Linking up

UPDATE January 13, 2011 You may have noticed News From Nowhere has been discontinued for a little while. It seems Mark as decided to move on to other projects. Best wishes, Mark. The site will be certainly missed.
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Thanks to Mark Mitchell, creator of News From Nowhere, a site of poetry and visual art with a large emphasis on Stafford. From now on, whenever folks surf to his page of Stafford's poetry (currently the sixth highest ranked site on Google for the search term "William Stafford") they will find a link to this blog (listed as "Travis Poling blog") and the William Stafford Fan Club on Facebook!

Hopefully this marks only the beginning of clear signals across the deep darkness that is so often the internet.

Reviews of 'Encountering Stafford'

A running list of comments, emails and reviews regarding this site:

I surely share your appreciation of Stafford's work and life, and I like what you're doing with this blog.
--comment from poet Jeff Gundy, Bluffton University

An insightful new blog entitled Encountering William Stafford. Reminds me a little of Rilke's Letters To A Young Poet but from the perspective of the young poet.
--News From Nowhere's links page

My wife and two close friends of ours are studying William's work as a way of furthering our own consciousness and living from a place of integrity. We are enjoying this process immensely. We are considerably older than you so it would nice to have a 28 year old viewpoint in our discussions.
--email from Ronald L. Riffel, Sarasota, FL

I am a poet and a Mennonite...I have heard of William Stafford, but did not know he was 'Christian', much less pacifist...Your blog clarified the connection between Stafford and pacifism; that is the Brethren... Now that I know...Mr. William Stafford shall be my next babtism by immersion.
--email from Daniel Foote, Bethany, OK

I have briefly looked over your blog and look forward to spending more time with it. I have a dear poet friend with whom I read sometimes and it will be fun to show her your enthusiasm for Stafford. I'm looking forward to learning more about this admired poet through you.
--email from Sue Hanson, Poulsbo, WA

Initiation: A Poem

I wrote this poem after days of trying to disect Stafford's poem "Believer" (The Way It Is 112-113). I don't know if I've come any closer to cracking the poem, but I've given it this try.


Initiation

When you are lost on the open road
and you still see everyone for miles,
who chooses to step forward
      and say, "Listen..."?

If magnetism confuses its poles
how does attraction spark fresh from the world,
pulling all of us in ways, through force, toward iron?

All of us need, not magnets in our pockets,
but empty, wide spaces
where the gift of vision, knowing who we are,
                    waves as it pushes past.
Our response is to say its name.

Sing Now: A Poem

This is a poem I wrote a while ago after reading a poem of Stafford's, though the title eludes me at them moment.

Sing Now

A cappella four-part harmony is.
Everything else waits, listens.
Silence rises on air
at each breath, while
heaven descends on
old hundredth or 606.

All we need is now.
Before and after tumble
down, and now lifts away.
Sound is the only chapel.

A cappella four-part harmony is:
it saves us everywhere.

The silent river of life

I just returned tonight from a retreat of a group known as A Place Apart, a growing network of communities that strive to follow Jesus in ways that nurture being fully alive as God would have us, as Jesus modeled in his life. As I continue to read Stafford, I am struck by how much of what he says is so in line with what A Place Apart is about. Here is a blurb from their website that begins to sum it up:

The purpose of A Place Apart is to provide a place where men and women, young and old, married couples and singles, clergy and lay people, Christians, other faith traditions, and those without any religious affiliation can comfortably come to break with the frenzied pace, empty value systems, fakery, and pseudo-life of the world and develop a new relationship to God, to others, to themselves, and to the Earth. A Place Apart will be a place to regain hope and a place to receive direction and channel hope.

Stafford, in my view, was about this break from what is empty in the world and reconnecting to the world in new and innovative ways.

