William Stafford Archives Blog

Japanese Students Illustrate "Malheur before Dawn"

2011-03-24T10:51:00.000-07:00

Barbara Schramm writes:

Each year during their January interim I facilitate a three-day workshop with 30-35 Japanese students in the Academy of International Education program based in Osaka, Japan. These students are enrolled at St. Martin’s University and Pierce Community College in Lacy, WA. Students vary in their English speaking proficiency. One of the 5th year students acts as our translator.

In 2010, with encouragement and guidance from Paul Merchant, we worked with four William Stafford poems: “A Ritual To Read To Each Other,” “Ask Me,” “A Valley Like This” and “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid.” You may review this work on Lewis & Clark College’s William Stafford Archives website (blog of February 25, 2010, under “Information”).

This year we worked with “Malheur Before Dawn” using the following reflection questions: Write about the title, what does it seem to prefigure? How does it work to assist the ideas of the poem? Choose one line from the poem and respond to it: What are your associations with it? What does it remind you of? What question does it ask or answer? Why did you choose this line? Which one word is at the heart or core of this poem? If you had to choose one word to represent the entire poem, which would it be? Explain your choice.

Students work in groups of four, writing individual responses then discussing in their small group followed by full group discussion. The students were asked ahead of time to bring a poem of their own choosing, including a short biography of the poet. We discussed these poems also and compared ideas from their excellent selections to those expressed in “Malheur Before Dawn”. We tied these ideas to Ekhart Tolle’s New Earth, a book they’d been required to read this summer during their annual 30 -day retreat in Hokkaido.

On the third day the students drew a “wood cut” illustrating the one line they’d chosen from “Malheur Before Dawn”. I’d shown them on a large screen Michael Spafford’s wood cuts illustrating Wallace Stevens’ s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, two wood cuts for each of the thirteen stanzas. Particular drawing paper and pens were selected in advance with advice from Art Media.

One of the students, Seijun Kanazawa, translated “Malheur Before Dawn” from English into Japanese. This is a student who is learning English as his second language! Hirotsugu Kawai, Miho Harada and Yosuki Oi, and a group of students from Steilacoom Hall wrote their own responses to “Malheur” in English.

The Directors of the program say that they’re amazed at the language learning that takes place during these three days.

My thanks to Paul Merchant for encouraging this project, Ann Staley for her help with the focused free-write questions, and to Takuya Otani, Director for his endless patience and good humor in coordinating all the details.

The students in this program were:

Shuhei Nagashima, Masato Nishida, Masaaki Hasegawa, Seijun Kanazawa. Takeshi Ono, Takanori Ito, Akira Oishi, Ikue Nomura, Miho Harada, Kyoko Shimozono, Yuma Kanai, Yosuke Oi, Ryota Mizutani, Tetsuya Yonetsu, Eriko Nekomoto, Mayumi Iwata, Takashi Fujii, Yuki Kato, Yasuyuki Shimada, Takuya Hashimoto, Hirofumi Kuroda, Maki Endo, Ayumi Mikuriya, Yuki Otsuki, Kaoru Fujita, Kokoro Iwano, Koshiro Ueda, Takumi Iizuka, Atsuhito Sekiya, Shingo Kojima, Ryoko Wada, Hiroko Momose, Kimiko Hakomori, Hirotsugu Kawai, So Sato, Makoto Yuasa.

Barbara Schramm, MA

Paul Merchant comments:

This project resulted in a remarkable collection of illustrations of "Malheur before Dawn," responding to almost every word of the poem. The poem and illustrations are reproduced here, together with a translation of the poem into Japanese by one of the students.

Here is the poem, “Malheur before Dawn,” by William Stafford. It was first collected in Holding onto the Grass (Honeybrook Press, 1992), and reprinted in Even in Quiet Places (Confluence Press, 1996) and The Way It Is (Graywolf Press, 1998):

Malheur Before Dawn

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.
I didn’t hear it—I breathed it into my ears.

Little ones at first, the stars retired, leaving
polished little circles on the sky for awhile.

Then the sun began to shout from below the horizon.
Throngs of birds campaigned, their music a tent of sound.

From across a pond, out of the mist,
one drake made a V and said its name.

Some vast animal of sound began to rouse
from the reeds and lean outward.

Frogs discovered their national anthem again.
I didn’t know a ditch could hold so much joy.

So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.
Some day like this might save the world.

William Stafford

Here is Seijun Kanazawa's translation of the poem into Japanese:

Ryota Mizutani and Makoto Yuasa illustrated the first two couplets of the poem. Ryota's drawing has a splendid difference in scale between the owl and the listening poet, and Makoto has done something very imaginative in making the night sky a reflection of the dawn sky:

An owl sound wandered along the road with me.

I didn't hear it—I breathed it into my ears.

Little ones at first, the stars retired, leaving

polished little circles on the sky for awhile.

The next couplet was illustrated by fourteen students. First Maki Endo shows the sun's shout against the darkness:

Hirofumi Kuroda and Yuki Kato show two different ways of placing the horizon and of showing the relationship of light to dark:

So Sato (top left) takes a long view, while Ryoko Wada enters the landscape more intimately. Yasayuki Shimada and Yuma Kanai (bottom left and right) explore the sunrise itself in two very different ways:

Three more sunrises, by Masaaki Hasegawa (left), Shuhei Nagashima (center) and Mayumi Iwata (Right) express the whole range from naturalistic to abstract interpretation:

And now the birds have begun to appear, floating on the lake in Masato Nishida's drawing, or, in Hirotsugu Kawai's interpretation, forming patterns in the sky:

Akira Oishi and Kyoko Shimozono show the shout from behind the horizon itself, and Akira also showed the drake making a V and saying his name. Three students illustrated the following three lines:

Throngs of birds campaigned, their music a tent of sound.

From across a pond, out of the mist,

one drake made a V and said his name.

Miho Harada made music out of the flight of the birds, while Eriko Nekomoto placed the birds in musical patterns on a pine tree:

For the next two lines:

Some vast animal of air began to rouse

from the reeds and lean outward.

Hiroko Momose placed herself right in the reeds and imagined the vast animal, a lovely piece of understatement:

Four students enjoyed the next line:

Frogs discovered their national anthem again.

Seijun Kanazawa (top left, who also made the translation into Japanese shown earlier) and Takeshi Ono (top right) combine frogs and music, from a distance and close up through a magnifying glass, while Ikue Nomura (bottom left) and Takanori Ito (bottom right) group the frogs amusingly into singing choirs:

Three students, Shingo Kojima (left), Takuya Hashimoto (center), and Yosuke Oi (right) found ways ranging from peaceful landscape through a pattern of frog's heads to a flamboyant ditch of frogs in a forest to express the word joy in the following line:

I didn't know a ditch could hold so much joy.

William Stafford ends his poem with two ecstatic lines of acceptance and exhilaration:

So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid.

Some day like this might save the world.

Both Kokoro Iwano (left) and Ayumi Mikuriya (right) respond with appropriately peaceful landscapes:

These illustrations amaze me with their variety, wit, imagination, and presentational skill.

At a time of great tragedy in Japan, following the devastating earthquakes and tsunami, it is heartening to experience the sensitivity of these young peoples' responses to William Stafford's poem. We can be both brave and afraid, and I like to think that these students show the way to keep alive a creative spirit: "Some day like this might save the world."

Paul Merchant, William Stafford Archivist,

Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon

Poem by Ruth Crowley

2011-01-11T11:22:00.000-08:00

Kim was contacted recently by Molly Fisk, a good friend of our treasured associate Fred Marchant, poet and editor of William Stafford's early poems (Another World Instead). With Fred's encouragement, Molly was sharing a poem by her student Ruth Crowley, written in response to the New York Times obituary heading for William Stafford.

Ruth Crowley's poem, a rich and evocative response to the Times's slightly limiting headline, is printed here for the first time with her permission. Our thanks to her, to Molly Fisk, and to Fred Marchant.

William Stafford, Noted Regionalist, Dies
New York Times, 1993

Each morning before dawn he rose
to write. He listened to the dark, and what took root
was only his. Light hides a lot, he said. He teased
large questions from his daily tasks and shied at answers.

Not intertextual or urbane, his work
feels like plain speech, flat as the Kansas of his birth,
but look again how careful and compact,
how closely shepherded each word.

He fought the war as a CO. The pain of that.
Half Crazy Horse, half Gandhi, he sought the wild in us,
and in the wild our path. Isolate, who else would ask:
is this poem good--for the universe?

His region is the space between:
hand and hand, sky and ground, mind and mind.

Erland Anderson Remembers William Stafford

2010-09-29T09:22:00.000-07:00

Poet and academic Erland Anderson , a frequent correspondent with William Stafford from 1975 to 1993, has sent us this memoir of their long association. His reminiscence ends with a revealing comment by William Stafford on his poem "Fifteen," the kind of information that usually goes unrecorded, and an interesting sidebar to Stafford's published account of the poem, reprinted in Crossing Unmarked Snow (1998). Dr Anderson's home page has two addresses, the easy to remember www.erlandanderson.com and the address listed in the document below.

Back and Forth: Los Prietos, Wendell Berry, Friends of Stafford, Friends of P. B. Shelley

Not until this January, 2010 had I managed to play a part in a William Stafford memorial celebration of his words. Thanks to Paul Willis of Westmont College, an outdoor reading was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon late in that month at Los Prietos, now a California State Park just over the Santa Inez Pass from Santa Barbara. California. Of course, that is the site of one of the camps where Stafford served as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, and where he met his future wife, Dorothy.

Recent Stafford scholarship has uncovered plenty of new material relating to his development as a writer and poet at Los Prietos, with a clear focus on his writing habits and stance as a witness to events big and small. Before the reading that afternoon, Paul took me for a walk and pointed out several rows of stones, which are the remains of barracks from the days of the CCC and later the CO camps. “Of course, it is also the former site of a Chumash Indian village,” he added.

Then Paul had me look across the arroyo, brimming this rainy year with smooth-flowing water, to the mountain opposite and uttered a line from one of Bill’s poems written at the camp and describing the multiple thin layers in those massive white rocks. (Here, if I had been so fortunate, I would have liked to quote that line, but, alas, my memory fails.) [Perhaps Paul was quoting the opening line of The Country of Thin Mountains: “I tell you, friends, the mountains here are thin—” (July 1942) or the phrase from Meditation: “some day, looking along a furrowed cliff” (March 1943), both now in Another World Instead, pp. 29 and 38—Ed.]

Where memory doesn’t fail me, especially when it comes to quoting Stafford, can be easily reinforced by the many treasured poems I have returned to as a reader and a teacher of his and others’ poetry over the last forty-two years. The multiple contacts—as a student, a reader, a fellow teacher, a correspondent back in the days of snail mail, a fellow poet, and workshop participant—would be too long to trace here, but a few anecdotes from my memories of the various colloquies I had with Bill might be of interest to those with whom I share a common inspiration.

Vince Mowrey, who also read at Los Prietos that day in January, helped to bring me up to speed afterwards by sending me the CD called Every War Has Two Losers, and then a copy of Kim Stafford’s book-length memoir, Early Morning. It was after re-establishing contact with Kim and sharing shorter versions of the following pieces via email that Kim suggested I try weaving them as a blog on the William Stafford Archive website.

Oh yes, Kim suggested I should talk “recklessly,” so I will try.

My very first contact with the work of William Stafford arrived as a package at my apartment in Seattle a month or so after I moved there in 1968 to begin my graduate studies in English. As an undergraduate at UCLA I had drifted from the study of History and Anthropology to Literature and Languages, and, though occasionally trying my hand at a sonnet or two, I saw myself as having a vocation to teach first and then do research and write whatever might come. My impression of “creative writing programs” at the time, I must admit, was not especially positive, and I stuck to the heavy-duty reading programs in multiple European languages emphasizing major writers and historical periods.

When I finally opened that package in Seattle, out slipped three slender books of poetry—two in hard back (Traveling Through the Dark, and A Rescued Year) one in paper (Allegiances)—sent to me by a cousin in Kansas, who some fifteen years later I would find out had been my birth-mother. (So these books, in hindsight, already fit into a pattern of “tokens” from which I might have inferred a closer relationship to this “country cousin,” but at the time the details of my adoption were a dark, well-kept, family secret.) Back in 1968, it appeared that she simply shared my interest in wide reading and wanted to offer me a link between her favorite poet and my new residence in the Northwest. And, sure enough, it wasn’t long after I read through those books, noting her check marks next to the poems she especially liked, that her “Kansas poet” was scheduled to read on the University of Washington campus.

