Emulating William Stafford

I rose at five o'clock this morning in homage to the late American pacifist poet William Stafford. Bill used to get up at that hour daily to work on his poetry. The way the story runs, he’d complete at least one poem by breakfast, and send it off to one or another of the little magazines he patronized.

Establishing this routine in in his forties, by his death at age 79 the poet had published over three thousand poems. That was in 1993. He appparently left thousands more in cartons too.

At breakfast, Bill would reconnect with his family and then go off to his day job at the University of Oregon, where he taught writing. He was an important figure in the "process writing" movement of the seventies.

There is something about Bill’s project to keep himself both free and connected to the world that speaks strongly to me. He really wanted it all. He wanted to give his genius its due without being forced into cranky isolation.

Stafford was a pacifist. He did alternative service in camps during World War II, from 1941-1946. That was the third remarkable thing I began noticing his work around 2000.

What were the first two things I learned?

Well, the first thing I learned about him was that he had a nice sense of what it would be like to be a wild animal. Online, at The Wondering Minstrels, someone had posted, “Atavism,” and it drew me in.

A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind....

The second thing I learned about Bill was that he had written a poem just minutes before a heart attack took him off, a poem that to all the world sounds like a tremendously affirmative summing up even as Death was knocking at the door. It starts

“Are you William Stafford?
Yes, but....”

Interpretations of those lines exist that deny the unnamed speaker is Death--Bill had recently been phoned in error by someone searching for another William Stafford, but I cannot credit them. That little poem (easily available online) is a wonderful final statement. And there is a hint in it of sensory peculiarity.

Sunlight used to follow my hand...

followed by a levelling out returning him to the ordinary world. I identified with both movements.

As I say, the third thing I discovered was that Stafford had declared himself a pacifist in 1941.

That gave me pause at the time. I did not know that there were conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Rather, I knew that there were, but assumed they were all doctrinaire Mennonites or Witnesses blindly following their religion. When I was a kid in the fifties, propaganda painted it that way. Even today most of us carry around the idea that the Second World War was the last good war, don't we? We really were on the side of the angels that time, eh? A genuinely thoughtful man would hardly have sat it out. Right?

Getting up early in the morning in emulation of Stafford is defiance on my part. I defy the death-in-life that I have known, and that I still know in my bones and along my veins. It is a renewed vow to get things together, whatever it is that means for me. Careful though. I’m tempted to expect too much of myself. ("Too little of yourself you mean!" snorts my resident darkness--Mobojobo.) The chances of my getting a poem off to a publisher before breakfast are slim. (The chances I will post this to my anonymous blog though are much better.)