Name that tune

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William Stafford

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border

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This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,

and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed-or were killed-on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems.

William Stafford's birthday rekindles love of poetry

By Jeff Baker, The Oregonian

January 25, 2010, 12:54PM

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On Jan. 17 William Stafford would have been 96 years old. His son, Kim, celebrated by attending a Stafford birthday event and leading a writing workshop.

Kim Stafford started by using Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac" segment about his father as a prompt to get some creative juices flowing.

"Take 6 1/2 minutes to remember and ponder, maybe jot some things down," Stafford told a small, attentive group at the Writers' Dojo in North Portland. "I want to be as deliberately vague as possible. Just let it go."

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William Stafford

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Kim Stafford was in his stocking feet -- it's dojo policy to leave your shoes at the door -- and completely in his element. He moved to a discussion of William Stafford's poem "Fifteen" and described how his father "started with the ordinary." The elder Stafford once found a rusty bike near a road and used his imagination and poetic gifts to create what his son called "a poem of great longing and promise."

"Fifteen" is about a boy who finds a motorcycle in the high grass and thinks about how he could "find the end of a road, meet the sky on out Seventeenth." It uses a simple, repetitive phrase -- "I was fifteen" -- to great effect and is typical of William Stafford in its clear, direct language and resonance.

It's not hard to tell what's going on in a Stafford poem, but usually something a little more interesting is happening at the edges or just below the surface. His poetry has been drawing readers in and holding them since his first book, "West of Your City," was published in 1960, when he was 46 and teaching at Lewis & Clark College. He wrote more than 60 books before his death in 1993 and is more popular than ever.

Every January people around Oregon and around the world gather to celebrate Stafford's birthday. The events usually involve reading his poetry and poems he inspired, but there is no defined procedure or theme. This year birthday events will be held in Japan, in the Northern Nevada Correctional Center and at the site of the Los Prietos Civilian Public Service Camp, where Stafford was stationed as a conscientious objector during World War II. Sometimes there is music or a video; always, Stafford's spirit is present.

At the Writers' Dojo, Kim Stafford challenged the audience to "do a William Stafford. Let it grow." After another few minutes of silent writing, it was time to talk about how to teach Stafford's poetry. Doug Erickson, the head of special collections at Lewis & Clark, gave a short presentation about the Stafford archives. Stafford wrote every day from 1950-93 and tens of thousands of poems, letters and photographs are in the archives. The Web site has different versions of many of Stafford's poems, allowing users to see the poet's revisions and track his creative process.

Teachers described how they taught Stafford's poetry in the classroom. Andy Kulak, an English teacher at Jefferson High School, said he prepared a 40-slide presentation of Stafford's "In the Oregon Country," which he laughingly called "the worst example of overplanning in my career" because "by the third slide they were ready to go." Football players at Jefferson responded positively to Stafford's poetry and helped each other without waiting for Kulak.

Robin Judd from Success Alternative High School in Woodburn previously tried a Tupac Shakur poetry-writing workshop but found her students "felt intimidated writing in the shadow of a person they respected." Shakur is an iconic rapper whose popularity continued to grow after his murder in 1996. With Stafford, she used a workshop called "Writing Down My Family" that had students interviewing their relatives and was a great success.

Erin Ocón, a teacher at Brown Middle School in Hillsboro, taught Stafford's "The View From Here," an eight-line poem featuring penguins, to her students. She started the lesson with free-write time on the topic of cold, then showed a video of emperor penguins. Her students worked on similes with a partner and looked at Stafford's rough drafts, which was a great encouragement and confidence-builder for them to see messy drafts that didn't come out perfect the first time. Younger writers often feel their first draft is perfect, and it's instructive to them to see how important revision is in the creative process.

Gloria Canson, a language arts teacher at King Elementary School, read an original poem called "Communication" and Stafford's "Serving With Gideon." She said her students "like reading the poetry of William Stafford and arguing about what it means."

Stafford birthday events continue through Jan. 31. Local events this week: Broadway Books (7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28); Portland State (7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 28); Oregon City Public Library (2 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30); and Looking Glass Bookstore (4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 30). More information: http://williamstafford.org

Notes, notes, notes

"The horror of that moment," the King went on, "I shall never, never forget!" "You will, though," the Queen said, "if you don't make a memorandum of it." Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass."

Do you have little pieces of paper scattered around the house with notes on them? Do you have multiple lists of things to do, things to get, places to go, people to call, telephone numbers, memos, odd words, etc.? How do you organize any of this?

Here's a way to do it on the Internet in a secure way on any computer that has Internet access: Animist Notes from Michael McDonald, CEO of Worldisround.


Here is Michael's description of the features of his notes:

One Big Pile
Animist Notes is essentially one big pile of notes with two fundamental features: add and search.

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To create a User Account Click Here.

Susan Vreeland

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Novelist Susan Vreeland [was] born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1946. She grew up in California, became a teacher, and for 30 years she taught English and ceramics in the San Diego public schools. She wrote a book called What Love Sees (1988), based on the true story of her parents' friends, a couple who were both blind but who managed a ranch and raised children with the help of a Seeing Eye cow. But she was also busy with her teaching, and for a while she wrote occasional stories or articles, but not much else.

Then, in 1996, she was diagnosed with lymphoma. She had chemotherapy and operations, and for a few months she couldn't do much but read, and even that was hard for her. So instead, she paged through art books, and she especially liked Vermeer, whose paintings were so calming. She needed more treatment, and she had to take off another year of teaching, and so she started writing stories based on Vermeer. Vermeer only painted 35 paintings, and so Susan Vreeland imagined that he had painted one more, and she wrote a story about that, and then several more stories about Vermeer and the imagined 36th painting and the people who owned it over the years. She said, "My goal at the time wasn't to create a novel that would make it out in the big world. It was to have enough time left in my life to finish this group of stories and print out 12 copies, so my husband could give them to members of my writing group so they'd have something to remember me by." She did finish them, and she turned them into a novel, and a tiny publishing house in Denver agreed to publish the novel, Girl in Hyacinth Blue (1999).

Girl In Hyacinth Blue was a best-seller, and Penguin bought the rights. Vreeland got better, and now she had an audience for her work, so she wrote four more novels centered around art, including The Passion of Artemisia (2002) about one of the first influential female artists, Artemisia Gentileschi, and most recently, [Luncheon of] The Boating Party (2007), about Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Both novels were New York Times best-sellers.

The trouble with pleasure

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

One of the Butterflies

by W. S. Merwin

The trouble with pleasure is the timing
it can overtake me without warning
and be gone before I know it is here
it can stand facing me unrecognized
while I am remembering somewhere else
in another age or someone not seen
for years and never to be seen again
in this world and it seems that I cherish
only now a joy I was not aware of
when it was here although it remains
out of reach and will not be caught or named
or called back and if I could make it stay
as I want to it would turn to pain.

"One of the Butterflies" by W. S. Merwin, from The Shadow of Sirius. © Copper Canyon Press, 2008.