to open this book is to spread the curtains wide

I've been pretty busy, and haven't been able to give much time to reading poetry, let alone Stafford. But then yesterday, Stafford came up in a conversation with a friend who knows of my interest in his work. The syllabus for a seminary class this friend and I will be taking together in the fall suggests WS as a possible author to research and present on as a theopoet--a writer whose work engages the imagination and reveals the divine that is within and around all of our daily living. After our conversation, I pulled "The Way It Is" off the shelf for the first time this summer, and happily started reading again. Then just as I begin to think of WS again, he enters my world in an even more tangible, and exciting way.

As I was running errands today in downtown Richmond, Indiana, I thought I'd go browse my local used bookstore. I wasn't planning on making any purchases, but was just interested to see what was there, and if anything new came in I might find worthwhile. I spent my usual five or ten minutes in the religion section, then stepped over to the poetry books. I always check first for any work by Stafford, even though the store owner said he didn't ever sell any Stafford when I had asked a few years back. It's rare that my Stafford searches are successful, but today, my eyes fell on a copy of Traveling Through The Dark, Stafford's 1962 National Book Award winner. The store owner said, jokingly I think, that he might raise the price if I kept saying how amazing of a find it was, so I bought it quickly.

When I got home, I did some looking around online, and found a signed first edition in fine condition for $450. There's no direct evidence that my copy is a first edition (I still need to do some more research on the book and publisher), and the condition is not quite fine (though my untrained eye says it's pretty close), but I would think it would be worth more than the four dollars I payed for it. Whatever it's worth, it's now sitting on my shelf with my growing Stafford collection, but it's too valuable in other ways to just sit there unappreciated. Before I got the book I had read most of the poems in the book in other places, but as I read the title poem from those 1962 pages today, it was a completely new experience. Here's what I wrote soon after I got home from the store.

Upon Finding “Traveling Through The Dark”
by Travis Poling

To open this book is to spread the curtains wide
in the middle of the day; reading
“Traveling Through The Dark” brings
as much light into the room, eyes opening
to images and brightness of what is most real
but barely seen. The yellowed pages
of the first printing years ago is daylight pushing out past
the bookstore two miles away, into my house as I rise early—
this sun calls me to its bright source. In the store I read
of messengers and premonitions, then return the book of angels
to its slot between prayer and scripture, turn again, and step
to the stacks of poetry, scanning the named edges
beside the window.

I happened to find two new sites from the Stafford Archives today as well, William Stafford Archives blog, and StaffordArchives.org.

Ready for 'Another World '? Stafford's early poetry published

Today I went to my local bookstore and stumbled across an article in the May/June 2008 issue pf American Poetry Review. I picked up the magazine and opened it to the first page and thought of the photo there, "That looks like Stafford." My eyes went up the page and sure enough, there was his name. The photo is of a young Stafford at a Civilian Public Service camp during his years as a conscientious objector in World War II.

The article, by Fred Merchant, explains that "Stafford was not a member of one of the historic peace churches [who ran the CPS camps: Quakers, Mennonites and Brethren], though he did in fact meet and marry Dorothy Hope Frantz, the daughter of a Brethren minister, while serving in the Los Prietos camp." When I was a student at Manchester College several years back, where Stafford taught for a year in the mid 1950s, I ran across a membership book of the local Church of the Brethren congregation, and there is at least one Stafford listed among the membership roles. If I remember correctly, it even read "W. Stafford." Without being at the college, I am unable to confirm this, but I might contact the archives and ask for a copy of that page. Stafford was fairly anti-institutionalist, so it would not surprise me if he never joined the denomination, even if he had attended a Brethren congregation and been sympathetic with its ethical and spiritual flavor.

In any event, what is most exciting in the article is the announcement of a forthcoming publication from Graywolf Press of a new collection of poems by Stafford: Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947. At 128 pages, Another World promises to be an intriguing look into the young William Stafford, from age 23 to 33, from his college years to after the end of the war. The APR article called it "forthcoming" but it looks as if it's possible to order a copy from the Graywolf Press website already. I'll be waiting to get my hands on it. The eight poems they've printed in APR give just enough of a teaser to whet the appetite for more unreleased Stafford work, but only enough to last a little while.