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Born in Hutchinson, Kansas on January 17, 1914, William Edgar Stafford grew up with parents who listened to their children’s ideas. They also loved to read, and would "luxuriate in stories." In terms of literary influences, Stafford consistently claimed his mother to be most significant. His father’s generosity comes through in a story William told of being on a walk with him and seeing a hawk land in a cottonwood across a field. When they approached the tree, his father said, "Bill, maybe your eyes are better than mine. Maybe you will be the one to see the hawk." By such moves his father brought him right alongside him, even as a "partner." |
William Stafford |
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This closeness with his parents and his decision to be a conscientious objector to the Second World War, place him outside the turbulent waters of the majority of the literature during the first fifty years of his life. It’s interesting to note several other poets who were born that same year, 1914: Randal Jarrell, Dylan Thomas, and John Berryman. Jarrell’s work was described as the "poetry of desperation," Thomas’s chronic alcoholism brought about his early death, and Berryman threw himself from a bridge. Not to make light of the very real pain these men experienced, but the contrast to Stafford’s life is stark. At some point he left the "steady" Kansas land and went into the world. Yet within that new vulnerability he drew on his past to make a kind of shelter in the storm. His art is anything but ignorant of the aggression and menacing nature of the 1940's. In the way he describes his writing time in an interview with Nancy Bunge, he reveals something more of his shelter. "It’s a confirming, satisfying activity to do. And it’s almost devotional. Maybe that’s too strong, but it’s as if a day of my life deserves a little attention from life. It’s my kind of attention to stop long enough, to let the evaluative, the speculative, the exploratory impulses that are native to that portion of my time be manifest in a sustained way so that I can recognize them and get sustenance from them." While in high school William went on what he described as an Indian vision quest, camping out in the breaks above the Cimarron River: "That encounter with the size and serenity of the earth and its neighbors in the sky has never left me. The earth was my home; I would never feel lost while it held me." Or as he said in his poem "One Home:" "Wherever we looked the land would hold us up." You can see where his steadiness comes from. Stafford received degrees from the University of Kansas and a PhD. from the University of Iowa. In 1948 he began teaching at Lewis & Clark College where he would remain until his retirement. His first book of poetry was published in 1960 when he was forty-six. Through the course of his life, he went on to publish 50 more books. While his poetry has been honored with a National Book Award and the highest praise from fellow poets, his role as teacher has been equally influential as well as important. Through essays and interviews his process-oriented writing method has become widely known. His frequent utterance, "lower your standards," has helped many writers sustain the ongoing nature of a writing life and overcome debilitating self-criticism. Because Stafford was what he preached, the impact of his gentleness and calm would be hard to overestimate. That he was generous and kind is witnessed by everyone who met him. But he was also wiley or cagey. In other words, behind that gentleness was not the desire to please or promote an agenda or himself. As both Robert Bly and Kim Stafford, William’s son, point out in introductions to their respective collections, Stafford stood the non-violent ground consistently, with a quiet that was as fierce as it was anti-strident. He died at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993. The poem he’d written that morning included the line: "Be ready for what God sends." In his poem, "Glimpses In The Woods," he poses the quiestion: "Don't you want people to think well of you?" Of course, we all encounter such considerations every day. Stafford persistently asks these questions in his poems. Charles Simic in an essay about Stafford said: "At the end of his great poems we are always alone, their fateful acts and consequences now our own to consider." Alone but for the poem. There is a sense of respect and confidence in his leaving us to our own devices, to ponder questions we are somehow freer to ask ourselves. As the title says,"glimpses," not long and drawn out visions. Stafford replies to the question posed earlier about what others think of us: "No, give them things, and then disappear." That is the story of his life. Give, exit: "smoke's way." Further on in the poem he says: "Let me be / remembered only for the mud on my hands." He concludes with an appeal to a tree for help with a line full of the elusiveness and humility that mark his work and life: "Yew tree, make me steadfast in my weakness: teach me the sacred blur." —Mark Mitchell |