Doing a little preparatory reading before I heard him read aloud, I could tell that William Stafford was a poet who offered words that resonated with a consciousness of current national and local issues both deeply troubling and deeply reassuring. Whereas my education at UCLA had provided a penchant for modernist irony, Ivor Winters, and the “New Criticism” (which was in fact quite old by then), the University of Washington seemed like a deep immersion in an endless variety of poets who gave frequent public readings, culminating every spring with one in memory of Theodore Roethke. His ghost, it was rumored, still walked circuitously through the corridors of Padelford Hall, prodding on the surviving scholars who were his friends: Arnold Stein, Robert Heilmann, Otto Reinhardt, Brents Sterling and my future dissertation advisor, Edward E.Bostetter.

Appropriately enough, Stafford’s reading was a modest affair, but it left an indelible impression on me. Not certain why, I was nonetheless hooked. His words had been clear and accessible on the page, but something he projected audibly in his reading revived the timbre of his voice afterwards each time I encountered any new poems by him wherever they appeared. In my graduate studies I was gravitating toward the English Romantic poets and quickly made the connection between strains of that tradition in twentieth-century American literature, which he, despite the deceptively plain surface of his work, seemed to have cultivated into a finely expressive art.

Furthermore, don’t forget that it was the late Sixties, and every other male student I knew beginning graduate school that year was likely to be drafted into the “war effort” in Vietnam. Having been raised as a son of a lieutenant captain in the Navy during World War Two, I was far from a protester as the war began in the early Sixties. My own “A Draft for Vietnam” from a later chapbook, A Hollow of Waves, and which is accessible on my website, www.erland-anderson.appspot.com, details my transformation from Goldwater Republican to ambivalent protester by the end of that decade. Consciously or unconsciously part of my decision to move to Seattle had to do with the proximity of the Canadian border if things came to boil, and I had grown increasingly interested in alternative service myself, attending meetings at the Friends’ Church and examining my own conscience. It was a time of crucial decisions and many had to make them in a highly charged era of “political polarization” and media hyperbole without much calm, reasoned discussion.

So it was helpful to have a witness to similar inner conflicts and convictions from someone from my parent’s generation who had added current insights in his ongoing production of recent poems. Unlike louder, less temperate voices of protest, Stafford got to the heart of the matter with his steady demeanor and wry sense of humor. Here was a role model, closer to my own temperament, for learning a way to tackle the circumstances and potential vocations in my life without succumbing to anger and despair. Eventually I was to learn that his pacifist religious tradition in the Church of the Brethren had been part of my Kansas heritage on my birth-father’s side at McPherson College, and like his own brother, Bob, my relatives had mostly chosen to part from their religious backgrounds and participate dutifully through military service in World War Two.

Over the years of our contact, I shared these distant connections of mine with Bill and I made sure to stay abreast of many of his poems and publications on teaching writing and literature. When I, myself, was offered a two-week Poet-in-Residence position in Junction City, Kansas, and the local paper published my poem “Drop Drill” from A Hollow of Waves, Bill sent me a letter right away, which I received when I returned to the Northwest, telling me that one of his friends or relatives there had sent him my poem and the photo of me reading at the high school. I often consider that poem to be a kind of “Song of Innocence” from a third grader’s perspective on the unimaginable threats of a nuclear holocaust—a horror humanity has managed to avoid up to the present perhaps because we keep reading, writing, praying, and singing in the manner of William Stafford.

All the readings and panel discussions that I attended and that he participated in during the period from ’68 to ’76 went into my “Continental Drift” from Searchings For Modesto. Also at www.erland-anderson.appspot.com. What impressed me the most was Bill’s ability to question the more academic poets, who often claimed that political poetry was too often written “from the gutter,” but also to frown, often visibly, at inflated rhetoric by others who departed too radically from the principles of non-violent protest and reconciliation

But I drift from my purpose of providing direct dialogues with Bill. At first I was a reader and listener to his poetry and an observer of his witness at gatherings in Seattle, but in 1973 I began teaching, first at Oregon State University and then at Portland State University, and that proximity aided in coming more frequently in direct contact with him. Other poets kept passing our way, too: Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Richard Wilbur, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, W.S. Merlin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In Oregon, I began writing journal entries along with my students, and some of my own entries wanted to become poems, which I duly sent out for (not-too-frequent) publication, and collected in my first chapbook, Piedras (1978).

And, of course, by then it was my turn to participate in the dialogue my cousin had started by sending a copy of my poems to William Stafford. And, so like him, he responded to this fledgling work with a letter I cherish, complimenting my “well-placed” poems. After that, it was easier to go up and chat with a man who made a habit of corresponding to all writers, no matter their public status. I have a handful of notes, some instigated by the business of readings and travel accommodations, but all containing bonus descriptions of inner and outer events in his life as he thought they might relate to me and others.

By the early 1980’s “ecological metaphors” were all the rage, or at least had their moment in the Oregon sun when Wendell Berry, after giving a reading of his own poetry, also gave a lecture out in the Rose Garden during the Portland Poetry Festival that August. I happened to be sitting on a semi-circular cement embankment within earshot of Bill during that presentation in which Berry was attempting to define a poetic aesthetic regarding “nature poetry.” That dissertation was quite ambitious and comprehensive. One among its many examples of illustrious poets who had substituted mental fantasies for more down-to-earth, more-closely-engaged descriptions of nature was Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Berry’s argument was incisive and full of corroborating examples, indicting Shelley for projecting his erotic dreams onto nature from “Mont Blanc,” to the Vale of Kashmir, to the forests above Florence in a gathering October storm. Shelley had clearly allowed his imagination too much license, to the point of dangerous manipulation of facts and conspicuous over-consumption of nature’s beauties to facilitate his own myth-making. And the consequence of these choices put Shelley’s poetry on the side of Wall Street mass marketing and self-aggrandizement that threatened the planet with Mutually Assured Destruction.

Strong stuff! And not to be dismissed lightly.

During the lecture I noticed that Bill’s face showed he was alert but famously non-committal. Then, as Berry worked towards his conclusion, I noticed he was looking over at me from time to time to see how I was reacting to it all. Bill knew me by then for the chapbooks and attendance at readings at Lewis and Clark as well as Portland State. and I think he might have seen my book, Harmonious Madness: A Study of Musical Metaphors in the Poetry of Coleridge, Shelley and Keats. But as we stood up after the lecture, he walked right toward me and in that off-the-cuff (but rhetorical!) way of his, asked me: “Do you really think we need to abandon everything in Shelley?”

Of course, I shook my head, “no,” Or at least, “no comment.” Berry’s dichotomies were useful for argumentative topics, but Bill always had a few of “those obstinate questionings” that indicated a subtler, inclusive approach to aesthetic questions. He could even “lower [his] standards” enough to rescue poor Shelley in that moment from a philosophy that might have clipped his ineffectual wings.

