The Way It Is
by William Stafford
from Graywolf Press
What we remember about a lyric poet is an extremely small fraction of the total work; time, aided by editors, creates a reputation out of about five great poems. In the case of William Stafford, The Way It Is has considerably expanded the field of candidates. His widely anthologized "Ceremony," "Thinking for Berky," and "Traveling through the Dark" are here, along with other contenders, including "Adults Only," which begins, "Animals own a fur world; / people own worlds that are variously, pleasingly bare." A writer of silence, loss, memory, and conviction, Stafford wrote a poem almost every morning, rising at four to eat toast and compose. This is a part of his myth that the Stafford industry--other poets, workshop leaders, old friends--agrees is admirable, the hard-working farmhand who beats the cows to the dairy barn. Stafford's poem-a-day habit certainly made things difficult for his literary executors Kim Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Robert Bly. Nonetheless, The Way It Is manages to encompass a pleasingly varied survey of Stafford's 35- book career, from his first collection, West of Your City, published in 1960, to the lyric written on the morning of his death on August 28, 1993. Not every poem is as perfect as "The Farm on the Great Plains"; some of them are embarrassingly sentimental, and the editors have curiously omitted a number of Stafford's better and more complicated poems in favor of more recent unpublished ones that he presumably didn't have time to revise. But all Stafford poems are worth reading at least once, and in the absence of a many-volumed Collected Poems, The Way It Is is a useful compromise, making available poems from his moral, religious, secular, maverick, political, and apolitical modes--all of them wise and at once exquisitely rhetorical and deeply imagistic. --Edward Skoog
The Darkness Around Us is Deep: Selected Poems of William Stafford
by William Stafford
from Harper Perennial
Bestselling author Robert Bly selects his favorite works by the award-winning poet William Stafford.
Even in Quiet Places: Poems
by William Stafford
from Confluence Press
Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises 20
by Stephen Dunning
from National Council of Teachers of English
Introduces different kinds of poems, including headline, letter, recipe, list, and monologue, and provides exercises in writing poems based on both memory and imagination.
Writing the Australian Crawl (Poets on Poetry)
by William Stafford
from University of Michigan Press
Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War
by William Stafford
from Milkweed Editions
The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life (Poets on Poetry)
by William Stafford
from University of Michigan Press
You Must Revise Your Life (Poets on Poetry)
Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947
by William Stafford
from Graywolf Press
But some day, looking along a furrowed cliff, staring
and every stone will fall separate and revealed.
—from “Meditation”
Twenty-eight years old and a conscientious objector during World War II, William Stafford was assigned under penalty of law to work in camps, an internal exile within his own country. In this remarkable collection of poems, nearly all of them never before published, the first decade of Stafford’s writing life is for the first time made available to readers. Edited by the poet Fred Marchant, one of
the first marine officers honorably discharged as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Another World Instead tells the story of a committed pacifist living in a time of war and a writer beginning a major life in American poetry.
Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation (Poets on Poetry)
by William Stafford
from University of Michigan Press
+++
