William Stafford, Aphorist: A Line-by-Line Rodeo

          Stafford came under the spell of the philosopher Frederich Nietzsche while reading in the library at the University of Kansas. From Nietzsche and others he developed a talent for boiling wisdom into bite-sized expressions that can stand the test of time. His essays, poems, and other writings amount to a bottomless well of aphorisms.

Stafford scholars Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant celebrated the practice in a valuable collection, Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford. Published in 2014 by the University of Pittsburgh Press, the book presents more than 400 items and prompted the poet Naomi Shihab Nye to conclude, “These brilliant lines are tuning forks, weather reports from a resonant interior world, to help us with the mysterious days confounding us. Dip in anywhere, repeatedly.”

           In my scouring of the Stafford record, I frequently highlight lines that resonate in this way. It occurred to me that, since my biography of Stafford remains a thing in progress, I shouldn’t have to wait to share more of his compressed thoughts.

It’s likely that some of my finds also appear in Sound of the Ax, but most of them are new, I think, and I expect the collection posted here will grow as I revisit various Stafford books and continue to page through the poet’s archives of writings and correspondence. Stafford turned his attention to the whole world, but the process of writing becomes a naturally recurring topic. Some lines collected here are less aphoristic but leapt forward as glimmering poetic gestures worthy of heightened attention.

Items are generally identified by their sources; often the poems are listed by their first book appearance, though many of Stafford’s most memorable poems are also collected in the posthumous The Way It Is. Unless otherwise noted, most drafts and unpublished material come from the William Stafford Archives in the Watzek Library at Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon.  

—Steve Paul

“Writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along.”

—   “Making a Poem/Starting a Car on Ice,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“My debt to the world begins again,/ that I am part of this permanent dream.”

—    “Glimpses,” A Glass Face in the Rain

“We are surrounded, not by emblems, by paragons or villains, or fragments from Heaven and Hell, but by ready and adjustable potentials: nothing is special, everything is maybe.”

—   “The Importance of the Trivial,” prose draft, c. September 1964

“Anyone in the breathing business is in the rhythm business.”

—   “Writers Who Talk, Talkers Who Write,” essay draft, 1968

“Could there be a light so far that when/ you stop you make a shadow forever?”

—   “Passing a Pile of Stones,” A Glass Face in the Rain; this, of course, is a likely candidate to become an epigraph in my book, whose working title is The Shadow Poet.  

“Wherever you are, there is another door.”

—   “Smoke,” Smoke’s Way

“No matter how willing and weak your own/ face is, you know another face/ for you somewhere in the world: your house.”

—   “Looking for You,” Smoke’s Way

“Set free, the mind discovers shortcuts and arabesques through and over and around all purposes.”

—   Writing the Australian Crawl

“Animals full of light/ walk through the forest/ toward someone aiming a gun/ loaded with darkness./ That’s the world: God/ holding still/ letting it happen again/ and again and again.”

—   “Meditation,” the whole poem, frequently reprinted

“Those mad rulers at times elsewhere,/ inhuman and yet mob-worshipped,/ leaders of monstrous doctrine, unspeakable/ beyond belief, yet strangely attractive to/ the uninstructed.”

—   “Help from History,” An Oregon Message]

“But some facts happen only to people who are ready/ for how the Yukon turns over when you say its name.”

—   “For People with Problems About How to Believe,” An Oregon Message

“And you live beside me, millions of stars away.”

—   “Where We Live,” Learning to Live in the World

“A poem is a serious joke, truth that has learned jujitsu.”

—   “What It Is Like,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“The only connection we make/ is like a twinge when sometimes they change/ the beat in music, and we sprawl with it/ and hear another world for a minute/ that is almost there.”

—   “Sending These Messages,” A Glass Face in the Rain

“You turn your head—/ that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone./ The whole wide world pours down.”

 –“Assurance,” Smoke’s Way

“In my life, I will more than live.”

—   “Reminders,” Learning to Live in the World

“(I)ntention endangers creation.”

—   Writing the Australian Crawl

“If you let your thought play, turn things this way and that, be ready for liveliness, alternatives, new views, the possibility of another world—you are in the area of poetry.”

—   “What It Is Like,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“Poems don’t just happen. They are luckily or stealthily related to a readiness within ourselves.”

—   Introduction, Since Feeling Is First

“I feel ready to follow even the most trivial hunch, and my notes to myself are full of beginnings, wavery hints, all kinds of inconclusive sequences sustained by nothing more than my indulgent realization that if it occurred to me it might somehow by justified.

—   “A Statement on Life and Writing,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“Now and then a sequence appeals to me for long enough to be teased into something like a poem, and when I feel sufficient conviction, I detach it from the accumulated leaves—my compost heap—and halfheartedly send it around to editors.”