Another time Penny Avila, who was Poetry Editor at The Oregonian in those days, organized a workshop at the Portland Zoo. Bill was there early that rainy morning and excited to be face to face with a badger out in the blustery weather. Though the workshop itself turned to topics like the choice of words such as “grasp” at crucial points in a poem, our main concern that day was the ash from a still erupting Mt. St. Helens, falling in the rain and soon to be kicked up into the atmosphere by cars on the roads.

In Fall of 1983, after beginning work with Lars Nordstrom on translating the poetry of Rolf Aggestam from Swedish, I moved down to Ashland to take a job at Southern Oregon State College, while still participating in the Poets in the Schools Program at two high schools in Salem, Oregon. Starting a poetry workshop in Ashland seemed a logical step, and Patti and Vince Wixon showed up. In a year’s time, along with Lawson and Janet Inada, we had initiated the International Writers’ Series in the Fall of 1984, with our first guest, William Stafford. Although I had been to Spain and to Moscow by then, Bill’s voice was precisely the kind we wished to begin with. After all, there are “Aunt Mabels all over the world/ Or their graves in the rain.”

Being away from Portland more often, excepting the annual Writers’ program at Portland State, I had fewer chances to chat with Bill, but thanks to Vince Wixon and Mike Markee, more video material began to surface for use in class when it came to reading Stafford with my students. By then, Judith Kitchen’s Understanding William Stafford had appeared, too.

One time, maybe the last time Stafford came to Ashland, I went up to chat with him about “Fifteen,” one of the poems he had just read. Along with “Aunt Mabel,” I had been using it to get “reader responses” from my students, but with more success with “Fifteen” than with “Aunt Mabel,” So I recklessly mentioned that to him.

Bill looked me in the eye and said, “Let me share something with you because I know you will appreciate it: the place I was imagining in that poem was near a certain bridge in town and what we found as kids wasn’t a motorcycle at all but an abandoned bicycle. But, you know, somehow my fifteen-year-old needed a greater temptation.”

I said, “He either is saved from stealing a motorcycle or misses his big chance to get out of that small town, and that’s what my students like about the poem. It really connects with their lives.”

“Yes,” Bill added, “that’s what I needed. I had to tell the truth in that poem with a little white lie.”

That comment hit me like the sound of a motorcycle roaring away.

Now, “looking back farther in the grass,” I can still picture Bill bringing me full circle back to the best defense of Shelley ever offered me.

Digitization of Stafford's Daily Writings

2010-07-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

During the past two summers numerous student interns have been working at digitizing William Stafford's daily writings. The image at the right shows Nick Erickson scanning a page of Stafford's writing from the last week of his life.

Last summer we digitized and posted the daily writings and related materials for all of the poems in the books West of Your City and Traveling through the Dark at williamstaffordarchives.org This summer we are finishing digitizing every page of his daily writings. In fact, we anticipate the final page to be digitized sometime next week. Although there are no immediate plans to post all of this content online, having the material digitized is an important form of preservation. It provides a backup copy in the unlikely case that an original were to be damaged. Having a digital copy also allows for scholars to study Stafford's writings without excessive handling of the originals. For scholars that don't live in the Pacific Northwest, the creation digital copies of Stafford's manuscripts also opens up the possibility of remote access and research. All of these developments are exciting to the staff here at Lewis & Clark, and it is our hope that everyone interested in Stafford's writing will benefit from this project.

Norman Solomon Interviews Haydn Reiss

2010-07-01T11:07:00.000-07:00

Linda Short informs us about a screening with Alice Walker of Haydn Reiss's film based on William Stafford's "Every War Has Two Losers." The link below leads to Norman Solomon's interview with Reiss aired on local community television.

http://cmcm.tv/node/290

Summer Work on William Stafford's Correspondence

2010-06-22T14:59:00.000-07:00

This summer staff and volunteers at the William Stafford Archives are in the process of completing a finding aid for the 35,000+ items in Stafford's collected correspondence. This is an exciting project which will provide researchers with the ability to search the finding aid by personal name, corporate name, and date. Every day reveals interesting letters. Today we discovered the following notice printed by Walter Hamady of the Perishable Press. Click on the image to enlarge. The fine print is definitely worth reading.

National Poetry Month Reading List

2010-04-16T14:25:00.000-07:00

Nancy Pearl, a celebrity librarian and commentator on NPR, recently put together a list of eight recommended poetry books for National Poetry Month. Pearl included Stafford's The Way It Is on her list. Listen to Pearl's interview and read her comments at the following link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125997807

Stafford's Voice on KUOW Radio

2010-03-09T10:31:00.000-08:00

As she promised last month, when she introduced her own reading of Stafford's late poem "You Reading This, Be Ready" (see post for February 17),Elizabeth Austen of Seattle's KUOW recently played a recording of William Stafford himself reading his "A Ritual to Read to Each Other." The link is below (click "Download"). Many thanks again to Elizabeth for her continued hospitality to the work of William Stafford.

http://kuow.org/program.php?id=19638

Japanese Translation for Language Proficiency

2010-02-25T09:17:00.000-08:00

Earlier this year, Barbara Schramm engaged in an interesting educational experiment, using translations of William Stafford poems into Japanese as a means of enhancing the students' comprehension and vocabulary skills in English. She writes:

This is my tenth year facilitating an intensive three-day January Seminar with the Academy of International Education at St. Martin’s University. Established in California in 1981, the Academy of International Education (AIE) has been running its study-abroad program in Washington over the past twenty years, partnering with Saint Martin's University and other local universities and colleges. AIE founder, Dr. Toshio Ogoshi, bases his educational philosophy on building individual character while exposing students to American life and language. AIE offers various programs with the goal of building internationally minded Japanese.

Students are enrolled in ESL and the liberal arts curriculum simultaneously and have varying degrees of English language proficiency.

This January, Paul Merchant, Director of the William Stafford Archives, asked me to choose four of my favorite poems, poems I thought meaningful for the students, for translating from English into Japanese. I sent “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid”, “A Ritual To Read To Each Other”, “A Valley Like This”, and “Ask Me”, to the students in late October to “live with” the poems so to speak, knowing they wouldn’t have much time to study the poems given their academic schedules. On the first day of the seminar it became clear that most of the thirty-one students were considering the poetry for the first time.

Since I don’t speak Japanese, there is a senior student who translates my speaking into Japanese. The students ask me questions in English. This works well, better than one might expect. The student translators are fluent in English and, of course in Japanese. Through the years I’ve encouraged students to speak to each other across the room to help clarify each other’s thoughts and to help with translating my remarks. This works well. The class is theirs and is open and lively.

For this project we divided the class into six groups, five/six students in each group, making certain that third and fourth year students were in each of the groups. This year’s students were Kenta Toyomura, Hirotsugu Kojima, Kohei Shimada, Makoto Yuasa, Maki Korai, Yusuke Takami, Tetsuro Ohira, So Sato, Hirotsugu Kawai, Ryoko Wada, Kimiko Hakomori, Hiroko Momose, Takahiro Kato, Shingo Kojima, Kodai Kojima, Atsuhito Sekiya, Takumi Iizuka, Kokoro Iwano, Yoshiko Watanabe, Kaoru Fujita, Koshiro Ueda, Maki Endo, Ayumi Mikuriya, Hirofumi Kuroda, Yuki Otsuki, Tetsuya Yonetsu, Takashi Fujii, Yosuke Oi, Yuki Kato, Yasuyuki Shimada, Takuya Hashimoto, Mayumi Iwata, Ryota Mizutani, Eriko Nekomoto.

We began with “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid,” one of the most difficult of the four poems. AIE students read the poem aloud first in Japanese and then in English, twice, using the poem as a meditation. (I’ve previously worked with the students practicing meditation so they understand the process and purpose). The other three poems were “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” “A Valley Like This,” and “Ask Me.”

The readings of each poem were followed by class discussion then writing in student journals, responding to questions such as: Write about the title, what does it seem to prefigure? How does it work to assist the ideas of this poem? Choose one line from the poem and respond to it: What are your associations with it? What does it remind you of? What question does it ask or answer? Why did you choose this line? Which one word is at the heart or core of this poem? If you had to choose one word to represent the entire poem, which would it be? Explain your choices.

It was a great joy to watch the lively activity in each group—laughing, serious conversation, questions for me, much work with hand-held computer dictionaries. There was a lot of language learning going on. At the William Stafford birthday celebration, one of the new students said the translating helped him realize how limited his own Japanese vocabulary is. We worked five and one-half hours for three full days and the students worked with their Winter 2010 Interim Director, Chie Yuhara, during the evenings, coming up with a final translation of the poems selected for the Friends of William Stafford website.

On the third day we concluded with an art project, an All Hands Poem. We divided into four groups---the students chose the poem they most wanted to work with. Students selected a line or two from their journal writing, wrote those lines on strips of watercolor paper that they’d washed, then glued the strips on tag board, also washed and shaped by their creative imagination. Their new poem was given a title with reference to the original WS poem and then signed at the bottom by each of the students. These were beautiful creations. I wish you could see them.

On Saturday, January 16, we held a William Stafford birthday celebration in Heron Hall on the St. Martin’s campus where we again read all the poems, eight students reading in English and Japanese. We discussed the translation process and students described the “All Hands Poems” that hung on the wall. One of the AIE students said he realized that his Japanese vocabulary was limited and wants to work to correct that. The students’ ESL instructor was one of the guests. He said he was amazed at the language learning that took place and asked to be invited next year to see their seminar work.

One of the St. Martin's monks attending our William Stafford birthday celebration told me that Stafford had spent time on campus through the years, attending the Washington State Poetry Association, or some such organization. How appropriate that we should have this opportunity to translate his poems into Japanese on the campus where, according to Father Benedict, he walked in the woods.

My heartfelt thanks to Paul Merchant for suggesting this excellent language-learning project, introducing William Stafford’s philosophy for student discussion. Thanks also to writer, poet and FWS Board member, Ann Staley, for sharing her process for the All Hands Poem project. Finally, I'd like to thank Takuya Otani, AIE Director, for his good-natured support throughout this project.

Barbara Schramm

The three most successful group translations (of “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” “A Valley Like This,” and “Ask Me”) are printed here.

William Stafford has been translated into Japanese in the past by two other translators. Yorifumi Yaguchi, a friend of William Stafford’s who collaborated with him on translations of Japanese poems into English, and also engaged with him in a handful of renga-type alternating poems, has published a number of translations of Stafford poems into Japanese. And Portland poet Ritz Kyoko Mori gathered a collection of her translations of William Stafford in the second William Stafford Chapbook series at Lewis & Clark College.

Collaborative translations into Japanese by AIE students, AIE Winter Seminar 2010

A Ritual To Read To Each Other　互いに読み合う儀式

もし、あなたが、私がどんな人間であるかを知らず、
そして、私が、あなたがどんな人間であるかを知らなければ、
誰かの手によって作られた模範が世に広まり、
そして、誤った偶像を追い、私たちの星を見失うかもしれない。

なぜなら、心の中には、小さな裏切りがたくさんある。
崩れた堤（つつみ）を通り抜けて遊びに行こうと飛び出してしまったような、
子どもの頃の恐ろしい過ちを、叫びながら、
肩をすくめて見てみる振りをして、
脆いつながりを壊してしまうようなことだ。

象が前の象の尻尾を鼻でつかみながら、連なり行進しているとき、
その中の一頭が群れを外れて迷ってしまうと、
他の象も行き着くべき場所を見失ってしまう。
私は、それを残酷と呼ぶ。そして、何が起こるかを知りながら、
その事実を認識しようとしないというすべての残酷さの源となる。

だから、私は、影となっている声に問いかける。
話をする人々すべてのなかにある、遠く離れているが大切な場所なのだが、
それは陰に隠れている。
私たちは、互いにからかうことはできるが、
互いの人生の行進が闇へと迷いこまないように、
深く考えるべきである。

なぜなら、目覚めている人は、目覚め続けていることが大切であり、
そうしなければ、行進の列を崩すことで、人を眠りに戻してしまうからだ。
私たちが出す合図は、「はい」か「いいえ」か、「たぶん」であり、
それらは、明確でなければならない。
私たちを取り囲む暗闇は、深い。

A Valley Like This 　このような谷

ときどき、あなたは、このような空虚な谷を見る。
そして突然、雪がその空間を埋める。
こうしてすべての世界は生まれた。
そこには何もなかった。そして、それから・・・

しかし、あなたが外を見ると、ある時、
山さえも消えているかもしれない。
世界は再び、無に返る。
世界を元に戻すのに、人は何ができるのだろうか。

私たちは、世界を見て、そしてそれから互いのことも見なければならない。
一緒に、まるで、注意して見ておかないと消えてしまう泡を持つように、
寄り添い、その世界を守っていくのだ。

生き続けながら、このことをよく考えてください。
世界に息を吹きかけてください。
世界に手を差し伸べてください。
朝と夜が繰り返される中で、どのように日が昇って沈み、
あなたの人生という祝宴に、世界がどのようにあなたを招き入れるのかを、
よく見てください。

