William Stafford's Birthday

During January of 2010, more than 40 events across the United States—and 22 in the Portland area alone— commem- orated the birthday of poet and longtime Lake Oswego resident William Stafford (January 17, 1914-August 28, 1993). Organized primarily by various Friends of William Stafford, these events featured poetry readings, lectures, recollections and—in Lake Oswego, at least, where Poetry & Popular Culture was invited to take part in the fun emceed by Oregon poet and urban planner Scot Siegel—carrot cake and punch.

P&PC gave what Siegel called a "mini sermon" titled "William Stafford's Evergreens" about some of the poetry that Stafford published in newspapers over the course of his life, especially "The War Season" which he wrote in 1945 while doing alternative service work as a Conscientious Objector in Elgin, Illinois. Here is "The War Season":

The birds that winter blew past our yard
feathered along so young
that only the trees could follow their wings
or understand their tongue.

The north wind blew. Limbs bent down.
Leaves fell over the lawn.
The birds one day were young in the sky;
the next day they were gone.

Curiously, while Stafford noted in his manuscript records of "The War Season" that the poem was "Published in The Oregonian in about 1948," none of the P&PC interns can actually find it there, making us wonder about the sad fact that "The War Season" could be relevant in 1945 before World War Two ended, in 1948 three years after the war had ended, and today. Here's what we concluded:

We are always, as the poet Barrett Watten has said in his book Bad History, living in "the era between two wars," and so the evergreen poem, "The War Season," is always timely. Whether it's 1945, 1948, or 2010, it's always War Season, and the fact that Stafford's verse could have been perfectly relevant during the war, after the war in the "era between two wars," or today, is "The War Season"'s sadness, tragedy, and, ultimately, the moral and ethical critique the poem is after. Stafford, the Conscientious Objector, knew—feared, protested—the fact that it's always War Season. And so the date that he wrote on his manuscript copy of "The War Season"—the date that threw librarians, archivists, and myself off track—is not only not wrong, but perhaps not right enough, as it could have been published in The Oregonian "in about 2010" as well. This is one of the reasons—an unfortunate reason, yes, but one nonetheless—why Stafford stays relevant to us today.

For more on Stafford, check out the William Stafford Archives at Lewis and Clark College. See you around the punch bowl in 2011?

Poetry & Popular Culture Goes West

Lured by the promise of pinot noir, trout fishing, whale watching, and the spirit of poets like Gary Snyder and William Stafford, Poetry & Popular Culture hits the Oregon Trail this week and permanently heads out west to its new home in Salem, Oregon, and the Willamette River valley. Moving from Iowa City has not been unemotional (goodbye Foxhead, goodbye Prairie Lights), but verses like the one pictured on the postcard to the left reassure us that poetic treasures aplenty await us in the Pacific Northwest as well as in the Heartland. Framed by two images (a panoramic view of the river valley, and someone canoeing in front of Mount Hood), "Sunset on the Willamette" reads:

The sun sinks downward thru the silver mist
That looms across the valley, fold on fold,
And sliding thru the fields that dawn has kissed,
Willamette sweeps, a chain of liquid gold.

Trails onward ever, curving as it goes,
Past many a hill and many a flowered lea,
Until it pauses where Columbia flows,
Deep-tongued, deep-chested to the waiting sea.

O lovely vales thru which Willamette slips!
O vine clad hills that hear its soft voice call!
My heart turns ever to their sweet, cool lips,
That, passing, press each rock or grassy wall.

Thru pasture lands, where mild-eyed cattle feed
Thru marshy flats, where velvet tulles grow,
Past many a rose tree, many a signing reed,
I hear those wet lips calling, calling low.

The sun sinks downward thru the trembling haze
the mist flings glistening needles higher and higher.
And thru the clouds—O fair beyond all praise!
Mt. Hood leaps, chastened, from a sea of fire.

"Sunset on the Willamette" is by Ella Higginson (1861-1940) who, like William Stafford, was born in Kansas and later moved to Oregon and (after marrying) Washington. A poet and short story writer whose work appeared in publications like McClures, Harper's Monthly, and Colliers, Higginson was made poet laureate of Washington State in 1931 and served as campaign manager for the first woman elected to the Washington State House of Representatives (Frances C. Axtell in 1912). Her poem "Four-Leaf Clover" was especially popular, appearing (among other places) in Edmund Clarence Stedman's An American Anthology from 1900. If you want to learn more about Higginson, head on over to the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University which has 18 boxes of her writing, scrapbooks, and other materials available for scholarly research.