William Stafford as Religious Poet?

If you've followed this blog for any amount of time, you'd know I read a certain amount of religious meaning in William Stafford's poetry. This is largely due to my primary interest of study being religion for the past seven years through college and seminary. For better or worse, I tend to find religious and spiritual truths in many places within the culture I live in, especially art and language.

If you've read much of William Stafford's poetry, you may have noticed he mentions religious and spiritual themes, but they are not often the main focus of his work. Stafford grew up attending various Protestant churches, and later came under the influence of Quakerism and Anabaptism. But for most of his life he lived in Oregon, one of the most secular places in America. As far as I know, he was not highly involved in any religious institution for very long; he generally shunned institutions. But he also had a keen sensibility that allowed him to intuit many spiritual truths.

His pacifism is perhaps the best known incarnation of his religious stance. When he spoke to his draft board in World War Two, he told them he learned in church that it was wrong to kill, and he was believed to be sincere enough to perform alternative service, working for the government in manual labor camps instead of donning a uniform and picking up a gun.

A lot of attention has been paid to Stafford's writings on peace, including a collection of poems and essays, and a documentary film based upon the collection, both works entitled "Every War Has Two Losers." Interestingly enough, not much has been said about Stafford's religious and spiritual writings. Generally he is thought to have been secular, though I wonder if he fell more along the the lines of secular Christianity, that is, believing basic principles of the faith, while not making a distinction between religious and nonreligious realms of culture. He was asked in a 1993 interview with The Paris Review if he considered himself a Christian poet. Here is his response:

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.

I have begun to read critics' views on Stafford to find what others readers have found in his work that hints toward some spiritual stance, and have found that many call him a mystic but almost always qualify it by explaining that his poems are rooted in the daily world. Stafford, then, was not interested in transcending the world, but entering into it to find "more than what we know." I have also started to identify poems and essays by Stafford that say something of his religious and spiritual views. I am also interested in researching these questions in the Stafford archives in Portland, Oregon and interviewing scholars and writers who may be familiar with this aspect of his work. Possible outcomes could be an anthology of Stafford's writings on spirituality and religion with an introduction, or a book length essay. I will see what possibilities arise. For now, I will keep reading.

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.

Stafford and the San Francisco Renaissance

I was browsing through Preaching in a Tavern, a collection of small Brethren tales, when I came across an entry about creative arts in the Civilian Public Service. During World War II, the Church of the Brethren operated labor camps for conscientious objectors. One camp in the Pacific Northwest known as Waldport was home to a number of artists, among them the poet William Everson. The story said that Everson played a part in the beginnings of the San Francisco Renaissance, otherwise known as the Beat movement.

Stafford, another conscientious objector, did not attend this camp, but was stationed nearby. Everson and Stafford got to know one another, and Stafford even published a few works in the Waldport press.

After the war Everson joined the Dominican order. He changed his name to Brother antoninus, but continued his printing and poetry. In 1967 Stafford wrote an introduction critiquing the work of his friend in a small volume entitled The Achievement of Brother Antoninus.

Stafford writes:

Kenneth Rexroth, in an article which helped to launch "the beat generation" into public notice ("San Francisco Letter," in the second issue of Evergreen Review), calls William Everson "probably the most profoundly moving and durable poet of the San Francisco Renaissance," and continues: "His work has a gnarled, even tortured honesty, a rugged unliterary diction, a relentless probing and searching, which are not just engaging, but almost overwhelming." And Rexroth goes on to say, "Anything less like the verse of the fashionable literary quarterlies would be hard to imagine."

I recall reading WS's WWII memoir, Down in my Heart, and being reminded of the prose style I appreciated over ten years ago when I first picked up Jack Kerouac's novels. It makes me wonder: if Stafford had settled in California, would he have become a Beat icon? I don't know for sure. What I can say is that I am thankful that he moved to Indiana and joined the Brethren. Otherwise I might not have discovered him, at least in the ways that I have.

