Hello!
The writer Andrea Carlisle posted this poem earlier, and I wanted to pass it along.
William Stafford was, of course, a long-time Oregonian and a big league author—
Among Stafford’s many honors and awards were a Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. From 1970 to 1971, he was the consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a position currently known as U.S. poet laureate.
You can find out more about him, online and in his books.
Andrea Carlisle is the one who, incidentally, vouched for Tom Spanbauer and encouraged me to take his class, way back when. Thank you, Andrea! Good instincts! I was so young, and you set me on this path… :)
I always view the life of authors as existing in conversation, not competition, and I love the conversation between voices in real life and on the page—through time and shifting circumstance.
I tried to write about how this network of voices has seeped into my own work, my worldview, in the second essay in my two-essay book…Come Closer.
We can know writers personally, and of course now we can know them online via YouTube and the rest of it, but the best way to know writers, I’d say, is through their work, or at least in conversation with their work.
I read a quote yesterday, a scholar talking about reading the work of Thoreau—how much he wrote, and how little we know of him—and for me, those words raised the question…where is he, if not in his work, his words?
Hope your day is a good one.
One more Stafford, before I get to my own pages…
Any Morning
Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can't
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won't even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
Ohio Review Volume 50 (1993) via the Writer’s Almanac
And if you’re writing—get some words on the page! :)
Sending out my thoughts to you,
M
ps—getting the word out:
Any Morning is such a good poem.