Stafford William - Ask me: 100 essential poems of William Stafford

This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-664-4 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-325-4 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2014 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013946920 Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design Cover photo: Robert B. Miller

As a child, he heard drums in the military parade. At the edge of town, he watched the Klan march. He chopped weeds in the sugar beet field. He worked in an oil refinery. His paper route sustained the family for a time. And when he started writing during World War II, in a camp for conscientious objectors, he wrote about trees, and evening, and quiet at the margins.

He wrote about the citizens of Dresden. He was spared the need to hate. Something deeper was at stake. A hungry reader of philosophy, his lifelong companions were Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal, and Wittgenstein. But so were the thousands who sent him their poems, and received an immediate reply. Lets talk recklessly, he would say.

He wrote rituals, notes, lists, gestures, letters, poemsand invited others into those spaces. I must be willingly fallible, he wrote, to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen. At a reading, he would hold up his left hand, starting into a poem: This is the hand I dipped in the Missouri. Or if he found himself in another country, he would name the local river. In the poem that gives this book its title, he wrote, What the river says, that is what I say. He read these poems in Iran under the Shah, in Poland, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Nepal.

With his habit of writing every day before dawn, he composed twenty thousand poems. Of these, four thousand were published in magazines. He had a cardboard box in his office labeled Abandoned Poems. When I reached in a few days after my father died to take one at random, it was startling, imperfect, exploratory. I remembered his claim, I would trade everything I have ever written for the next thing. He traveled for poetrysometimes thirty readings in thirty days.

He was an ambassador for the possibility of peace through poetry. The calendar was black with engagements. At a reading, following one of his deft, quiet offerings, a listener helplessly spoke aloud, I could have written that. And William Stafford, looking kindly at the speaker, replied, But you didnt. A beat of silence. But you could write your own.

You could write your own. What a democratic idea. Each of us could write our own poem, our own proposal for peace, our own aphoristic meditation at the un-national monument, our own consolation, manifesto, blessing. The field of writing will never be crowded, he told me once, not because people cant write, but they dont think they can. His life as teacher and witness and corresponding friend advocated the pen in hand, the moving pen, your own way of looking at things. A hundred years after his birth, from the fifty books he published in his lifetime and the dozen published since, Ask Me offers these one hundred essential poems of William Stafford, from the indelible scene described in Traveling through the Dark to the challenging questions presented in You Reading This, Be Ready.

This book will help us all be ready. The greatest ownership of all, he said, is to look around and understand. For us, poem by poem, he looked at the worldand the world was mysterious, dark, enticing. Kim Stafford