But consider this: Could WS be a Beat in his bones, in his soul of souls? I ask because of the meaning of the word "Beat" as it pertains to Gary Snyder (who interestingly serves as an advisor to Friends of William Stafford) Kerouac, Ginsberg, Rexroth and the like:

The word "Beat" originally derived from circus and carnival argot, reflecting the straitened circumstances of nomadic carnies. In the drug world, "beat" meant "robbed" or "cheated" (as in a "beat" deal)...

The word acquired historical resonance when Jack Kerouac, in a November 1948 conversation with fellow writer John Clellon Holmes, remarked, "So I guess you might say we're a beat generation." ..."It involves a sort of nakedness of mind, and, ultimately, of soul," Holmes wrote, "a feeling of being reduced to the bedrock of consciousness."

By the early 1950's, Kerouac and Ginsberg had begun to emphasize the "beatific" quality of "Beat", investing the viewpoint of the defeated with mystical perspective. "The point of Beat is that you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way," wrote Ginsberg, " which is the old classical understanding of what happens in the dark night of the soul."

So much of this seems to resonate in the works of William Stafford, as well as in the wider Anabaptist story, of which Stafford is one part: from Kerouac's "we're a beat generation." ... to Ginsberg's "you get beat down to a certain nakedness where you actually are able to see the world in a visionary way". This may also explain why I, as an Anabaptist poet, am drawn to the visionary ways of Stafford and Kerouac. Even the writing styles of the two poets seem akin. As I've previously discussed in other places,

In his essay "“Belief & Technique for Modern Prose", Kerouac lists these essentials among others for producing prose works: “2. submissive to everything, open, listening...5. Something that you feel will find its own form...13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition

Likewise, Stafford's first rule of writing is "lower your standards."

Here the task gets trickier. Imagine a conversation between Stafford and any of the Beats. What would they say to each other? How would they interact? Someday I'll write that short story. Until then, I'll take your comments.

Declaration of the Feast of William Stafford

In response to yesterday's parenthetical petition, I received a message from Jeff Gundy, the organizer of Mennonite/s Writing:

I hereby declare that in the minds of all who choose to accept it, August 28 is from now on the Feast of William Stafford!

Book critiquing WS wins award; Menno Lit conference blogging

Mennonite poet & critic Jeff Gundy's book Walker in the Fog: On Mennonite Writing, which contains a chapter on WS entitled "Almost One of the Boys: Marginality, Community and Nonviolence in William Stafford" received an award named for a Brethren scholar at a Brethren college. Gundy's site announces:

Walker in the Fog has been chosen for the 2006 Dale W. Brown Award, given each year by Elizabethtown College for "outstanding scholarship in Anabaptist and Pietist studies."

read the news release

Gundy was responsible for a large part of my appreciation of WS as an Anabaptist writer. Congratulations on your award, Jeff.

Related news:
Gundy is the organizer of this year's Mennonite/s Writing conference (Oct 26-29), which I'll be attending and hopefully blogging on this site and Radical Pie.

'Ready for what God sends', August 28 Feast of William Stafford

August 28 is the day of the Feast of Saint Augustine, and the anniversary of the 1993 death of William Stafford. Both were very prominent and prolific spiritual writers who valued the inner life and community, as well as the amazing power of love.

On this morning thirteen years ago, Stafford wrote his final poem "Are You Mr. Wiliam Stafford?". The last stanza contains these lines:

You can't tell when strange things with meaning
will happen. I'm [still] here writing it down
just the way it was. "You don't have to
prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready
for what God sends."

This conveys a part of what it has meant for me to walk as an Anabaptist, a writer, and a reader of Stafford. Tomorrow, I will carry these words along as I begin my first full semester of seminary, where I expect to find "strange things with meaning" and hope to "be ready for what God sends."

(Perhaps readers of WS could petition Mennonite/s Writing to make today the Feast of William Stafford!)

William Stafford, pray for us.

