Writers and Resistance

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: the writers are on our side! I mean those poets, novelists, playwrights and songwriters who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

Howard Zinn writes this in an article, "Rise Like Lions, Writers and Resistance," in Poets Against War's Fall 2006 Newsletter.

Speaking to the heart of what was surely on many minds as they went out to vote last week, Zinn continues:

The barrage of film and books glorifying World War II (The Greatest Generation, Saving Private Ryan, Pearl Harbor, Flags of Our Fathers, and more) comes at a time when it is necessary for the Establishment to do what it must periodically do, try to wipe out of the public mind the ugly stain of the war in Vietnam, and now that the aura around the Gulf War has turned sour, to forget that too. A justification is needed for the enormous military budget, and so the good war, the best war, is trundled out to give war a good name.

Saying "At such a time, our polemical prose is not enough. We need the power of song, of poetry to remind us of truths deeper than the political slogans of the day," Zinn then quotes Bob Dylan's "Masters of War":

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul...

More quotes worth repetition here:

The great writers could see through the fog of what was called "“patriotism", what was considered "loyalty."


"I am an enemy of the existing order."” (George Bernard Shaw)

Zinn does not mention William Stafford, but he could. Stafford said:

I belong to a small fanatical sect...We believe that current ways of carrying on world affairs are malignant. We believe that armies, and the kind of international dealings based on armed might, will be self-­perpetuating to a certain point--—and that point may bring annihilation. Armies are a result of obsolete ways--—just as gibbets are, and as thumbscrews are, and leper windows. (from Every War Has Two Losers)

Meeting Naomi Shihab Nye

I met Naomi Shihab Nye, a fervent Stafford devotee, at an Earlham College convocation yesterday. I wrote this after meeting her.

Naomi Shihab Nye has stricken the word "busy" from her vocabulary. "It doesn't help us do anything. It's just a word we use when we're doing everything else." Her kind host is speaking words of hurry, things to do at her. "Five minutes." And then, "other people are waiting." "It's time to go." Naomi's face says "busy" although she does not. The book signing line is dwindling, but not complete. "Tell them I will be five minutes late." I am at the front of the line, waiting, still, while the poet explains that she is busy. She reaches for my book of her poetry I bought over ten years ago, and signing it says, "It looks like I misspelled 'gratitude,'" and "Oh, I am so happy to see you have that." I am holding my well worn book from her favorite poet and mine, William Stafford. "I have a request," I say. "This is a paper I wrote. Would you like to read it?" I hand her my essay on Stafford. "I'm excited to read it, and she folds it, slips it into her coat. "Thank you." We shake hands. As I head for the door she is already talking to someone else. I am too busy to go to the reception, still I take the time to write this down.

What Prayer Is: A Poem

I've been reading A Scripture of Leaves, Stafford's only poetry collection published by Brethren Press. I wrote this poem after reading "To You Around Me," and "An Offering."

UPDATE October, 31 2006: I submitted the poem to Alba: A Journal of Short Poetry. If it is published, I will link to it here.

UPDATE January 12, 2007: The poem has been published in Issue 14, January 2007 of Alba. Read it here.

Stafford and the San Francisco Renaissance

I was browsing through Preaching in a Tavern, a collection of small Brethren tales, when I came across an entry about creative arts in the Civilian Public Service. During World War II, the Church of the Brethren operated labor camps for conscientious objectors. One camp in the Pacific Northwest known as Waldport was home to a number of artists, among them the poet William Everson. The story said that Everson played a part in the beginnings of the San Francisco Renaissance, otherwise known as the Beat movement.

Stafford, another conscientious objector, did not attend this camp, but was stationed nearby. Everson and Stafford got to know one another, and Stafford even published a few works in the Waldport press.

After the war Everson joined the Dominican order. He changed his name to Brother antoninus, but continued his printing and poetry. In 1967 Stafford wrote an introduction critiquing the work of his friend in a small volume entitled The Achievement of Brother Antoninus.

Stafford writes:

Kenneth Rexroth, in an article which helped to launch "the beat generation" into public notice ("San Francisco Letter," in the second issue of Evergreen Review), calls William Everson "probably the most profoundly moving and durable poet of the San Francisco Renaissance," and continues: "His work has a gnarled, even tortured honesty, a rugged unliterary diction, a relentless probing and searching, which are not just engaging, but almost overwhelming." And Rexroth goes on to say, "Anything less like the verse of the fashionable literary quarterlies would be hard to imagine."

