William Stafford: An oracular voice

 1. An ethical divide

To make sense of William Stafford’s poetry, it helps to understand one biographical fact: He parted ways with his country at an early age.

Americans make much of the “Greatest Generation,” the people who fought World War II. While millions of young men rushed off to war, often with high motives, Stafford decided he could not go.

It was a matter of conscience. Stafford had been raised in Kansas. His family had ties to the Church of the Brethren, one of the “peace churches” that forbid violence. Stafford had started a master’s degree at the University of Kansas when he was drafted.

Conscientious objectors weren’t imprisoned, Stafford said, but they were interned. They were sent to camps, usually the Civilian Conservation Corps Camps built during the Depression. Conscientious objectors worked in national forests and on soil conservation projects. The work was not voluntary, and the government did not pay the men. They got $2.50 a month from collections from the peace churches.

Two weeks after Pearl Harbor Stafford was sent to a camp in Arkansas with a copy of The Journal of John Woolman, .

Conscientious objectors were not popular, and Stafford and two others came close to being lynched. (Explain.)Until the war, he had always heard of America as “our country,” he said. Overnight, it became  “their” country, someone else’s.

Stafford objected to the event that defined his generation. He spent a lifetime quietly insisting that aggression is not a means to an end and that violence is a failure of the imagination. He insisted on a better way.

2. How he wrote

Stafford once said his religion was thinking and he started each morning by thinking about his life.

He got up to write at 4 a.m. He had a job teaching English and he had a family — wife, Dorothy, and four children. Like everyone else, he had responsibilities. But if you wake up before other people, he said, you can be free for a while.

Every morning, Stafford found a comfortable place on the couch with paper, pen and books. He wrote lying down, a sheet of paper on a book on his knees.

He wrote a page or two a day. He’d start by putting the date on a sheet of paper and then making a note on the day before. He mentioned dreams. He reflected on family life. He recorded quotations from people or from his reading. Sometimes he’d list an idea for a story. Occasionally, he’d record aphorisms — “single lines of trenchant observation,” he called them — that wouldn’t be incorporated into a poem. While he considered his place in the world, he did not record news. He was after something else.

At some point, the notes would stop and a poem would start to take shape.

He’d periodically review his daily writing and would copy, by typing, a poem he wished to save for publication. He kept the sheets of daily writing together, though. If a poem was labeled “copied,” it had been typed.

One of those typed copies was declared the documentary copy of the poem. On the back, Stafford wrote the dates and places where he had read it.

Kim Stafford, who is also a professor and a poet, said his father produced a handwritten ream a year. The ream went into a box, which eventually joined a larger box in the attic.

Kim was entrusted with the collection on his father’s death in 1993.

Kim wrote a memoir, Early Morning, about his father and his way of writing. William Stafford had a lot to say about his writing, both in books and in interviews. But Kim Stafford’s insights into his father’s work and habits are often more helpful.

Kim Stafford described his father as an objector.

3. Objectors

If you spend time with William Stafford’s poetry, you will see that he was not just objecting to war but to all violence.

We express aggression through the way we use money and organize our workplaces. We express aggression in our ideas of manhood.

As Kim Stafford put it, (his father thought) violence is not just a part of our culture. (or biology). It’s a kind of secular faith. We believe that our security depends on our ability to intimidate others into place. And so, instead of making human connections, sorting through our imperfections, we get drunk on anger. We buy more guns.

William Stafford’s poem “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” describes another way.

            If you don’t know the kind of person I am

            and I don’t know the kind of person you are

            a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

            and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

This is an appeal to make those small human connections and to trust your neighbor at least well enough to know him.

Kim Stafford said that his father taught there were three fallacies about violence:

• Aggression is a means of attaining ends.

• Machinations of certain evil persons must be stopped.

• Distrust, punishment and stern behavior are essential.

Instead, William Stafford held fast to the view that violence is a failure. His experiences of upholding that conviction shaped his view of the role of the poet.

