About a month ago, a friend sent along a book of William Stafford’s early poems gathered in Another World Instead, edited by poet and translator Fred Marchant. These Stafford poems were written when he was a conscientious objector during World War II. You can imagine the insults that came his way for having made that choice in a time of fierce nationalism. But it was a choice to live his values, a choice that prized life over death, and more than a little bit relevant to his poetry.
I read this book slowly, in the morning sun—because the poems asked for my full attention. They represent roughly a fourth of Stafford’s extant work, and as a posthumous collection, it is surprising how many poems foretell the mature Stafford voice. It is also a joy to read the poet while he was learning his craft. For most of the time, he was living in a rural mountain camp in Los Prietos, near Santa Barbara, California. And, like his later work, many of the poems are anchored in the flora and fauna of his physical place. The threat of battle, however, overshadows his relative isolation and, at times, he is haunted by fundamental questions. Listen to this final stanza from “Country Boy at College—Postwar.”
And there was whoever God was,
holding up the sky, and always to lean on—
taking orders from someone in the War Department.
This poem is quintessentially Stafford—that twist of language to make the nouns do the action—leaning on the sky with the support of whoever the spiritual being was—this became his signature, his referent for turning the perception of things over so we might see them fresh—or see them like God, “taking orders from . . . the War Department.” This was where Stafford began to find his voice, to address the tension that gave him pause: He was an outsider who could not reconcile the duality of spoken military intent and lived pacifist experience. Wherever he looked, blood would be spilled. And it was the acceptance of this fact that he set himself to argue against. He didn’t see the resolution of this sorrow in the same terms as they were given. He looked within for explanation, asked how he might respond, as in these lines from “Muttered Creed:”
Call out friendliness.
Knock on wood.
Offer to hew wood, carry water.
Greet the enemy.
Fall facing homeward
and calling out clearly:
“Forgive!”
What forged Stafford’s singular vision was his antipathy toward the status quo. He could not understand how willingly decisions got taken for granted—especially the most difficult ones, just like they are now. He was admonished to listen when all he wanted to do was object. The way he expressed this vision was to tip the natural world over, to disarm the reader by making language act in ways it had not done. Listen to the last lines from this deceptively plain poem, entitled “It’s an Old Story,” so assured in its structure that it is useless to try to avoid its stare.
And your way is a river, deepening;
And each night has many undelivered stars.
You become a listener;
You can’t lose what you give away;
And you live each day for keeps.
He is giving permission to listen, to be like the river—which, is how he answers the question of trusting the elements in his later, well-known poem, “Ask Me.”
“What the river says, that’s what I say.” In other words, you must live as if your brother were your keeper, also an idea that was and still is, hard to fathom. There is a reason for needing people, for needing the place to which we belong. This is how we thrive, how we learn to trust what lies beyond our control because we control virtually nothing. Stafford’s river draws people because of their compassion—something that is disarmingly necessary and yet difficult to accomplish: tend to the other, as in this first stanza from his poem “We Kindred.”
Whoever stands uncertain in the night
And sees porch, steps, and boards along the floor,
And hears a train go tearing in wild flight
Along the edge of dark he listens for
May have my home and possess all my land.
He is asking the reader to think of that stranger as someone like him—who has stood by night, alone, with the wailing of the train, and “the edge of dark he listens for.” This is not a new night; all of us have stood in this dark but we are loath to remember it makes us vulnerable—when the things we cannot say or see take on their own significance and leave us to question ourselves. And this is why we read poetry—to steady the questions with the resolve of others who have faced them. Stafford knew even then that there were no easy answers, no living without trepidation, but he also knew that we are much better off with each other than without. And his pacifist colleagues—from Robinson Jeffers to Robert Lowell to Kenneth Patchen, each a poet, too—knew this as well. I think of Patchen who, like Stafford, was in a CO camp and later wrote the book What Shall We Do Without Us? This is a question we know the answer to but hesitate to respond to when asked. Stafford implored us not to hesitate when our humanity is at stake, as here, in the closing lines of a sonnet-like five-stanza poem, in which a driver stops in the night along a bend in the road to tend to a dead doe lying there and discovering a fawn still living within: “I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—, / then pushed her over the edge into the river.” He would write these prophetic lines in his widely anthologized “Traveling through the Dark,” almost 20 years after his time in Los Prietos, imploring us to act as if we depended on each other. An act worthy of a poet, yes, but of us as well. Stafford intimated no standing by the river without intent.