I recall reading WS's WWII memoir, Down in my Heart, and being reminded of the prose style I appreciated over ten years ago when I first picked up Jack Kerouac's novels. It makes me wonder: if Stafford had settled in California, would he have become a Beat icon? I don't know for sure. What I can say is that I am thankful that he moved to Indiana and joined the Brethren. Otherwise I might not have discovered him, at least in the ways that I have.

But consider this: Could WS be a Beat in his bones, in his soul of souls? I ask because of the meaning of the word "Beat" as it pertains to Gary Snyder (who interestingly serves as an advisor to Friends of William Stafford) Kerouac, Ginsberg, Rexroth and the like:

The word "Beat" originally derived from circus and carnival argot, reflecting the straitened circumstances of nomadic carnies. In the drug world, "beat" meant "robbed" or "cheated" (as in a "beat" deal)...

The word acquired historical resonance when Jack Kerouac, in a November 1948 conversation with fellow writer John Clellon Holmes, remarked, "So I guess you might say we're a beat generation." ..."It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul," Holmes wrote, "a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness."

By the early 1950's, Kerouac and Ginsberg had begun to emphasize the "beatific" quality of "Beat", investing the viewpoint of the defeated with mystical perspective. "The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way," wrote Ginsberg, " which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul."

So much of this seems to resonate in the works of William Stafford, as well as in the wider Anabaptist story, of which Stafford is one part: from Kerouac's "we're a beat generation." ... to Ginsberg's "you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way". This may also explain why I, as an Anabaptist poet, am drawn to the visionary ways of Stafford and Kerouac. Even the writing styles of the two poets seem akin. As I've previously discussed in other places,

In his essay "“Belief & Technique for Modern Prose", Kerouac lists these essentials among others for producing prose works: “2. submissive to everything, open, listening...5. Something that you feel will find its own form...13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Likewise, Stafford's first rule of writing is "lower your standards."

Here the task gets trickier. Imagine a conversation between Stafford and any of the Beats. What would they say to each other? How would they interact? Someday I'll write that short story. Until then, I'll take your comments.

Declaration of the Feast of William Stafford

In response to yesterday's parenthetical petition, I received a message from Jeff Gundy, the organizer of Mennonite/s Writing:

I hereby declare that in the minds of all who choose to accept it, August 28 is from now on the Feast of William Stafford!

Shopping with WS

Lake Oswego, Oregon, the community outside of Portland where WS called home has decided to name a shopping block after the poet. But this doesn't seem like a regular strip mall. The community newspaper reports:

Stafford Commons, first announced in May 2005, combines retail and office space with eight live/work units for creative professionals.

Tenants so far include Umpqa Bank, who sees itself as providing "something other than an errand." Further,

Half of the office space in Stafford Commons is also filled, with offices for an attorney, psychiatrist and financial group planned.

...

owners have turned down a number of fast food tenants for the space. Ideally, ...they sought a specialty shop that would blend with the downtown’s current mix of retailers.

Another story tells that

Drew Prell and Jim Morton, developers of the new Stafford Commons, commissioned Frank Boyden to develop the sculpture, “The Way It Is,” to honor Lake Oswego poet William Stafford, who died in 1993.

Book critiquing WS wins award; Menno Lit conference blogging

Mennonite poet & critic Jeff Gundy's book Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing, which contains a chapter on WS entitled "Almost One of the Boys: Marginality, Community and Nonviolence in William Stafford" received an award named for a Brethren scholar at a Brethren college. Gundy's site announces:

Walker in the Fog has been chosen for the 2006 Dale W. Brown Award, given each year by Elizabethtown College for "outstanding scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist studies."

read the news release

Gundy was responsible for a large part of my appreciation of WS as an Anabaptist writer. Congratulations on your award, Jeff.

Related news:
Gundy is the organizer of this year's Mennonite/s Writing conference (Oct 26-29), which I'll be attending and hopefully blogging on this site and Radical Pie.

'Ready for what God sends', August 28 Feast of William Stafford

August 28 is the day of the Feast of Saint Augustine, and the anniversary of the 1993 death of William Stafford. Both were very prominent and prolific spiritual writers who valued the inner life and community, as well as the amazing power of love.

On this morning thirteen years ago, Stafford wrote his final poem "Are You Mr. Wiliam Stafford?". The last stanza contains these lines:

You can't tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends."