4. Role of a poet

After World War II, the popular view of the poet was as a rebel against the prevailing culture. Stafford saw the poet playing the role of the chorus in Greek tragedy, calling to the central character, challenging his thinking, warning that his course of action might not the wise. It wasn’t the chorus that was the rebel, Stafford said. The rebel was the tragic character, his judgment clouded by hubris, on the verge of an irreparable mistake. In this case, the rebel is a country.

Stafford wrote poems trying to persuade people to step back from the impulse toward anger, aggression and violence in everyday life. People might be persuaded into abandoning violence, but they obviously can’t be bullied or bludgeoned into abandoning violence. 

Objectors have to set a higher standard. They have to be kind. The have to be aware of people around them, respectful of their individuality. They have to be humble and admit there are wrongs they can’t stop.

Those themes are common in William Stafford’s poetry. His poem “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune” begins:

Wisdom is having things right in your life

and knowing why.

            If you do not have things right in your life

            you will be overwhelmed:

            you may be heroic, but you will not be wise.

If your life is right but you don’t know why, you’re just lucky, and you’re not going to move

            in the little ways that encourage good fortune.

It’s a plea to learn those little ways, and a lot of Stafford’s poetry is an education in those little ways.

Objectors don’t blame. They just try to understand another’s point of view.

Objectors make their case humbly but clearly, trusting in the power of clarity to persuade. Objectors conduct their part of the discussion in a way that keeps open the possibility of friendship.

As William Stafford put it, a raised voice is a mistake.

5. Where do poems come from?

During the counterculture movements of the 1960s, one of Stafford’s poems developed a following. “The Animal That Drinks Up Sound” is about an animal that needs sound, but, instead of making some, he took it away.

He eventually took it all away. No more rustling leaves. No more splashes from fish. When the animal had drunk in all the sound, he began to starve. After he died, a cricket emerged and chirped

                        and back like a river

            from one act flowed the kind of world we know,

            first whisperings, then moves in the grass and leaves;

            the water splashed, and the big night bird screamed.

Sometimes the moon, cold, waits for the dreaded animal to return

            But somewhere the cricket waits.

The poem seems to have a following wherever people fear oppression. Kim Stafford, when he traveled to Iran, ran into poets who were certain that the poem was about censorship. Censorship is one form of violence, but there are many.

And of course we don’t have to wonder what species of animal is pointlessly violent.

Where do such poems come from? There are two answers. Such poems came from Stafford’s conviction that people should not surrender to the impulse toward violence. But the poem also came from his practice of getting up early and thinking about his life.

After the war, Stafford got his doctorate from the University of Iowa and taught at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon. As a teacher of poets, Stafford tried to get young writers to see that lying on the couch and thinking iswriting.

Perhaps the most damaging misconception a person can have about writing is that it is composing sentences — that you are writing only when you are sitting in front of a computer.

In Stafford’s view, the time spent thinking was writing. It’s the creative process — reflecting on your life and being open to whatever intuitions and ideas come up. That process requires no technical skills, just an attitude of openness and some patience.

A parallel process is involved, which Stafford called the process of revising texts. That process does require technical skill, meaning it’s something that can be taught.

But you don’t begin with the technical skills. You begin with the creative work of lying on the couch and thinking.

Stafford was not fond of endlessly revising texts. He liked to point out that Plato banned poets from the republic when they abandoned philosophy for the love of exquisite language.

“I think you create a good poem by revising your life … by living the kind of life that enables good poems to come about,” he said in an interview with the Paris Review.

Stafford held that the goal of a writer should not be to write good poems, but inevitable poems, the poems that come out of your life — and could not possibly come out of anyone else’s. A student cannot, by desire and study, learn to write like Shakespeare any more than a corn seed can learn, by desire and hard work, to produce tomatoes. Students should write the things that they will write, must write, given who they are. That was Stafford’s teaching.

He said: “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”

6. Rules of thumb

Kim Stafford said his father put brackets around words that he could, in theory, cut but wasn’t yet ready to. He hadn’t given up on them yet.

I feel closest to William Stafford the writer when I run across such small details about the way he worked. I suppose most writers like to peek inside another writer’s shop.

William Stafford didn’t believe in leaders or disciples. He said a writing teacher is not a master, just a companion who knows the difficulties. And the difficulty of what to cut, what to leave in, is with us always.

