William Stafford Online Reader website launched

I've been thinking for awhile of starting a website with links to web content relating to Stafford, so I decided to go ahead with it, and today I launched the William Stafford Online Reader. This blog is being phased out, but may stay up for now for archival purposes. If you want to find poems, books, art, media and articles by and about Stafford, check out the site. There's also a news page on the new website so you can stay up to date with all the latest that's happening.

William Stafford & Martin Luther King, Jr. share more than one day

Since Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was commemorated this year on Stafford's birthday, January 17, I posted on Twitter a link to a poem about segregation entitled "Serving with Gideon" (read the poem here). The connection between King and Stafford go deeper than one day of remembrance, so I'd like to provide some more context for the poem and its relation to the work that Stafford did on behalf of peace and justice.

Dennis Hopper honored with Stafford poem

This is old news by now, but I only recently learned of it, so it counts as news here. Last March, actor Viggo Mortensen honored his friend Dennis Hopper (1963-2010) when Hopper received a star on Hollywood Boulevard with a short speech in which he quoted Stafford.

Dennis Hopper was born in Dodge City, Kansas. Perhaps the finest and most honest poet that state has produced was William Stafford. In a 1971 interview he once said something that could have come straight from Dennis: "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."

Mortensen closed with a reading of Stafford's "For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid." Read Mortensen's remarks along with the poem published by The Nation.

Thoughts for the future and some notes on faith

You might not be able to tell just by looking at this blog, with its relatively low number of posts, but I've been veraciously reading and studying William Stafford for the past five years. The trouble is I don't always know how to turn my work into content for this blog. I'm considering spinning off a less blog-esque website to introduce new folks to Stafford without having to wade through a bunch of content they may or may not be interested in. I don't know what it would look like, but my brain's working on it. In the mean time I'll be completing an MA thesis focusing, in part, on Stafford over the next few months, so I'm not sure how quickly things will change around here. For now, I'll leave you with some of my latest (unedited) reflections on Stafford's work as it relates to spirituality and theology. I'll be taking a class in Narrative Theology this semester, examining WS's World War 2 memoir Down in my Heart, and this is what I started thinking about: