Poet William Stafford

He was the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.

William Stafford
William Stafford
Born	William Edgar Stafford (1914-01-17)January 17, 1914 Hutchinson, Kansas, USA
Died	August 28, 1993(1993-08-28) (aged 79) Lake Oswego, Oregon, USA
Occupation	Poet
Nationality	American
Period	1962–1993
Notable awards	National Book Award for Poetry (1963), Guggenheim Fellowship (1966), Western States Book Award (1992), Robert Frost Medal (1993)
Spouse	Dorothy Hope Frantz
Children	Kim Stafford, Kit Stafford, Barbara Stafford

Background

Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, the oldest of three children in a highly literate family. During the Depression, his family moved from town to town in an effort to find work for his father. Stafford helped contribute to family income by delivering newspapers, working in sugar beet fields, raising vegetables, and working as an electrician's apprentice.

Stafford graduated from high school in the town of Liberal, Kansas in 1933. After initially attending senior college, he received a B.A. from the University of Kansas in 1937. He was drafted into the United States armed forces in 1941 while pursuing his master's degree at the University of Kansas, but declared himself a pacifist. As a registered conscientious objector, he performed alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps. The work consisted of forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month. While working in California in 1944, he met and married Dorothy Hope Frantz, with whom he later had four children (Bret, who died in 1988; Kim, writer; Kit, artist; Barbara, artist). He received his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1947. His master's thesis, the prose memoir Down In My Heart, was published in 1948 and described his experience in the forest service camps. He taught English for one academic semester (1947) to 11th graders (juniors) at Chaffey Union High School, Ontario, California. That same year he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis & Clark College. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. Stafford taught for one academic year (1955–1956) in the English department at Manchester College in Indiana, a college affiliated with the Church of the Brethren where he had received training during his time in Civilian Public Service. The following year (1956–57), he taught at San Jose State in California, and the next year returned to the faculty of Lewis & Clark.

One striking feature of his career is its late start. Stafford was 48 years old when his first major collection of poetry was published, Traveling Through the Dark, which won the 1963 National Book Award for Poetry. The title poem is one of his best-known works. It describes encountering a recently killed doe on a mountain road. Before pushing the doe into a canyon, the narrator discovers that she was pregnant and the fawn inside is still alive.

Stafford had a quiet daily ritual of writing, and his writing focuses on the ordinary. Paul Merchant, writing in the Oregon Encyclopedia, is gentle quotidian style to Robert Frost. Merchant states, "his poems are accessible, sometimes deceptively so, with a conversational manner that is close to everyday speech. Among predecessors whom he most admired are William Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson." His poems are typically short, focusing on the earthy, accessible details appropriate to a specific locality. Stafford said this in a 1971 interview:

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

Stafford was a close friend and collaborator with poet Robert Bly. Despite his late start, he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies and eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry. James Dickey called Stafford one of those poets "who pour out rivers of ink, all on good poems." He kept a daily journal for 50 years, and composed nearly 22,000 poems, of which roughly 3,000 were published.

In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate. In 1975, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon; his tenure in the position lasted until 1990. In 1980, he retired from Lewis & Clark College but continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. In 1992, he won the Western States Book Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.

Personal life

Stafford died at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993. The morning of his death he had written a poem containing the lines, "'You don't have to / prove anything,' my mother said. 'Just be ready / for what God sends.'" In 2008, the Stafford family gave William Stafford's papers, including the 20,000 pages of his daily writing, to the Special Collections Department at Lewis & Clark College.

Kim Stafford, who serves as literary executor for the Estate of William Stafford, has written a memoir, Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press).

Published Poetry Collections

Prose

• Down in My Heart (memoir). Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House, 1947. Reprint: Columbia, S.C.: Bench Press, 1985.
• Writing the Australian Crawl. Views on the Writer's Vocation (essays and reviews). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.
• You Must Revise Your Life (essays and interviews). Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1986.
• Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War (daily writings, essays, interviews, poems). Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2003.
• The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life (essays and interviews). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003.
• Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation (essays and interviews). University of Michigan Press, 1998.
• The Osage Orange Tree (fiction short story). Trinity University Press, 2014.

Translations

• Poems by Ghalib. New York: Hudson Review, 1969. Translated by Stafford, Adrienne Rich and Ajiz Ahmad.

• Lawson Fusao Inada, named state Poet Laureate in 2006

• William Stafford, Richard Hugo, John Haines, William Matthews, Reg Saner, Richard Shelton, Gary Soto, and David Wagoner (1982). Wild, Peter and Graziano, Frank (ed.). New Poetry of the American West. Durango, CO: Logbridge-Rhodes. pp. 104. ISBN 978-0937406199.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) OCLC 8589531, 655452420, 610178960 (print and on-line)

 

Wikiquote has quotations related to William Stafford.

• William Stafford Archives website
• William Stafford Prize for Poetry
• William Stafford page at Academy of American Poets website
• William Young (Winter 1993). "William Stafford, The Art of Poetry No. 67". The Paris Review. Winter 1993 (129).
• Quotes about Stafford's writing style Archived 2004-01-10 at the Wayback Machine
• An Encounter with William Stafford by David Feela
• Friends of William Stafford
• Poems about Hutchinson, Kansas
• TTTD Productions Poetry Videos and DVDs featuring Poets Laureate William Stafford, Lawson Inada, etc.
• A Pacifist's Plainspoken Poetry, NPR interview
• Oregon Poet Laureate program, homepage
• [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7cjBZ4Nv-U&list=PL_uRBSjikfiwJDUTvddRDU6N14zYLlzH4&index=4 An Oregon Message: With William Stafford]