Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 275-86.
Abstract
In the spring of 1986, my daughter was almost four years old and my wife and I were to have poet William Stafford to dinner during a visit he made to Washburn University. I searched for a short Stafford poem our daughter might memorize as a welcome and a tribute. We came across this simple gem, and she spoke it to him at the table.
Later in his visit, Stafford told a story about "Note." He traveled extensively all over the world. Once, in Pakistan, he opened his bags for a customs official. "Books," the man observed. "I am a poet," said Stafford.
"And these are your books?" The official pulled Allegiances from a suitcase and turned to "Note." He read the poem to Stafford, then closed the book. "I like it," he said. "Very nice. You may go."
Stafford liked that story because it confirmed his belief in the vibrant, living connection provided by language. Words, after all, are the little things of "Note." When they all go one way, they reveal the big thing-wind, place, poem, human connection.
Stafford wrote a great deal about his writing method, especially in the two books of prose, poetry, and interviews published by the University of Michigan Press in their Poets on Poetry series. Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life are full of apt metaphors.
For example, Stafford is starting a car on ice, developing a "traction on ice between writer and reader," making the reader enter a poem because "the moves ... come from inside the poem, the coercion to be part of the life right there."3
Or Stafford is dreaming, and making fun of those who treat dreaming (poetry) as a business: "You extract from successful dreams the elements that work. Then you carefully fashion dreams of your own. This way, you can be sure to have admirable dreams, ones that will appeal to the educated public."4
Or Stafford is swimming:
Just as the swimmer does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the writer passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment.5
Or Stafford is rehearsing: "Maybe it is all rehearsal, even when practice / ends and performance pretends to happen ... Maybe your stumbling / saves you, ... "6
Or Stafford is revising your life:
We can all learn technique and then improvise pieces of writing again and again, but without a certain security of character we cannot sustain the vision, the trajectory of significant creation: we can learn and know and still not understand. Perceiving the need for that security of character is not enough-you have to possess it, and it is a gift, or something like a gift.7
Or Stafford is climbing a cliff in the dark with scratched, numb hands, muscles cracking. But he makes it to the top, to the finished poem, and shouts, "Made it again! Made it again!"8
These metaphors come out of Stafford's relationship to language, the paying attention to something bigger, becoming aware of what is big by paying attention to its "little things" and nudging forward based on his listening.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln