"Fall Wind," by William Stafford

"Words Crowded Together"

I was reading a book of poems by William Stafford this morning, An Oregon Message, and the opening stanzas of a poem titled "Scripture" reminded me of why I like to read poetry. Okay, I really didn't need reminding, but nonetheless, here are the lines (from p. 91 of the book):

[From "Scripture," by William Stafford]

In the dark book where words crowded together,
a land with spirits waited, and they rose and walked
every night when the book opened by candlelight--

A sacred land where the words touched the trees
and their leaves turned into fire. We carried in wherever
we went, our hidden scene; and in the sigh of snow coming down.

Herrick's Poem, Reader's Face, Let's Party

(image: Likeness of Robert Herrick [1591-1674])

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To the Sour Reader

by Robert Herrick

If thou dislik'st the piece thou light'st on first,

Think that of all that I have writ the worst;

But if though read'st my book unto the end,

And still dost this and that verse reprehend,

O perverse man! If all disgustful be,

The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me.

Well, then! Here is poetry as a bit of a contact-sport. Instead of invoking the muses, Herrick invokes the reader, and, as I interpret the poem, he gives the reader two options: 1) If you don't like the first poem you read in my book, then simply assume that that poem is the worst poem in the book and move on from there (to what will, by definition, be better poetry). 2) If you don't like any of the poems, then you are perverse, and I curse you; specifically, may an extreme scab afflict you and those whom you know.

A poet and poem with attitude: not bad. Also a poet who probably wore a wig, judging by the image above. He looks like he could have played in a 1980s rock-band. Or maybe 1970s: He looks just a bit like Tony Orlando from "Tony Orlando and Dawn."

The use of "reprehend" is nice. We're used to "reprehensible." I don't hear or read "reprehend" much if at all anymore, though.

"Scab," I assume, in this case refers more to a disease than a single scab (crusted-over wound), per se. Here is an example from the OED online that may obtain (from anotheer poet, George Herbert, although not from a poem):

G. Herbert Jacula Prudentum 1137 The itch of disputing is the scab of the Church [transl. of the saying Disputandi prurigo est ecclesiæ scabies].

"Scab" also, of course, has come to refer to a worker who takes the job of a union-worker on strike. I haven't looked into the origins of that figurative use yet, but I probably will.

In the meantime, here's to Robert Herrick and his aggressive opening gambit toward is audience, even though the audience could have simply closed the book in outrage--and hoped the curse would not come to pass.

In a preface or foreword to one of his poetry-books, William Stafford was somewhat more subtle. If memory serves he wrote, "And to my critics: thanks, anyway." Lovely.

Stafford and Yevtushenko

An oddly matched pair--William Stafford and Yevgeny Yevtushenko: the former a conversational, modest American, in favor of low-key rhetoric; the latter in a tradition of more public, declamatory poetic rhetoric, and also in possession of a robust personality.

I've convinced myself I perceived an intersection in their work, however, specifically in a couple of stanzas. The first is from the opening of Stafford's poem, "Next Time":

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

The poem is from An Oregon Message, and the last line of the stanza is supposed to be indented 5 spaces, but the blog-machinery doesn't want to cooperate.

I like the matter-of-fact whimsicality of the lines but also the way they and the whole poem suggest a wish to do and to be better.

In "Requiem for Challenger," a poem from Almost At the End and, as the title states, a poem concerning a space-shuttle explosion, Yevtushenko begins with a great dramatic image: "This white tragic swan/of farewell explosion," and then, with his panoramic view, manages to take in Arlington Cemetery, the Kremlin, the Pyrenees, the Caucasus, Mt. Everest, and the Statue of Liberty. --Broad, bold strokes: what one has come to expect from this poet. But here is how the poem concludes (and again, the indentation of lines is off; my apologies):

Our life is a challenge.
Our planet is our common Challenger.
We humiliate her,
frightening each other with bombs.
But could we explode her?
Even by mistake?
Even by accident?
That would be the final error
never to be undone.

Like Stafford, Yevtushenko is interested in one's, in everyone's, doing and being better, and, in my opinion, he makes a nice choice when yoking one kind of technological disaster with another one--the nuclear one. Probably some will see "our common Challenger" as trite--a repetition of the "spaceship Earth" analogy, but Yevtushenko is never afraid to err in the direction of big plain statements, large-hearted emotion from which he probably knows some readers will recoil.