William Stafford taught that writing was “one of the great, free human activities.” He thought that writing could reveal your truest self, your truest personality. Everyone should try it.

He rejected any notion that a writer could claim to have better insight than anyone else. A writer is just a human being writing — exploring something through language, hoping to discover something. The discovery might be good.

Instead of a writing program, Stafford had rules of thumb. They are scattered throughout his books and interviews. Here is a sample:

• “If you are writing and you get stuck, lower your standards and keep going.”

• “When you are writing and it gets hard, don’t stop. It’s hard because you are doing something original.”

• “Understanding too soon is overrated.”

I like to picture the man who said that. In my mind, he is lying on the couch at about 5 a.m., lost in a notion, trying to find a way to get a notion down on paper. The writing is hard because the matter is not clear. But he’s just about to discover something he hadn’t known before.

One of my favorite rules of thumb is on how you can tell when you’re done. When revision ceases to be an adventure, that is, an act of creation, you’re done.

One more: Always carry a pocket notebook. “Writers are not called upon so much to be smart, as to be alert.”

7. Publication

At any given time, William Stafford had 50 to 100 poems in circulation. He estimated his rejection rate at 80 percent.

One of the poems that has been republished frequently, “Traveling through the Dark,” was rejected more than 20 times.

Stafford said he decided early on to write recklessly and leave the decisions about publishing to other people. He just kept sending his poems to editors. No magazine was too small.

He was 46 years old when he published his first book, yet he published more than 50.

His process of organizing a book was simple. When he had about 100 poems that had been published in magazines, he spread them out on the carpet. The natural groupings were obvious, he said.

Kim Stafford said that when he was growing up his father would periodically hand out copies of his latest book. It was the only evidence family members had of the mysterious practice William Stafford maintained while everyone else was sleeping.

Kim Stafford said his father said there were three stages of a poet’s career, measured in terms of readings. In stage one, no one asks. In stage two, you have to say yes. In stage three, you can choose.

William Stafford told his son he’d never gotten to stage three.

8. Kim Stafford

Through the years, I read Kim Stafford as a way of getting a better understanding of his father. But his book of poems Wild Honey, Tough Salt was astonishing. The book was published during the Trump era, when anti-democratic forces were becoming overtly violent.

Kim Stafford’s poem “Citizen of Dark Times” begins with these lines:

Agenda in a time of fear: Be not afraid.
When things go wrong, do right.
Set out by the half-light of the seeker.
For the well-lit problem begins to heal.

I wrote him, enclosing a photograph of that poem, typed on a notecard, already dog-eared from being carried around in a pocket. 

I told him that for years, I had typed poems by his father and pasted them on notecards. When I’d get stuck in a waiting room or in a long line, I’d pull out a notecard. It was magic. A moment that would ordinarily be frustrating would become a quiet moment in an oasis.

I wore out many notecards with William Stafford’s poems. “The Little Ways That Encourage Good Fortune,” “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” “When I Met My Muse” and “Notes for the Program” were favorites.

Some of William Stafford’s poems sounded like oracles to me. Kim Stafford’s voice is not the voice of his father. But some of his poems also sound like oracles to me.

9. Bibliography

• William Stafford, The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems, St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 1998. Kim Stafford said that, about once a year, his father would hand him a copy of a book representing new work. Williams Stafford published dozens of books. This is a good place to start.

• If you are interested in William Stafford’s approach to writing, there are two views: his own, published in two books, and his son Kim’s. 

William Stafford, You Must Revise Your Life, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1986.

William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1978.

Kim Stafford, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford, St. Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2002.

• William Stafford, The Art of Poetry No. 67, The Paris Review, No. 129, Winter 1993. Here is a shorter version that gives the highlights of William Stafford’s approach to writing.

• William Stafford, Down in the Heart, Corvalis: Oregon State University Press, 2006. This is an account of Stafford’s time in the camps as a conscientious objector. A version of this submitted as his master’s thesis.

• Kim Stafford, Wild Honey, Tough Salt, Pasadena, Calif.: Red Hen Press, 2019.