In September 1992, Stafford wrote a fan letter to a former U.S. president and fellow poet, Jimmy Carter. Stafford had read a group of Carter’s poems that had recently been published in the North Dakota Review. Carter, who died Dec. 29, 2024, at 100, was reportedly studying poetry in those days with two Arkansas writers, Jim Whitehead and Miller Williams. Stafford appreciated “that glimpse of part of your life” that he found in Carter’s poems. And as a fellow writer, Stafford enclosed a poem from his book An Oregon Message (1987). Although we’re not yet sure which poem he sent to Carter, Stafford felt like it was “harmonious with” one of the former president’s poems he particularly liked.

            Within a month or so, according to a notation made on the letter that appears in his correspondence files, Carter responded with a brief hand-written acknowledgment on a copy of the original letter, reproduced here.

Some months later, in January 1995, the New York Times would report that Carter spent two solid hours signing copies of his new book, Always a Reckoning (published, as it happens, by the newspaper’s imprint, Times Books), at a Rizzoli’s bookstore.

            By this point in Stafford’s career, just a year before his death, converging with heads of state and top political figures who happened to be poets might have been old hat for him. In the early 1970s, as you’ll discover in my forthcoming biography of Stafford, he began a friendship in poetry with Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. McCarthy was the erstwhile presidential candidate—I worked for his campaign as an early teenager in 1968! McCarthy was not shy about sharing his poems with Stafford during the year (1970-71) the Oregon poet served in Washington, D.C., as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. — SBP