—    “A Statement on Life and Writing,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“What one has written is not to be defended or valued, but abandoned: others must decide significance and value.”

— “Writing and Literature: Some Opinions,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“A poem today is anything said in such a way or put on the page in such a way as to invite from the hearer or reader a certain kind of attention.”

—    “The End of a Golden String,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“Only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.”

—   “The End of a Golden String,” Writing the Australian Crawl

“A realization: my slogan for writing—lower your standards and go on—applies to living, to getting old.”

—   Sound of the Ax

“My typical act is—hit the road.”

—   Sound of the Ax

Notes from the Literary Road: How a Biography Grows

On November 13, 2024, near the end of a two-week research trip to the Stafford Archives, in the Watzek Library at Lewis and Clark College, I started musing. Like this:

A real Portland rain this morning. As dreary as it gets. But I’m back at the library early enough to snare one of the more convenient parking spaces. I’ve been thinking about where this project is headed and what still needs to be done.

There are many series of papers in the Stafford Archives that I’ve not yet inspected, most having to do with book publications that come along later in the 1970s, ‘80s and beyond. As of now, and as an example of what that means, I’ve got a decent picture of how the 1970 collection, Allegiances, came together and am on the verge of weaving that into a chapter that closes the 1960s and leads up to Stafford’s Library of Congress year of 1970-71.

There are said to be more than 100,000 pages of correspondence on the storage shelves nearby, and while it seems I’ve already paged through that many, I’ve only barely scratched the surface. My practice over the last three years, which I think is the right approach, has been to make surgical forays into the correspondence boxes to gather material relating to a specific month or year or, especially, to gather Stafford’s correspondence to (if there are carbons) and from certain people.

This week, for example, I wanted to find letters to and from two of Stafford’s Lewis and Clark faculty colleagues, Vern Rutsala and Bob Dusenbery. There aren’t a lot of letters involving each, but the process, aided by the searchable Finding Aid online, means asking for multiple boxes (only two at a time) in order to pull out the one folder that might have one letter often, though not always, identifiable by a particular date. I make notes or digital scans of the letters that have usable material. This, of course, takes a considerable amount of time for what essentially is a small return.

Inevitably, just having one of those folders open in search of a single letter, my eyes will settle on a name (one of the Stafford children, say) or a subject that causes me to stop and scan. These unexpected digressions are gratifying, but they do add time to the process.

Occasionally, I have paged through folder after folder in a certain period in order to get a good sense of Stafford’s travels, speaking invitations, or activities that bear a closer look as I work on chapters involving certain times in his life and career. This turn-every-page procedure adds up, as well, and the research clock ticks. I’ve found myself spending an hour or an hour and a half in a single folder. Consider this: Stafford’s general correspondence spans more than 70 boxes, each of which contain as many as five or six folders stuffed with paper representing roughly a month or more of Stafford time.

The incoming correspondence, except that from known figures, poets, and friends, tends not to be of much use—random people asking Stafford to read their poems, organizations seeking his participation, hosts and hostesses thanking him for an appearance, itinerary planning, etc. Then again, you never know. Surprises and unexpected finds can occur around any bend. Without getting into details here, I was stunned one day to find a note from Dorothy Stafford chastising her husband for a perceived affront.

Incoming letters, especially from friends and writing or publishing colleagues, also tend to contain references to a Stafford letter they’d received or to notable events that demand following up. In the last few days I’ve been inventorying a cache of Stafford letters to the poet Donald Hall that have only recently become accessible from the University of New Hampshire library. I first tried to poke into that collection more than three years ago. Now, my reading of Stafford’s connections with Hall have become far more layered and meaningful.

As researchers we live for miracle moments. They don’t happen often, but they are elating when they occur. Shortly after drafting the first version of this essay, I was surprised to find, in an unexpected box of material, a package of letters that Stafford sent home from his two-month State Department tour of South Asia and the Middle East in 1972. This and other “new” material from this journey provided a welcome revelation that a chapter soon to be written will now be enriched with details I didn’t expect to have at this point.

Aside from chasing miracles, biographers are also faced with the frequent dilemmas that enormous amounts of material present. Just yesterday, when chasing down a single piece of paper, I learned that the meticulous record-keeper Stafford, and his subsequent archival ranchers, amassed a box full of three folders holding 1,057 (by someone’s count) notebook pages of what Stafford called his “Tired Poems”—they’d wandered around the market so much, rejected here and there, that he set them aside. It’s possible that some of these poems eventually did get published, but I’ve at least momentarily decided that figuring that out is not my job right now.

Still, knowing this detail is quite enough to help tell the Stafford story as it unfolds elsewhere on my laptop.