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.