Stafford's college receives his papers and journals

Last week Lewis & Clark College reported that the personal collection of papers and journals from William Stafford are moving to the college's archival facilities. The college already houses a substantial collection of Stafford's works, but this bequest contains much more:

The William Stafford Archive is a collection of 40 years of daily journals and papers representing the poet’s methodical and disciplined writing process, as well as his world travels on behalf of writing and reconciliation...The collection also includes 90 discs of recordings from William Stafford poetry readings, fine press broadsides, and 15,000 photos he took over the course of his life

The college's president said

“This vast treasure will enormously enhance the capacity for the research and study of Bill Stafford for writers, students and scholars from around the world.”

The possibility of traveling to Portland and sitting in the archives for weeks is tempting, but for many, unrealistic. Fortunately, the news gets even better:

The library plans to digitize the entire collection over the next two years and make it available online, enhancing scholarly research for historians, writers, and students alike.

New webpage on Stafford scholarship

This spring I've been toying around with a website, and finally put up a page on Stafford. A major purpose of this new page is to link specifically to scholarship on Stafford that is already online--articles, tributes, interviews and more. The url is a a little bit of a hassle to remember, but here it is: http://poling.travis.googlepages.com/stafford. I've entitled the page "Pieces of a Different World" after a poem in the new collection of Stafford's early work. If there's anything you would like to see on the page, let me know. This blog will keep going, but I will start to migrate some of the content from here over to there. This blog will remain as a home for more reflective pieces, while the webpage will play home to deeper scholarly work.

Article on Stafford in Brethren news publication

In the April 22, 2008 issue of the Church of the Brethren Newsline, Brian Nixon, a member of the Church of the Brethren recounts a poetry reading William Stafford gave at the denomination's 1991 Annual Conference in Portland, OR. I'm pretty certain I was at that conference, but I didn't know anything about Stafford then, at age 12.

Nixon tells this story:

As an impressionable college student, I looked over the plethora of lectures, seeing one that read, "Poetry Reading: William Stafford." This sounded great to me, but I was unsure of exactly who Stafford was. As a member of the Church of the Brethren, I had heard of Mr. Stafford, but was not yet quite "into" him. I knew he published a book of poetry with Brethren Press called "A Scripture of Leaves," and was well loved among the Brethren folk.

But as I stood there and looked at the other conference offerings, I finally decided upon a folk group concert instead (you see, I was "into" music).

Read the rest here.