EARTH HOME TO WILLIAM STAFFORD 257Listening to William Stafford speak his poems feels like walking with some-
one who’d like to let you see certain things, share them with you. At a read-
ing, each brief poem gets a small sheet of paper, even if already published. A
Midwestern music in his level voice blends the poems together with apt, brief,
ego-free comments he makes in between. Sometimes you don’t right away notice
the transition from poem to comment, except as a poem’s own rhythm distills
what it moves.
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone
who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have
thought of if he had not started to say them.” He ’s “willing to go where the
emergences come out of language,” like going overland through new perspec-
tives, perceptions. As Roethke put it, “I learn by going where I have to go.”
Stafford likes “the surprise of action,” not “worthy statements, but an experi-
ence of taking a roller coaster of offerings... that suddenly welds together what
the whole poem has been tending toward.” Caminante, no hay camino,/Se hace
camino al andar, Antonio Machado wrote, “Wayfarer, there is no way, / You
make a way as you go.”
“I place my feet / with care in such a world.” A good Stafford sentence speaks
alike for dwelling and for writing in touch with this earth. So in his politi-
cal moments, poetry and the land go hand in hand. Before the Vietnam war,
“Watching the Jet Planes Dive” brought our threatening technologic power
down to earth.
We must go back and find a trail on the ground
back of the forest and mountain on the slow land...
We must go back with noses and the palms of our hands
and climb over the map in far places, everywhere,
and lie down whenever there is doubt and sleep there.A half-century later, one wants to take this plea literally and broadcast it.
The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.Because the ways of the world, human greed and ingenuity and barbarity, can
ride roughshod over such verse, its humility, its groundedness need hearing
all the more.
Right after “The Well Rising” in The Rescued Year, Stafford placed another
1960 poem, “At the Bomb Testing Site.”
At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense...
There was just a continent without much on it
under a sky that never cared less.