Daily Acts of Rebellion: The Poetry of the Young William Stafford (review)

Los Prietos, CA, c. 1943. William Stafford served as a Conscientious Objector at a Civilian Public Service Camp. Photo courtesy of William Stafford Archives, Lewis & Clark College.

William Stafford, poet and pacifist, did not begin publishing poetry until he was in his forties, long after his experience as a World War II conscientious objector in the Civilian Public Service camps. But he had been writing poems daily since that time, and anyone who already loves his writing will be grateful to Fred Marchant for this selection from Stafford's first 400 poems. The better we already know his mature work, the more pleasure these poems will give. The later work will have greater resonance and richness, as it should have: Early work prepares for the later, and the young person's passion is deepened, enriched, perhaps tempered by more experience.

Marchant's introduction beautifully places Stafford's  poetry in the framework of those years of first testing, when he served in Civilian Public Service camps. Being a conscientious objector has never been easy, but being opposed to "the good war" marked out the men, their families and girlfriends and wives, for scorn. CPS was designed to demand grueling, often  trivial work, and to feel prison-like. Many experienced it as  punishment for conscience.

Marchant has shaped this selection to tell the developmental story of the "deep, inner-life work" which is, for me, the essence of Stafford's poetic accomplishment. The mature pacifist activist and practiced poet grows from the roots of the war years.

The early poetry comes from an exile, a recognition of being (Marchant's words) "so far out on the margins of society," but what must strike any student of Stafford's life's work is how all the sources of the bitterness, alienation, and cramped self-protectiveness that the CPS experience produced in many who served there seem often instead to have been transmuted into health and openness to the world.

We will not understand Stafford's accomplishment if we do not recognize how intensely he practiced his writer's discipline. Every morning, starting  in CPS, he would get up at 4:30 am to give himself the day's first hours to write. This free writing invited the words and images to emerge as they would, to become  later backbone and limbs of a poem. The government owned his time from after breakfast through the rest of the day, but early morning was all his. That is an act of self-assertion, maybe even of defiance, but above all of openness to creative energy, "the flow of my inner life." Out of this spirit of silent waiting and invitation he wrote at least a poem a day virtually his whole life.

When asked what he did if the poems thus produced did not meet his highest standards, Stafford says he answered: "I lower my standards." This is of course  blasphemy, if we expect every poem to be High Art, every day's achievement a new "personal best."  But what if it is a daily act of both rebellion and renewal of health? an act that, as Robert Frost said, "begins in delight..." With luck or grace, the poem that begins in delight may end in wisdom, but the patient practice, the waiting in silence and solitude for the right words and images to come, can be restorative in itself.  Judging a poem-in-progress is probably forebrain work, but being willing to lower one's standards may be the best way to invite and sustain the creative flow.

Close readers of Stafford will be grateful to the young poet for learning how to become the wiser, more realized artist and also glad for the poems which show their own accomplishment.

Here, in its entirety, is "Like Whitman," written on August 27, 1943:

If any time was used preparing
No preparing is wasted.
No preparing at all is wasted.
I am meeting you wherever you are.
I am on my way.
Do not let the distance and the time
Of that way influence you.
I am coming toward you.
Do you know anything of the breakers?
(Whatever holds back, outside and inside)
Do you realize no preparation is ever wasted?
(I am coming toward you).

Readers revisiting or just beginning to explore William Stafford's writings will also share my gratitude to his son Kim Stafford for his two books - his memoir Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press, 2002) and the collection Every War Has Two Losers: William Stafford on Peace and War (Milkweed Editions, 2003). Fred Marchant's book joins these as an excellent way into the whole arc of William Stafford's life and work.