By STEVE PAUL
(c) 2025
This post is about how biographers make certain decisions about what to include and how to include it. If it sounds like I’m speaking to myself, well, yes I am. But it occurs to me that pulling back the curtain on how certain moves are made would be enlightening for other writers in general as well as those who might be interested in the story of William Stafford. Stafford often pulled back his wizard’s curtain and wrote about how this poem was made or that one. As much as he thought, or wanted us to think, that poems emerge from somewhere ineffable and often seem to write themselves, he knew otherwise.
As this anecdote was emerging one morning while waking up, I wondered about going back four years to the notes I began making as this project was taking shape and birthing and growing up. In January I started a notes file for Year 5 of the Stafford biography. So five documents now add up to hundreds of pages of random notes, collected facts, poetic lines, emails of interest, interviews, and occasional interior debates about strategies, ideas, dead ends, and new finds. Watch for a separate post in the near future where I’ll share a progression of those notes, a kind of writing diary as I was learning and thinking about this extraordinary poet, citizen, and human.
It was nearly four years ago when I came across this curious episode in Stafford’s writing life. December 6, 1973, he appeared on a reading event in San Francisco with the wild and grungy Charles Bukowski. The Stafford archives made a blog entry about the whole thing in 2013, offering up not only an account of the event but an exchange of letters between the two poets that revealed a complex level of multi-layered interpersonal relations, hard feelings, and snap judgments. This will be fun to write about, I’ve thought all along.
William Stafford’s photograph of Charles Bukowski.
And now, while nearing the spot in a late chapter where l’affaire Bukowski would neatly fit, I came to a crossroads. What exactly should I do with it?
I’ve got the letters. I’ve got the blog item. Now what? I didn’t want to just recast the archive blog in my own words. I soon realized that if I couldn’t bring anything new to the incident then why bother spending much time and space on it.
So I poked around. The internet, of course, was quite helpful. Three or four “new” things did emerge, none employed by Jessica Alberg, a Lewis and Clark student, for the Stafford Archives blog in 2013. (The William Stafford Archives are housed in the Special Collections Department of the Aubrey Watzek Library at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore.)
First was a poem by Bukowski that directly described, with derision, his version of the scene as Stafford read poems about “nature and the inherent goodness of man.” The second find was a newspaper article from Portland nearly a year later when a poetry columnist dredged up the episode and quoted an account, anonymous, from a witness. A contemporaneous review of Bukowski’s recently republished short fiction adds another voice and a respectful view of the poet’s provocative but invaluable place on the literary landscape. And a letter to another poet contained a useful snippet of Stafford’s real feelings.
The 2013 blog included a photograph that Stafford took of Bukowski that evening, a copy of which he apparently sent to the L.A. poet, if you read between the lines of Stafford’s brief letter. I had hoped to find alternative takes of the photograph in the vast cache of Stafford’s negatives in the archives. I looked through hundreds of photos from 1973 and adjacent years. Alas, none other turned up (yet).
These four extra bits don’t necessarily translate into a startling series of sentences. But they gave me something to work with other than a rehash of previously known material. Here’s how it turned out in the draft manuscript, which is currently still growing toward completion. (I’ve included source notes, along with the archive blog url near the end). As I was approaching this chapter, I’d expected to write a longer section about Stafford and Bukowski, but for now I’m hoping these four paragraphs suffice:
Charles Bukowski, the boozy and bonkers poet laureate of underbelly Los Angeles, took public aim at Stafford in a mid-1970s poem. Bukowski was remembering the odd night in December 1973 when he was paired with Stafford for a reading at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Sponsored by the San Francisco Poetry Center, the event has taken on legendary proportions—a gladiatorial meeting of the mild-mannered Oregonian and the grungy, gun-slinging Angeleno. In his poem “All the Little Girls” (later titled “The Little Girls”), Bukowski derides Stafford’s innocence, represented by the audience of girls in the colorful dresses and their “tight blue jeans with little hearts sewn on them” who wanted nothing more than to hear him read his poems “about nature and the goodness of man” Stafford, named only William in Bukowski’s poem, “had never been in jail or in a whorehouse…had never needed more than 3 drinks during his wildest evening; had never been rolled, flogged, mugged…” Bukowski, of course, knew nothing of Stafford’s wartime incarceration, but no matter, this was a performance.
Bukowski was likely drunk when he took the museum stage on Dec. 6, 1973. “Bukowski…looking like a wino from Fifth and Minna, vastly entertaining, and he had these groupies, vast and pendulous, wandering in and out, changing clothes and shuffling chairs while Stafford read…It was most touching that Bukowski took time out from his own reading to mock Stafford (‘Has he fainted yet?’) This reading was shocking. It was insensitive to put anyone short of King Kong on the same bill with a charismatic slime like Bukowski. It is doubly insulting to put a poet of William Stafford’s unique stature on such a bill.” This witness was an anonymous source for a Portland journalist who recounted the event nearly a year later. The Poetry Center director acknowledged that the combination of voices, while energetic, might have been a mistake given how rude Bukowski’s fans were to Stafford. But, “so be it.” [Bukowski’s poem can be found under both titles online. Gene Detro, “Poetry Notes: Readings Scheduled at PSU,” Oregon Journal, Oct. 12, 1974, 10.]
A Bukowski story collection had recently been reprinted by City Lights Books of San Francisco, prompting at least one admiring review. The literary critic and antiquarian bookseller Ralph Sipper, recognizing how the “black humor of ignominy pervades Bukowski’s work and it makes us laugh too,” describes how he stands far away from Stafford’s position on poetry’s spectrum though not too far away at the same time: “He is the minstrel of the men and women whose lives have been permanently derailed from the main line of comfortable society. And while that becomes unbearable at times, one listens because he sings the truth.”[Ralph Sipper, “A Volume of Adult Classics,” review of Bukowski’s Notes of a Dirty Old Man, San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 30, 1973, 121.] It’s doubtful that the Portland literature professor ever got around to reading Bukowski’s stories.
Nevertheless, Stafford was typically agreeable and unflustered when he wrote a brief letter to Bukowski a few days later and apparently sent him a print of the low-light photo he had taken. He regretted that they didn’t meet after the show. Bukowski was typically audacious in his reply a few weeks later, though reading his letter closely reveals that he might have even been touched by Stafford’s outreach. “It’s just as well we hadn’t met. I do things stupid.”[WS to Charles Bukowski, Dec. 10, 1973, Bukowski to WS, Jan. 4, 1974, General Correspondence. The letters are reproduced with a 2013 blog article about the episode, https://williamstaffordarchives.blogspot.com/2013/03/i-like-flat-country-and-i-hate-precious.html] Despite his polite letter to Bukowski, Stafford might have come closer to his real feelings in a letter about the same time to William Heyen, a poet and editor to whom he was submitting a piece about writing. Stafford called the San Francisco episode “one of the strangest readings of my life.”[WS to William Heyen, Dec. 9, 1973, General Correspondence, Box 22.3, Watzek]