Ask Me　たずねなさい

いつか、川が凍りつくとき、私にたずねなさい。
私が犯した過ちを。
私がしてきたことが、私の人生となってきたのかどうかも、
自身にたずねなさい。
私ではない他人が、私の思考の中にゆっくりと入ってくる。
そして、私を助けようとする者もいたし、傷つけようとする者もいた。
彼らのもっとも強い愛と憎しみは、どんな違いを生んだのか、
たずねなさい。

あなたが言うことを、私は聞こう。
あなたと私は向きを変え、
その音のない川を見つめながら、待つこともできる。
私たちは、そこに流れがあることを知っている。隠れているが、
何マイルも彼方から流れこみ、流れすぎて行く。
そして、ちょうど私たちの目の前では、その静かな流れを止めている。
その川が言うこと、それは私が言うことなのだ。

Emily Miller Reports on Educational Use of the Archives

2010-02-23T09:54:00.000-08:00

Emily Miller at Lewis & Clark College has just posted a story (at the URL below) summarizing the latest developments at the William Stafford Archives, including links to other commentaries. The article provides information about the ongoing work of digitization and cataloguing, with the invaluable help of students in the process, and the use of archival materials in educational outreach into Oregon schools and beyond. Many thanks to Emily for her careful summary. Feel free to respond to her story, either here or at the original site, with comments or suggestions.

http://www.lclark.edu/news/story/?id=4540

"You Reading This, Be Ready" on KUOW Public Radio, Seattle

2010-02-17T08:58:00.000-08:00

William Stafford's poem "You Reading This, Be Ready" was written on August 26th, 1993, in the wonderfully productive last week of his life. It was sensitively read recently by Elizabeth Austen, with a very pleasing commentary, on KUOW Seattle. Her reading and commentary can be heard at the link below. Many thanks to Elizabeth Austen, who also plans to present one of William Stafford's own readings of "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" in a future program.

http://kuow.org/program.php?id=19409

A Story That Could Be True

2009-11-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Kim Stafford recently alerted us to the fact that William Stafford's poem "A Story That Could Be True" (from the book Stories That Could Be True, 1977) played a prominent role in the pilot episode of the television show "The Riches" (2007).

William Stafford and His First Publishers

2009-10-12T12:56:00.000-07:00

The William Stafford Archives is pleased to announce the publication of: William Stafford and His First Publishers: The Making of West of Your City and Traveling through the Dark by Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant. This essay is the first of an occasional William Stafford Studies series published by the Lewis & Clark College Special Collections. The essay can downloaded in PDF form at: http://digitalcollections.lclark.edu/cgi-bin/showfile.exe?CISOROOT=/pubs&CISOPTR=55&filename=56.pdf
Hard copies can be requested by emailing Paul Merchant (merchant@lclark.edu).

Every War Has Two Losers documentary

2009-10-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

Be sure to visit the new website and watch the powerful trailer for the documentary film about William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers directed by Haydn Reiss at http://www.everywar.com/

Students and Other Researchers Welcome at the Archives

2009-08-26T15:48:00.000-07:00

Students may like to be reminded that Watzek Library's Special Collections and the William Stafford Room in 336 on the library's third floor house a unique resource, the complete papers of William Stafford, state and national poet laureate, who taught at the college for thirty years from 1947. You are encouraged to come to the Heritage Room and the next door office (230) to view aspects of the collection, which includes all twenty thousand pages of the poet's daily journal, the documentary copies and publisher correspondence for his sixty or so published volumes, around a thousand prints from his twelve thousand photographs, some ninety broadsides of his poems, and almost one hundred CDs of his poem readings. Special Collections staff (Doug Erickson, Jeremy Skinner and Paul Merchant) will welcome individual vistors or small groups, and are always willing to help students' research for Historical Materials, and other course projects.

Carolyn Buan Remembers William Stafford

2009-08-26T15:14:00.000-07:00

Lewis & Clark College alum Carolyn Buan, author and co-author of a number of books, including The First Oregonians, The Age of Abundance in an Age of Austerity, and Portland Then and Now, has sent us her reminiscences of William Stafford, illustrating (as others have done) the poet's willingness to provide beginning authors with material for their projects

When I was a junior at Lewis & Clark College in 1959-60, I had a lit class from William Stafford. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the name of that class. What I do remember is my frustration when this wonderful man and nationally famous poet began many sessions by apologizing for not being up to the task of teaching it. I used to think, How could you possibly believe you have to apologize for anything, much less your teaching abilities! I, like my classmates, was awestruck by him. How could he not be awestruck by himself?

Fast forward two years. By then I was at the University of Washington working towards my masters degree in English and taking a class in contemporary poetry from none other than Theodore Roethke. Our major assignment for his class: write a paper about a contemporary poet. Gathering up my courage, I wrote to Professor Stafford and asked if I had his permission to do a paper on him. The reply was vintage Stafford. “I can’t imagine why you would want to write about me” (or words to that effect). “However, I have some new, unpublished poems. Would you like to see them and use them for your paper?”

Unfortunately, in all my moves from one spot to another, I lost that paper. But I will never forget the honor of having William Stafford take such an interest in a former student and provide such wonderful material for my paper.

Years later, when I was associate director of the Oregon Council for the Humanities, I had other opportunities to meet with Professor Stafford. On one of those occasions, he shyly asked if I would like to see an interesting picture. It was a snapshot of a dewy young Bill Clinton, taken when he was a university student. I don’t recall if Bill took the picture and under what circumstances (I’m sure he explained it to me at the time). What I do recall is that he didn’t editorialize. Clinton was president at the time, and the photograph, which showed his famous grin and self-confidence, said it all.

Carolyn Buan

Driving William Stafford

2009-07-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

Richard Robbins has written an evocative account of being William Stafford's driver during the poet's visit to Mankato College, Minnesota in 1988. Read his blogs at the following URLs:

http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/brev30/robbins_stafford.html

http://brevity.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/blogging-william-stafford/

Barry M Clock Remembers William Stafford

2009-05-18T10:13:00.000-07:00

Barry Clock recently sent us this delightfully self-deprecating and affectionate account of his experiences with William Stafford as a teacher:

SOMETIMES GREAT THINGS HAPPEN TO US

IN SPITE OF OUR BEST EFFORTS OTHERWISE.