I swear to you I did not plan this

I swear to you I did not plan this. Neither am I stalking the legacy of WS, but he seems to be everywhere I turn these days, as if he has preceeded me here. When I think of predecessors, I imagine great people who cleared the path for those even greater. This is no the case of WS and me, not by a long shot. Perhaps he is inviting or guiding me through the world instead. Or maybe my world is just too small and I need to get out more. But I am in it, living it, I am of the world, sad as that might make me. I cannot escape the world that I was brought into by those who came before me who said to be in, not of the world. These are the same people WS joined in his early adulthood, perhaps around my age. WS was no recluse, though, just as most any Anabaptist literary writer; simply that act of writing poetry and story proves that. WS was in the world, in academia, but also within himself and in the people and places he loves, the same as I am. My soul is not midwestern, but WS's is. Perhaps that is why no encounter of mine with his works really came into fruition until I left the mountains of Mid Atlantic America, to come to know the flatness of Indiana. "Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.", WS wrote in the poem "One Home" of his native Kansas. My world is Pennsylvania, and I do intend to keep it, but it gets harder to hold onto out here in the open land, where WS thrived, yearned to return to one day but never did, in flesh anyway. His spirit is alive here in Indiana, though, and it has been following me. Many may not know of him here, but his words and even his steps seem to guide me through this midwest world, and frankkly, I can think of not better companion.

It was the first class in my seminary career just two weeks ago. It was a creative writing class called "Aspects of Writing as Ministry." The professor split us into groups to critique groups of poems on death. The other group all had poems about deceased children, while myself and my neighbor were given two poems on roadkill. Our instructions were to decided if the works could be defined as religious or spiritual writing. One poem was "Thoughts on Capital Punishment" by Rod McKuen, and we decided pretty quickly that it was not within the criteria set before us: no propagandizing, no peering into the private realm, and there were more which I'll have to check on. The other poem shouted spiritual writing. It was WS's "Traveling through the Dark". Although I have repeatedly read this poem, new insights jumped out at me: The traveling of the narrator was not necessarily down a roud at night, but a spiritual journey one takes when facing questions of mortality and morality. The poem tells a story that I can see so vividly in my mind, the act of dragging a dead doe from the road, feeling her round belly and knowing the life that lie in wait within, then deciding, for the wellbeing of the delicate balance of life, to do the unthinkable yet necessary:

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

The class discussion made me go back to The Way it Is, where I found "Growing Up", a poem that fit almost too well with the narrative memoir I was writing for the class. My story told of foolishly crossing a dam in my hometown at a lake, and I fell in, unable to swim. I chose the final two lines of "Growing Up" the epigram to my memoir:

It hurt to be told all the time
how I loved that terrible flame.

While my story was told of falling into water which could be equated to the flying in "Growing Up", what the memoir was really about, at least what the even meant to me as I lived it, was that as dangerous as I was living at certain times of my life, I loved playing with that fire, and to hell with anyone who told me it was dangerous. To me, life was, and still is, about living it fully. Sure, I've made some mistakes, but I love that terrible flame.

And if all that is not enough, when I picked up one of my texts for my next writing class, "The Paradise of Bombs" by Scott Russel Sanders, and turned it over to find the first jacket blurb written by Kim Stafford, son and literary executor of WS's estate. Kim writes the following of the book:

In these eleven essays, knowing about the world is not an intelectual exercise but a sensation, or a chain of sensations, told by a troubled intelligens...They give the reader more evidence than a poem and more intention than a story, more detailed substance from more angles than either poetry or fiction would."

There have been more serendipitous runnings-in with Stafford and his work in my life, like the date of August 28th, but I'll wait till that day to reveal it. Until then, you can explore a new link I just uncovered: The William Stafford Center. Be sure to check out the NWI for workshops in Stafford Studies.

The beginning

I first encountered the work of William Stafford in a meaningful way in the spring of 2005. As I stood and read "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" in the Manchester College library, I found myself, in the words of Robert Frost, "immortally wounded" by the poem. I wanted to re-enter the lines and settle in. I felt a tug on my spirit to try and figure this wondrous writer out. That semester I wrote a major paper critiquing Stafford in the context of Anabaptist literary writers, and found that, unlike many past subjects of academic inquiry, I never once tired of encountering this poet. I still have not grown weary of Stafford, but am rather driven to encounter his world all the more deeply. This weblog will chronicle my journey with William Stafford. I invite you to join in, share and grow along with me.