I have been reading a wonderful book from the Poets on Poetry series, "William Stafford: Crossing Unmarked Snow, Further views on the Writer's Vocation" edited by Paul Merchand and Vincent Wixon. The book is a combination of Stafford's poetry and his thoughts on the writing process. Why should you care about Stafford and his thoughts on crafting poetry? It's very simple. In his lifetime, William Stafford authored over 20,000 poems. Of those poems, 6,000 were published. The sheer volume of his productivity is mind-boggling. Here's the most amazing part. Stafford didn't publish his first book of poetry until the age of 46.
Predictably, he has some very strong opinions on the process of writing poetry. Much of his advice concerns letting go of obsessive thoughts of quality, embracing the feeling of being lost instead of fearing it, and simply allowing the poems to come to you. I have to admit that I sometimes get wrapped around the "quality" axle. Many times I feel myself getting so tangled in expectations that everything becomes a slow grind. Here are a couple of quotes from the book that helped me "ungrip."
"A writer must write the bad poems in order to approach the good ones--finicky ways will dry up the sources."
"But this makes me think that if you write...the way I do, accepting what comes--then many of those poems will seem insignificant and they are insignificant even ludicrous and grotesque to those who have standards. I'm willing to look awkward when trying to catch the one that can't be caught, to stumble because of the inability of language to get from there to here. So, I don't feel protective of poems."
"Somewhere deep where we have no program--our next discovery lies."
I admit I have a personal connection to Stafford. In 1983 when I was 16 and first learning to write poetry, Stafford visited my high school in Salt Lake City. There were about 30 of us in the library to meet with him. He was very stately with Silver hair. He had such personal dignity and patience. He answered questions slowly, as if holding them in his mind and imaging them in three dimensions. This consideration and seriousness made me feel like a person of worth instead of a dumb ass teenager. He then read a few of his poems. I'll never forget one image about crossing his knife and fork before every meal as a silent protest against war. Imagine the trust he must have had in us to share this kind of thinking. It wasn't until much later in my life that I read he was a conscientious objector. Most importantly I was left with the knowledge that poetry has value beyond the smothering ether of black letters on white paper. Poetry lingers in the mind, often for a lifetime.
Here's a nice bio on Stafford:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=6496. You can also find links to some of his poems at that site.
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I was also affected by William Stafford, although I was not inoculated with the ability to write through my tenuous association with Mr. Stafford.
He was a professor at Lewis & Clark College during the 1960s, and pretty much through to the end of his life, which is a couple of miles from where I grew up. Kit, his daughter, was in my class in high school. Mr. Stafford would attend the occasional high school activity, as well as spend a few hours each year with English classes studying poetry. What better way to teach poetry than have a respected poet visit the class?
Of course, to most of us he was merely Kit's dad, even though we knew he was a poet and professor. I did not fully feel the significance of his presence at the time, but did get a better grip on the value a few years later during college when I ran into Kim Stafford at the University of Oregon.
You were more fortunate than I in recognizing and learning from the experience while in the moment. I have been able to realize some value in later years, but it would have been much more valuable if I had been awake to the value at that time.
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