This conveys a part of what it has meant for me to walk as an Anabaptist, a writer, and a reader of Stafford. Tomorrow, I will carry these words along as I begin my first full semester of seminary, where I expect to find "strange things with meaning" and hope to "be ready for what God sends."

(Perhaps readers of WS could petition Mennonite/s Writing to make today the Feast of William Stafford!)

William Stafford, pray for us.

I swear to you I did not plan this

I swear to you I did not plan this. Neither am I stalking the legacy of WS, but he seems to be everywhere I turn these days, as if he has preceeded me here. When I think of predecessors, I imagine great people who cleared the path for those even greater. This is no the case of WS and me, not by a long shot. Perhaps he is inviting or guiding me through the world instead. Or maybe my world is just too small and I need to get out more. But I am in it, living it, I am of the world, sad as that might make me. I cannot escape the world that I was brought into by those who came before me who said to be in, not of the world. These are the same people WS joined in his early adulthood, perhaps around my age. WS was no recluse, though, just as most any Anabaptist literary writer; simply that act of writing poetry and story proves that. WS was in the world, in academia, but also within himself and in the people and places he loves, the same as I am. My soul is not midwestern, but WS's is. Perhaps that is why no encounter of mine with his works really came into fruition until I left the mountains of Mid Atlantic America, to come to know the flatness of Indiana. "Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.", WS wrote in the poem "One Home" of his native Kansas. My world is Pennsylvania, and I do intend to keep it, but it gets harder to hold onto out here in the open land, where WS thrived, yearned to return to one day but never did, in flesh anyway. His spirit is alive here in Indiana, though, and it has been following me. Many may not know of him here, but his words and even his steps seem to guide me through this midwest world, and frankkly, I can think of not better companion.

It was the first class in my seminary career just two weeks ago. It was a creative writing class called "Aspects of Writing as Ministry." The professor split us into groups to critique groups of poems on death. The other group all had poems about deceased children, while myself and my neighbor were given two poems on roadkill. Our instructions were to decided if the works could be defined as religious or spiritual writing. One poem was "Thoughts on Capital Punishment" by Rod McKuen, and we decided pretty quickly that it was not within the criteria set before us: no propagandizing, no peering into the private realm, and there were more which I'll have to check on. The other poem shouted spiritual writing. It was WS's "Traveling through the Dark". Although I have repeatedly read this poem, new insights jumped out at me: The traveling of the narrator was not necessarily down a roud at night, but a spiritual journey one takes when facing questions of mortality and morality. The poem tells a story that I can see so vividly in my mind, the act of dragging a dead doe from the road, feeling her round belly and knowing the life that lie in wait within, then deciding, for the wellbeing of the delicate balance of life, to do the unthinkable yet necessary:

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

The class discussion made me go back to The Way it Is, where I found "Growing Up", a poem that fit almost too well with the narrative memoir I was writing for the class. My story told of foolishly crossing a dam in my hometown at a lake, and I fell in, unable to swim. I chose the final two lines of "Growing Up" the epigram to my memoir:

It hurt to be told all the time
how I loved that terrible flame.

While my story was told of falling into water which could be equated to the flying in "Growing Up", what the memoir was really about, at least what the even meant to me as I lived it, was that as dangerous as I was living at certain times of my life, I loved playing with that fire, and to hell with anyone who told me it was dangerous. To me, life was, and still is, about living it fully. Sure, I've made some mistakes, but I love that terrible flame.

And if all that is not enough, when I picked up one of my texts for my next writing class, "The Paradise of Bombs" by Scott Russel Sanders, and turned it over to find the first jacket blurb written by Kim Stafford, son and literary executor of WS's estate. Kim writes the following of the book:

In these eleven essays, knowing about the world is not an intelectual exercise but a sensation, or a chain of sensations, told by a troubled intelligens...They give the reader more evidence than a poem and more intention than a story, more detailed substance from more angles than either poetry or fiction would."

There have been more serendipitous runnings-in with Stafford and his work in my life, like the date of August 28th, but I'll wait till that day to reveal it. Until then, you can explore a new link I just uncovered: The William Stafford Center. Be sure to check out the NWI for workshops in Stafford Studies.

To the churches: The War is Over!

"The pity of it!" George said. "Finding only such rare occasion (to have to wait for there to be a war, and then for it to end!) for them to relax their fears long enough to admit in public that they are enjoying themselves, to smile at strangers, to feel justified in having the actual freedom of a street-width in which to walk, rather than the narrow, crowded sidewalks."