I was a junior at L&C and had put off taking my English requirements for another year. I had my fill of Shakespeare and all those fellows back in high school and was dreading a follow-up course in college. In fact, I could see no good reason why it was even a requirement (and don't forget, I knew practically everything about everything ...I can't emphasize that enough). So I asked one of my friends at LC the all-important question about this prof named Stafford, "Is he easy?" He replied, "Well, ya, I didn't read more than 20 pages in that class and he passed me!" I'm thinking, just what the doctor ordered for spring time on Palatine Hill ..."English Lit for Dummies". I had just completed a course nicknamed "Rocks for Jocks" (Geology) the previous term, which ended up being difficult and one of the best classes I had ever taken in college. I was determined that wouldn't happen again.

So after all my hard work in "Rocks" and football and wrestling, I was due for a break with this Stafford guy, whom I had never even heard of before. So I walked into class in the basement of one of the Forest dorms on the first day. Perhaps 12 students and a teacher were sitting in a circle in a student desk (ya, I was late). Oh, oh, this doesn't look good,” I thought as I quickly looked around, "I'm going to have to say something in this class this term, with only a dozen other students and maybe even say what I think and why. And what's with that prof sitting there, like he actually cares? Plus he's looking like he is expecting to learn something from US as well?" This could be trouble. Oh well, at least he's easy.

William Stafford's soft-spoken words, thoughtful statements, unassuming attitude and easy-going ways swallowed me up from the first moment that class started. This "easy" guy had me hooked from the moment I cracked Shakespeare open that day and the discussion began, a timeless discussion that never ends, about good and evil and human nature. I loved it all, I had always read everything I could lay my hands on before this, but not LIKE THIS. I thought, "Hey, this guy's not too bad, he might make something of himself yet." A few weeks later, while eating dinner at Saga, I said just that (can you imagine anyone as stupid as I was?) and one of my friends looked at me and said, "Don't you know, ol' Stafford has a stack of awards that would make all of our sports awards look like nothin'?"

You know, in some ways I wish I had never heard that, because my respect for him jumped a mile higher. And it shouldn't have, because he was what he was, awards or not. But that too is human nature. I have two fond memories of Stafford (excuse my use of his name, to me that is a sign of familiarity and highest regard). One was the day when he had me read what I had written in front of the class followed by a discussion of it. He had ME read something to HIM ...is that a joke or what? So, of course I couldn't wait to take a Western Lit class from him the next year. I remember willingly reading all of Dante's "Inferno", when I should have been playing cards and talking with my teammates, on the team bus crossing Eastern Oregon and Idaho in a snow storm ...thinking, "How did ol' Stafford know I'd be out here in this frozen waste land reading about a hell that is frozen?"

In closing, I went on to teach high school at Newport for nearly 30 years. Many of my methods were borrowed from William Stafford. I recall a poster was hung in the NHS library, one year, with his picture on it, about him being the National Poet Laureate or something. I told everyone who would listen, "That was my professor! Can you believe it?" They didn't understand.

Every year when fall rolls around again, invariably I think of his poem, "That Autumn Instant", the finest thing ever written about a season of a year, a season in life. And my last thought, after rereading it is, "What if I hadn't taken the 'easy' professor and I had taken a 'hard' professor instead?"

So I learned, sometimes in life, the "easy" way out is the best as well as the hardest.

Barry M Clock

L&C, class of '70

THAT AUTUMN INSTANT

You stand on a hill in July

and wave: you feel summer stream over

the land, part of a river too wide

to cross, ever—still and mild.

You feel that river turn on its back

and stare at the sky.

You turn to dive again for your life

where it leads you, by breath and

anything next. The daylight endures;

it won’t pass; it follows the sun

around. But wherever you turn,

there on the grass and weeds

winter has brushed its hand.

William Stafford, from Smoke’s Way, Graywolf Press, 1983.

In response to a prompt from Kim Stafford, Barry sent these further thoughts:

MY PROF

RECOLLECTIONS FROM 1968 & 1969

This little essay began with an email when I said, "Kim, I could go on and on about your father's teaching methods, should you care to hear someday, (filtered through 30+ years)." You took me up on my offer to share some of my observations on your father and my professor at L&C, William Stafford.

In my mind, teaching was Stafford's greatest legacy, not poetry (but he wasn't too shabby at that either, ha). As far as I know he never got an award for teaching. In spite of what you hear sometimes in the media, teaching success is so difficult to measure. I taught high school for 30 years and I noticed that most awards connected with it are rather meaningless and often based on PR and garbage. It seems to me that the only teaching award that matters is the look in your student's eyes ...and in your eyes while you are teaching. It's kind of silly that it comes down to that, something so nebulous, in our "scientific, statistical" world. But it's the truest thing. If I were a principal, that's what I'd really be looking for when I was filling in the paperwork for a teacher's evaluation.

That was the thing, it was all in your father's eyes. That look at the start of class, a hint of a smile, a mischievous glance around the room, a thoughtful stare at the ceiling ...all gave me the feeling, "Do you want to do some thinking today? You guys want to kick around some words and ideas? Want to read some stuff and talk about it?" In short, Stafford's look was, "Hey, do you guys want to come out and play?"

That was one thing I took with me when I set off into the world of teaching. Education and teaching and learning are serious stuff, but NEVER take yourself too seriously. And there are two ways to go about it, the teacher's way or the student's way. The "student's way" is the best. A teacher is a student as well. I knew all that from watching Stafford in class, but of course I had to relearn it the hard way in front of high school students myself.

I don't want to sound sappy, but the feeling that Stafford gave us—that he really and truly cared about all things connected with us—amazed me. In fact it still does. I think I was able to communicate that to my students throughout the years also. My way was through a liberal dose of humor with all my students. His was a deeper thing, impossible to explain and convey.

Kim, if I have come across as disrespectful towards your father, by calling him by his last name in class and in this essay ...that is the opposite of my feelings for him and my intentions. I considered it a compliment of the highest order when all my students in class, and through out the years since, just called me "Clock". That was all I wanted. No Mr. or whatever. That's what your dad really taught me. Humility, caring, an understanding that was all-encompassing, a love of true learning and to be welcoming to all. Those are very difficult lessons to learn in life. And Stafford taught them all to me by example. Oh, and a little poetry and literature as well!