On Friday night I read some of Stafford's poetry, and several people commented how much they appreciated his words. I believe he is addressing a longing that so many of us are experiencing: to stop pretending that we have the answers, to no longer be afraid to say and be who we are and what we dream of becoming. I don't consider Stafford, nor myself, to be a "Christian poet" per se, but we both seek to present the world in ways that are true to human experience, so true that they move the reader to some sort of action, even--and especially--if that action is a shift in view. So much of poetry is about vision, a way of seeing that is apart from the habitualized, ritualized norms. I may write more expressly at times in religious language more than Stafford, but my writing, like Stafford's, is not about the "right way" as Christianity often is. Many people are beginning to no longer say we are Christian, because we are do not desire to be a part of that system anymore. Instead, we are calling ourselves, if we must call ourselves anything, followers of Jesus. (YouTube has four humorous videos that attempt to get at this dynamic.)

I have been reading The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life, and I just came across this passage from an interview with Stafford this evening:

To what extent do religious beliefs influence your work? Do you consider yourself a Christian poet?

I might describe myself as a religious poet whose vocabulary, reference points and surrounding culture are phrased in Christian terms. I think I would be whatever religion there was in the society around me; it's not the local content of the religion that possesses me, but the general attitude, the way of living that recognizes more than we know.

For Stafford, religion is not about religiosity--it is about the people around you rather than "getting it right"; and "the way of living" which he says so wonderfully "that recognizes more than we know." This is precisely what A Place Apart is seeking to do--what I am striving for myself. Of course, I am a Christian--or follower of Christ, and probably won't lose that part of myself. But I desire to live in a way that is not so much about me and what I believe, but how I live with the people around me, and how I interact with what I can never fully know. This is my "silent river" of sorts, as Stafford says of in "Ask Me":

...We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.

I wait to hear "what the river says," and write what I see. This is the only way I know how to be alive.

There is a country to cross

A dear friend asked me to keep her and her mother in my prayers. And then I read "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid," which can be read here. Stafford's words in this poem have become my prayer.

Annotated Webliography

I just began a new project today, the William Stafford Annotated Webliography, a bibliography but restricted to web content, of which there is actually quite a bit. Here is the intro:

This webliography is a continual project that I add to as I am able. I began on May 2, 2007, and will continue to add and revise content until all that I perceive as critical for the reader of William Stafford to engage has been included. I have elected to review only online material at this point since a search of most bookseller websites will provide access to the works of Stafford that are available for sale; online content is freely available to all, scholar and leisurely reader alike. While I approach Stafford as a scholar, I began to study his work because I came to appreciate his work as a lover and writer of poetry. I aim to include a balance of resources between that appropriate for study and that good for enjoyment.

You can access the webliography here.

UPDATE If you look in the upper right hand corner of this page, above Stafford's signature, you'll find the permanent link to the Webliography. Be sure to come back and check up on its progress from time to time, as it will keep growing.

Anabaptist American anguish

I came across this daily writing from December 4, 1981 in Every War Has Two Losers:

Was there ever anyone who understood the anguish of still being subject to allegiances you have begun to distrust?

Nietzsche did.

I don't know about Nietzsche, but I can say that this has been a large part of my own life. My own patriotism has been put to the test more than once in my life, and I continue to claim that my allegiance is not to America, but rather to my own (non)resistant Anabaptist tribe. I claim that it is, though I sometimes doubt where my allegiances truly lie, since I am so entrenched in the world and in America, for better or worse.

In the end, and to answer Stafford's question above, I do "understand the anguish." Even if my allegiances are not always clear, I, like Stafford clearly did, still struggle with what it means to live in this nation as one of many who rejects its malignant ways.

Birthday Commemorations

January 17, 2007 marked the 93rd anniversary of WS's birth. Besides numerous celebrations largely in the pacific northwest, Garrison Keillor dedicated that day's episode of the Writer's Almanac to one of WS's poems, "What's in My Journal," and some good words about the life of Stafford, including this:

About his own works, Stafford once commented, "I have woven a parachute out of everything broken."

What a wonderful metaphor. We all have objects, moments, relationships in our lives that we would rather just walk away from then take the time to fix. Yet in some profound, unknowable ways, it is very often these fractured pieces of our lives that, when fashioned through creativity and language, save us. Let us remember Stafford this year as one whose
words can contribute meaningfully to our salvation.