Perhaps the intersection between these poems and poets, if it exists, concerns something as simple (but difficult) as wisdom.

William Stafford and the Super Bowl

I wonder if poet William Stafford ever watched the Super Bowl. I doubt it. I also doubt that he believed himself to be superior to such mass entertainment. I suspect he might have simply not been interested in the game.

I've been reading his book, An Oregon Message, a book of poems published in 1987. Somehow I ended up with an autographed copy. I'm no handwriting expert, but my wild guess is that Stafford was left-handed. At any rate, he was roughly 73 years old when he published this book, and he prefaced it with this note, which I think I'll reproduce in full:

"My poems are organically grown, and it is my habit to allow language its own freedom and confidence. The results will sometimes bewilder conservative readers and hearers, especially those who try to control all emergent elements in discourse for the service of predetermined ends.

Each poem is a miracle that has been invited to happen. But these words, after they come, you look at what's there. Why these? Why not some calculated careful contenders? Because these chosen ones must survive as they were made, by the reckless impulse of a fallible but susceptible person. I must be willingly fallible in order to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen.

Writing poems is living in that realm. Each poem is a gift, a surprise that emerges as itself and is only later subjected to order and evaluation." (page 10 of the paperback).

As always, Stafford is sly--even in this preface. "Organically grown" not only alludes to a Romantic (as in British Romantic, Wordsworth, et al. ) point of view, but also to the term "organically grown," which had become ubiquitous in American marketing of food in the 1980s. With regard to art and poetry, "organic" doesn't have the "granola" connotation many people immediately think of. It's not a "touchy-feely" term. It simply refers to the way in which a poem or another kind of art finds its form, as opposed to filling up a predetermined form like a mold. You might think of "organic" in this context as the opposite of "formulaic."

I observe with pleasure the Christian--in the broadest sense of the term--note in the preface: a poet or a person has to be willingly fallible, as opposed to willful or arrogant, to receive poems. Of course, one need not be a Christian or even necessarily a person of faith to approach art this way. One need only be receptive in a certain way. Patient.

In Stafford's view of writing, one receives the language. This point of view does not, of course, mean that whatever one receives is good. It simply means that whatever one receives, one receives--a gift to consider. Then you take a look at it. Maybe you put it in a bit more order. Maybe you evaluate it. Maybe you decide you don't quite know what to make of this gift, so you put it on a shelf for a while.

This is the kind of "theory" of creativity that most literary critics don't get because they need something either more outlandlandish and grandiose or more logical. Stafford's way is too "in between." Perhaps it's too simple.

But to think of a poem as a gift, perhaps a modest gift indeed (who knows?), is a nice way of looking at poetry. Wait for the words. They usually arrive. After they arrive, take a look at them and see what you have. It's a bit like panning for gold. And almost no one pans for gold to get rich. One pans for gold because one enjoys panning for gold.

But what really astonishes me is that, at 73, Stafford apparently still felt he had to explain himself, his way of writing. True, it's not as if he were insecure or revealed insecurity in the preface. And there's some wry humor in these paragraphs of his. (In another book, in reference to critics, he says simply, "Thanks anyway."). Nonetheless, by age 73 Stafford had produced so much interesting poetry that one would think he wouldn't need to "explain" himself. It makes me a wee bit sad that he felt that way.

I met him once, in 1974 or 1975, when he came to read at U.C. Davis. He wore a simple "dress" shirt without a tie. I liked his laconic, clear way of reading. As was the routine then, we all gathered in a small classroom in Olson Hall. Maybe there were 20 of us. Ridiculous. He deserved an audience of hundreds. But so it goes with poetry. After the reading, we gathered at Karl Shapiro's house for a reception, and I asked Stafford about imagery. Shapiro rather liked poems to be overloaded with imagery, whereas (it seemed to me, a mere youth), Stafford was a little more comfortable with conversation in his poems, even as they included fine imagery. I forget his answer to my question, which probably wasn't phrased very well. I had to leave soon after that because, of all things, I was horrifically allergic to Shapir's cat. So it goes.

But oh my goodness am I enjoying the poems in An Oregon Message, poems Stafford waited for and received.