Barry M Clock

L&C Class of '70

William Stafford Teaching

2009-04-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

In response to the current article in the Lewis & Clark Chronicle ("William Stafford Returns to Lewis & Clark"), William Sack writes a reminiscence of Stafford as a teacher, ending in a pleasantly rueful poet's comment:

In 1954 I was a sophomore pre-med student. I took William Stafford's course, Intro. To English Literature because it was required to have some English. Little did I know how lucky I was! That course has stayed with me over the past fifty- five years. When Dr. Stafford read a poem, one was transported into another world. I've never heard anyone read a poem the way he could. (At the time I didn't know he was a famous poet himself.) Anyway one day, after reading a sonnet of Shakespeare's, he sighed and said, "After Shakespeare everything else seems a bit shabby."
Bill Sack, '56

Another World Instead: William Stafford Peace Symposium (May 14-16)

2009-04-15T12:06:00.000-07:00

The William Stafford Archives will be teaming with the Lamb Foundation to sponsor two literary events in the summer: a three-day peace symposium at the First Unitarian Church in downtown Portland, and a July project working with local teachers to create curriculum based on the work of William Stafford. The symposium ("Another World Instead") will present an evening of films, including the premiere of Haydn Reiss's new film "Every War Has Two Losers," an all-day Friday workshop led by Kim Stafford and Fred Marchant (editor of the edition of William Stafford's early poems, Another World Instead), followed by an evening poetry reading, and a Saturday series of papers by scholars of pacifist writing including Jeff Gundy, Philip Metres, Fred Marchant, Mary Szybist, and members of the Archives team.

Friday evening and all Saturday events are free and open to the public; the film showing (for which there will be a small admission fee) is at the Northwest Film Center. For further information about the symposium in general, please visit the following website:

http://www.staffordarchives.org/symposium.html

For information on the all-day Friday class (for which credit is available) see:

http://www.lclark.edu/dept/nwi/anotherworld.html

or contact Ashley Powers / aehlers@lclark.edu / 503-768-6043.

Stanford English Professor reads Stafford Poem on NPR.

2009-04-13T12:09:00.000-07:00

John Felstiner was on NPR this morning to promote his new book, 'Can Poetry Save the Earth?'. He answers this question throught the voices of many poets, from William Carlos Williams to an eight year old boy named El'Jay Johnson. On the program he reads Stafford's, 'The Well Rising'. It was read in response to the reporter asking him to pick just one poem that might save the Earth. Here is a link to the whole segment on NPR. Thanks to Kim Stafford and John Felstiner for alerting us to this segment. Felstiner's Book can be found at: www.powells.com

- Doug Erickson

Don Emblen, Glen Coffield, and William Stafford by Kim Stafford

2009-04-06T11:03:00.000-07:00

"How did you meet William Stafford?"

This past week, I had a chance to visit with a gentleman named Don Emblen, an old-time friend of William Stafford living in Santa Rosa, California. I asked Don how he had first met William Stafford, and he told the following story...

Don and his wife Betty were living in southern California after World War II, in a house Don had built, and one day they saw a notice in the public library for an unusual venture, the "Gruntdvig Folk School," run by Glen Coffield on the slopes of Mt. Hood in Oregon.

Don was a Navy man, and Glen had been a conscientious objector at Camp Angel on the Oregon coast, and had started Grundtvig as a place to change the world.

Don and his wife decided to take the plunge and join the cause. They rented out their house and headed for Oregon. When they arrived they were surprised to see that the house where Glen resided was an unfinished shack anchored to four huge firs that swayed in the wind, and it was cold, and there was no food. At this point, Betty realized she was pregnant, and Don announced to Glen that he was going to personally construct a room warm enough to keep his wife comfortable.

The rent money Don and Betty had brought from California was the only thing keeping Grundvit School alive, and Don felt he was entitled.

For some reason, this struck Glen, the ultimate idealist, as “soft,” and he refused to let comfort be part of the plan. Things started heating up, and eventually, Glen and Don decided they had to duke it out to settle matter. The Pacifist and the Navy man repaired to a clearing in the forest, raised their fists, looked into each other’s eyes—and burst out laughing.

Friends again, they decided to continue construction, which turned out to require scavenging from abandoned lumber camps nearby. One day they found a battered baby buggy in a camp dump, and used the flimsy chassis to drag salvaged boards up the mountain to the shack. Glen was thrilled with their success that day.

But the small party of idealists was starving. The rent money was gone, and Glen had no resources at all. Enter William Stafford, visiting his old friend Glen, and carrying a ham—a whole ham. Everyone feasted.

Don’s last memory of Glen was that the tall idealist had broken his leg, and was sitting in pain beside a sack of wheat in the remote shack, eating the kernels one by one.

Don assumed Glen had died there, until I told him no—Glen eventually headed south to the Bay Area, and ran a theater company, wrote symphonies, and continued to personally transform the world.

How many other stories of William Stafford’s life and times are waiting for us to ask a saint from those days, “How did you know this man?”

Kim Stafford

2009-03-02T11:08:00.000-08:00

Lewis & Clark College's new William Stafford Room in the Watzek Library is now completed and in use. Its bookshelves (seen on left in a partial watercolor view by staffer Anneliese Dehner) house around two thousand items, among them the published collections of five Lewis & Clark professors: National Book Award Winner William Stafford, National Book Award Finalist Vern Rutsala, Oregon Poet Laureate Lawson Inada, Western States Book Award Winner Kim Stafford, and Witter Bynner Prizewinner Mary Szybist. They also house the books belonging to the college's Pacifist Collection (including the complete output of Waldport CPS camp's Untide Press and the camp's Illiterati magazine) and collections of four other Oregon small presses specializing in poetry: Jim Anderson's Breitenbush Books, Vi Gale's Prescott Street Press, Carlos Reyes's Trask House Books, and Erik Muller's Traprock Books. The collection focuses on Oregon writers, with substantial collections of the work of Hazel Hall, Katherine Dunn, Paulann Petersen and others.

The room's walls are graced with broadsides selected from around one hundred broadsides of poems by William Stafford and many of his contemporaries, including a large number of broadsides designed by Karla Elling at Arizona's Mummy Mountain Press. The room is in use as the center for continuing archival work on the William Stafford, Vern Rutsala, and Vi Gale Collections, as well as for small-group student/faculty poetry workshops. It may be viewed by appointment through this web site.

2009-02-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

Welcome to the William Stafford Archives blog. This page will host your comments, questions, and reminiscences at the Archives, now housed at the Aubrey Watzek Library of Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon. We plan to provide news updates about ongoing work with the collection at least once a week.

This blog is set up so that anyone can post a comment. Just click on the comments link, type your message, and select a profile. Unless you have a gmail account, we recommend that you select the Name/URL option. This allows you type in your name and provide an address for your own website if you like. Once you have selected your profile, please preview your comment and then post.

We look forward to hearing from you and sharing our work with William Stafford's papers.