Last summer (in 2023, that is), I wrote a piece for Literary Hub on the 30th anniversary of William Stafford’s death. I think I meant to post it or a link here as well, but, blimey, I guess I didn’t, so I’ll drop the link in down below.
More than three years into the project, my biography of Stafford moves like a snail, or as Evan Connell once referred to his writing of stories, grows like a starfish. At the moment I’m closing in on 100,000 words overall and in the process of finishing drafts of the first 10 chapters to join drafts of four later chapters completed (mostly) earlier.
Above is a shot of the well-organized Stafford papers, giving readers here an idea of the mountainous task I’ve taken on. Will I turn every page, as the research saying goes (thanks to Bob Caro)? Doubtful; but I will turn very many of them. I’ve been in the archives for a total of about six weeks, most recently a week in April 2024, scanning documents, correspondence and the like, and getting my head around and inside the not-so-easy-to-comprehend head of Stafford.
I should say a quick word about the parallel project called the Stafford Challenge, which was launched early this year by a Portland poet who was inspired by Stafford to inspire others to write every day. Reportedly some hundreds of people signed up to participate, vowing to write a poem a day for the next year. Stafford didn’t exactly write a poem a day, though he scratched out something—notes, dreams, the beginnings of poems, and even occasionally complete poems—almost every morning for nearly 50 years. I became a passive participant. I don’t churn out a poem a day, though I write almost daily on this book and other projects. I have produced a few decent poems, however. An informal discussion group that I passively joined and Zoomed with early in the Stafford Challenge fell apart rather quickly, so, as a poet I remain mostly a bubble boy in my lonely silo.
I’ve had some issues with posting links on this Squarespace site, so hoping this one to the LitHub article works OK:
https://lithub.com/remembering-william-stafford-whose-poetic-region-was-all-the-world/