A few entries back, I introduced a poem by William Stafford. He has greatly influenced me--not only through his beautifully unique and strong poetry, but also through his philosophy of writing, which was full of generosity and wonder. I think he has an extremely insightful understanding of our spiritual nature and how we can become more open to God's voice. I'd like to tell you a little about him here, with some quotes taken from his book, Crossing Unmarked Snow. The highlights are (obviously) mine. You can read more of his wonderful poetry at http://www.williamstafford.org/spoems/index.html.
Stafford was born in 1914 in Hutchinson, Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas, and took active part in the early struggles of what would later be the Civil Rights movement. He was drafted in 1940, and served as a conscientious objector throughout the war (in work camps in Illinois, Arkansas and California). During this time, Stafford began a life-long discipline of rising very early to write for several hours every morning, and he wrote many poems during this time. He said everyone can be free around four in the morning.
He often talked about his writing process, which he claimed to value above any one poem he produced. He said that in those early writing sessions, his practice was to write whatever occurred to him, whatever located him.
As one interviewer put it, his writing process was one of “extreme receptivity,” which Stafford said acted as “a defense against being stampeded by the current, intentional engagement with what other people think is important. It’s very subjective, but it is the kind of subjectivity that makes you available for what is (making) a valid, actual, individual impression on a human being: yourself. I’m afraid that getting published has often pushed me toward trying to repeat what has succeeded, and I don’t want to do that. I want to stay as trusting and innocent as I was when I first started to write…”
A hunger to be “lost” often comes up in his poems. He spoke about that desire to be lost in his writing process: “…if you’re lost enough, then the experience of now is your guide to what comes next. None of us knows what comes the next second. We manage to survive in our lives by staying inside the bubble of our assumed self-sufficiency. That’s nice, cozy—but as a writer, as a thinker, as maybe a mediator, I have a sense of being in a set of circumstances that’s much more wilderness than most people assume.”
After the war, he continued his education and began teaching, finally setting at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 1956. He didn’t believe in overtly complimenting or criticizing students’ writings. He preferred to tell them where he “was with them,” and where he hadn't been able to follow them. He wanted the goal to be locating the self, not writing for praise.
“I feel trapped in a society, and in a school system, that persuades individuals that all their activities are goal-oriented towards some goal that doesn’t have anything to do with how they feel. In the arts it has to do with how you feel. So trust what occurs to you. And you’ve just got to do that. If somebody else doesn’t like it that way, you can make it the way they like it if you want to, but it won’t be art.”
He was stubbornly non-elitist in his ideas of education and writing, and claimed not to be overly concerned with the quality of any of his own poems.
“What is quality? It depends on where you stand, whether you feel you’re limited or not. I feel I’m limited. I feel other people are limited. This idea, whatever standard American writers have reached is estimable and other standards are not, is a relative matter. In a way, I could say I’m not that ambitious, but another way I could put it is I’m a lot more ambitious than that. I don’t want to reach the standard that American poetry has reached. Nothing less than everything, that’s what I would like to find by keeping going. The idea that you could cut back a little bit and thus be esteemed is not as important to me as if you could keep on being headlong, you might get beyond being esteemed. I’d like that. So maybe I’m more ambitious. God has got bigger plans than the standards of American poetry, no matter what those standards are.”
“I’m suspicious of the ability of any fallible human being to erect some kind of standard and say, this is it. The realm of possibility is more glorious than that--…the closing in on some kind of hierarchy is a function of the limitedness of the judges more than it is the quality of the work….”
“For me writing is invading that area of “what am I missing?” rather than “Does this reach a standard?” You live your life by the feeling of satisfaction a day at a time. Those who try to say, well, at least, no matter how grim this makes you feel to do this drudgery writing …. at least you have your accomplishment in the end. I don’t feel that way at all. I feel the other way around. At least you have pleasant days. You have good feelings about your life. As far as what I’ve accomplished, I don’t know.”
Stafford's first volume of poetry was published in 1960, and his second volume, Traveling Through the Dark received the National Book Award in 1962. He wrote poems steadily the rest of his life. He died in 1993.
