he’s always thinking. He has a quietness to his ponderings, picking his way forward without concern with density.
Reading his words, I gloss over grammatical words as fillers we don’t attend to, hurrying the stories when maybe I should slow down and sit a while with some ice tea.
It’s ironic, is it, that if one doesn’t write as one would speak, one writes more densely but then spaces the words out on the page to get back that optimal spacing again for the brain to parse. Same poundage of tree pulp results either style, but the message is broader if connections are more nebulous. More isn’t said but more can be inferred in a less narrative style. There isn’t as much guarding the cards to one’s chest. More can leak around.
PoemHunter has a couple more poems by Stafford, including Allegiances which also has embedded that optimism and belief that a truth exists. In a fundamental way he reinforces to himself that cycles and patterns exist. Perhaps that is due to religious faith, cultural or personal. Perhaps it’s a reflection of being born in the early 1900s without radio and tv to be buffers and distractors from the cycles of weather. He’s an observer.
I wonder how much impact culture has on desire for poetic innovation. Is there a relationship between being a child of that era and having been brought up with faith in patterns and being brought up in the shadow of two world wars and Vietnam and discouragement of even the rules of engagement for war and civility being broken. The basic faith in patterns wavers not only in cultural cynicism but effecting poetic form so that what feels natural and right is different than for, say Stafford’s generation.
Although he wrote his memoirs relatively young, he had done a lot of living before he produced poems. He wrote his first collection of poems in 1963. He died 30 years after that (not from related causes).
Although he is plainspoken and has a large volume of output, he is no naive writer unaware of what process he is in, cranking out similar veined work. He was poet laureate of Oregon. He was a career poet. He was conscious enough of the process to write Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation.
His son, Kim, has written a memoir remembering his life as well, Early Morning, Remembering My Father who describes his life as a conscious choice. As a conscientious objector to war, to the point of interment, he always wanted to put forward the quiet voice of reconciliation, the importance of silence and calm.
This is not a sharp engagement but it is a setting the rules he will play by, rejecting the raucous demands for war, for peace, for attention, modelling the de-escalation he wants. The main art is not the poem or poetry. The main art is the life as he seems to suggest in the quote from Writer’s Vocation. One has to get under not the best way to express a good poem but what movement this poem adds to the writer’s life. What does it come out of and where does it push the person towards.
Understanding Stafford’s work is incomplete to look only inside his work. It is built for the context of other people vying for excitement, innovation, aggression, jazzed, razzed and razing to build something over the erased pastoral landscape.
What he ends up with is refined to an extreme degree so that it hard to find an open door for an entry point. To enter, one has to reset expectations, simmer down from restless to rest. He’s not going to pull and provoke you along, although he does have spectacular lines and phrases. His poetry is to walk beside the reader.
Not surprisingly the Wikipedia entry compares him to Robert Frost. He’s got the plain speech, prosaic slowness of instructive narrative of daily rural life in a secure world. A balm of calm.
I suppose Silliman would list him with Stafford’s friend Robert Bly on the index of School of Quietude. By Kellog’s measure of poetic field, Stafford would be on the traditional end of the axis, not innovative end, but would he be more oriented to self or community? Since he has something of a lay preacher-feel, and it’s poetry as a public act, and he sought to be part of poetic community, I would say he’s in that quadrant. Although he talks about his day in personal terms, it is not raw emotional confession by any means. It is close to oratory but instead of inciting hell and brimstone or appeals to heaven he’s grounding. As in Allegiances,

we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.

This is like Mary Oliver in some ways. Reiterating everything is as it should be. There’s no mourning, only morning dawning and dawning. There’s something like a biblical rhythm. It’s like one of the poems of The Spoken Word Revolution Redux (from sourcebooks). Stafford contended and contented himself in timeless aspects. This poem excerpted below aims to loop two points in time and assumes things are not as they should be. There’s more of an anger and helplessness and different voltage of power. Marty McConnell writes Saint Catherine of Siena to Mary-Kate Olsen in a speech rhythm, this has the pop, press, and none of the smoothing of edge to elegance. Its aims are different and its sense of time being different. (excerpt)

what god stole your hunger? who demands this reduction
to vertebrae? it’s a specific reason, a case worth losing,
nobody can hear you with fingers or sticks in your throat,
nobody loves in the bathroom, everyone’s in the kitchen
again, this is my body, broken for you, take and eat
the appearance of bones is not a miracle of the flesh.
(take and eat) what do your visions insists? who
marries you in the dream, Christ slipping a ring
on my thin second finger, I was six when he first
came for me, my shorn hair all over the floor, gold
for gold / who insists on this full-body stigmata,
woman, how long have you been paying this penance?

It powerfully twists the intent of the original text to be able to see the words freshly. It rethinks the idea of stigmata and religious patterns versus personal. We still have the sense of order and biblical and spoken running through culturally. We still have ties to the immediate and concrete but other tethers to ritual that isn’t tangible.
Stafford has the sense of the mystic as in Atavism. In a way it invokes more spirituality than a dialogue with a saint. Perhaps it is because it is direct immersion in god thru nature and that itself is impacting reveal and pace.

aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found,

He is never lost without being found. There is no forward with the opposite left to chance or choice. The return must be made explicit. Things must be balanced.
There is a feeling out forwards, wandering the forest in the structure of the poem. Although the presentation is a block, lines are jagged yet there is the sense of regularity. It is comparable to walking a forest, not the open flat sidewalk but where each step judges angle of incline, no path exists, but as you take each step new openings become clear in the organic randomness with continuity of muted colors, constant tone and shapes. There are no surprises and yet there is distance travelled and motion.
Does it matter that is is the soother, not the breast, the poem, not the forest? Would it matter if this were re-aestheticized to be avant guard? Eventually hunger will send one past the emulation to the creation.