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.