I felt then, while listening to George, how good it would be--he made me see it--if that stretch of street could remain forever closed to automobiles, if for six blocks of a city's shopping center people could again have spaciousness. If they could sometimes get that feeling we often got on the truck, rolling along through the open country, gesturing broadly around at the mountains and the tall trees, knowing that we could relax with friends and confess our doubts, fears, ambitions and confusions--and that just over the hill was the back country, or rebellion, or any other adventure endless with possibility and serenity.

William Stafford, Down in my Heart. Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing House, 1947: 83.


In this passage from William Stafford's memoir of his Civilian Public Service years, the celebrations of D-Day filled the streets. The Second World War was over, and everyone but the CPS men were ecstatic. Having lived in military-style camps for four years to perform "work of national importance" on the homefront--preventing soil erosion, extinguishing forest fires, serving as mental hospital orderlies--in exchange for exemption from donning a uniform and carrying a gun overseas, these pacifists knew that the world they hoped to see was far from being fulfilled. From their standpoint, military victory was not only not enough to sustain genuine peace, but was in fact antithetical to the establishment of the kingdom, defined by Stafford in the opening dedication of the book: "the society of human beings who have a common life and are working for a common social good." War does not usher in this kind of kingdom, but runs counter to it. The men of CPS saw themselves as seeds of the kingdom, but knew that it would take more than a cease-fire for the seeds to take root. War brings anxiety. The end of any war may bring about a collective release of this emotion, but for the men in this story, it is too little too late.

The spaciousness that Stafford wishes for in the midst of the crowd relies upon the absence of automobiles. He dreams of the day when people will not have to hide away in their cars, but can be out in the open, walking in the streets, seeing and approaching each other with nothing but the common air between them. It is significant that this is realized in the marketplace, the area outside temples in ancient days, or churches in medieval (and even modern) Europe. Inside the temple or church has historically been safe-haven. Criminals or anyone else being pursued could enter a religious building and, in most cases, be assured of protection. Likewise, today, we go about in church glad that it is safe--social convention says that we don't ask personal questions, we don't openly confess, face to face, our hopes or fears. Instead we sit through the prescribed, predictable worship. If we meet any member of the congregation outside of Sunday morning, it can be awkward--we might reveal something about ourselves we don't want others to know. We try to avoid this at all costs, and behave well--not out of of any religious motivation, but merely because it would embarrass us if the "wrong" news got out. But Stafford is praising the marketplace and all of its spontaneity, favoring it over the safe distance that the automobile affords. And George is correct--it shouldn't take some great collective victory for us to be able to genuinely see each other as fellow humans with a common good. Our world, and our church, will not have a moment so energizing that it sustains us throughout the rest of our time on this earth. We must start doing this now, getting out of our cars, our predictable church religiosity and anxieties, and take a look around. We might just see a few seeds sprout.

The true value of Stafford's works

Two questions: How much would you pay for a Stafford collectible? Which publication would you pay the most for?

I don't know what my answer would be, but it's interesting that the the highest priced Stafford item that I could find online is a First Edition copy of Down in My Heart selling for $900! It isn't even poetry, but rather WS's memoir of alternative service during World War II. I would expect his award winning collection Travelling Throught the Dark to fetch more, but then, if that's what everyone knows, it holds less alluring mystique.

Here are the notes on this item:

Elgin, IL: Brethren Publishing House, (1947) First edition of author's first book, an account of his experience as a conscientious objector interned in Arkansas & California during WWII. Bound in gilt stamped cadmium green, 94pp. Very good-, gift inscription on front free endpaper, in good+ dust wrapper with some soiling but with price unclipped.

I can hear WS singing that old CPS song, perhaps with a new verse:

"I've got that opposition to consumption way down in my heart..."

At the same time, I want that $900 book! Maybe that's a sign I need to surf less and read more poetry.

The beginning

I first encountered the work of William Stafford in a meaningful way in the spring of 2005. As I stood and read "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" in the Manchester College library, I found myself, in the words of Robert Frost, "immortally wounded" by the poem. I wanted to re-enter the lines and settle in. I felt a tug on my spirit to try and figure this wondrous writer out. That semester I wrote a major paper critiquing Stafford in the context of Anabaptist literary writers, and found that, unlike many past subjects of academic inquiry, I never once tired of encountering this poet. I still have not grown weary of Stafford, but am rather driven to encounter his world all the more deeply. This weblog will chronicle my journey with William Stafford. I invite you to join in, share and grow along with me.