30 years ago this August, we lost the beloved poet William Stafford. Stafford’s vision of nature as a kind of teacher and his patient, humane approach to composition encouraged me to attempt my own poetry and to write about my own relationship with wild places. With the implications of climate change and other types of damage now playing out, Stafford’s absence feels particularly poignant in these times.
I had a chance to meet Stafford personally in my late 20s, before I had read any of his poetry. Barely a year before his death in 1993, having become a fan of his work, I corresponded with him and received some generous encouragement. This anniversary seems like the right time to tell the story.
In the mid-1980s, as I was struggling mightily to sort out my own confusing mixture of talents and limitations, I met and was befriended by the poet Peter Klappert, who’d just been hired to chair of the creative writing program at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, a few miles outside Washington, DC. I had been writing occasional poems for a few years and had started a novel and abandoned it in frustration. I was barely making a living as a teaching assistant for a special ed class in an Arlington high school, having lost two high school English teaching jobs due to my undiagnosed ADHD.
Peter was about 12 years my senior, gay, and wrote what were to me somewhat abstract, puzzling poems I couldn’t grasp, but they must have been good or why would he have been hired to start a creative writing program, right? As a young, straight man, I worried a bit about Peter’s expectations for our friendship, but his openness about himself encouraged trust, and our friendship was free of unwelcome overtures.
Peter asked me to dog sit for him one weekend while he was out of town, and I agreed. His townhouse was nicer than anyplace I’d lived in the DC area up to the point, his German Shepherd was amiable and undemanding. When Peter returned on Sunday, he invited me to a reception the following Friday at his townhouse for a visiting poet named William Stafford. The name wasn’t familiar to me, but Peter was convinced that I’d really like his work.
As it turned out, I had a date that night, and young women in the Washington DC area were hardly beating a path to my door at the time. But I decided I had time to show up for the reception, mingle a bit and munch on the grapes and brie before leaving to meet my date for dinner in Georgetown.
When Friday arrived, I was one of the earlier arrivals, so I helped Peter finish setting up, poured myself a modest glass of white wine and looked around the apartment. Two youngish professors seemed to be holding court on opposite sides of the livingroom/dinningroom. Around each of them, a small group of younger men and a few women – graduate students or assistants, I supposed – listened, their carriage showing a kind of dutiful alertness. I positioned myself at the outer fringes of the group closest to the brie and tried to listen, expecting at some point that one of the listeners would break away to introduce himself, but everyone’s gaze seemed to be trained on the middle distance, where great themes and dazzling literary techniques appeared to reside. I smiled in what I felt was a friendly way at the graduate students around me, but no one would make eye contact or return my smile. I tried to follow the talk, but I’d missed too much of it to know who was being discussed and was way too embarrassed to ask. I wondered at one point if they thought I was Peter’s lover. Eventually, I moved to the group on the opposite side of the room, but the reception was about the same. At a quarter to 7, I thanked Peter and headed out the back door toward where my car was parked in the alley.
Peter’s townhouse had a small, fenced yard with a gate to the alley. As I approached the back gate, an older man approached the gate from the alley. His graying hair was combed straight back, and he had the weathered-looking features of someone who’d worked part of his life out of doors. His eyes were wide-set and alert, giving him the look of someone who had just been surprised or slightly startled. Since I was leaving, an introduction would be awkward but necessary. I waited for him to get through the gate and thrust my hand out to him with mechanical confidence.
“Hi, I’m Clark Bouwman.”
He shook my hand readily, and a just a bit of the surprise left his face.
“I’m Bill Stafford.” And now the full, painful awkwardness of the situation was upon me.
“I apologize..I, I’m uh really embarrassed to say that I won’t be able to hear you read – I had a prior commitment.”
I don’t remember the words of his reply, but I know they were self-mocking, a gentle swipe at his role as guest of honor and main attraction, as if he were cutting himself down to size so that we could relate to each other the way he preferred, as equally important, or equally unimportant, human beings.
I laughed, took a breath, took my leave and walked to slowly my car, a little regretfully. In the alley, I turned once to look back at the tableau in Peter’s backyard, but, from a distance, it seemed unchanged, as if no one had noticed the arrival of William Stafford, visiting poet and honored guest of George Mason University.
****
I encountered Stafford’s actual poetry by chance a year or two later, while living in my first unshared apartment, a one-bedroom basement apartment in Southeast DC. I had noticed an audio cassette for sale at the Bethesda Writers’ Center with an image of a prairie landscape on the front and “Stafford” in large, block letters. Remembering that quiet, modest man who’d joked with me at Peter’s back gate, I bought it.
By this time, I was in the habit of taking a Sony Walkman with me on walks to listen to music. The poems on the cassette, read by Stafford in his soft, mid-western voice, spoke to me deeply. Although I couldn’t have articulated it at the time, I was missing a sense of the sacred, the holy in my life. Joining a church was not an option for me, but in Stafford’s poems of nature, the land, wildness, I found an answer. The poems on that cassette gave me a kind of permission to seek elements of the sacred in places not often associated with conventional religion, and to define and honor that sense in my own poems.
I noticed in Stafford’s work qualities that I liked and tried to incorporate in my own: the way ordinary things and small details became charged with meaning, the way the intensely personal and broadly political could merge, how “things” we think of as inanimate could suddenly gain a speaking voice.
One poem, which I’ve been unable to locate in any of my print collections, began with the line, “’So, you got here,’ anyplace says”. (Listening to Stafford speak that line, with a touch of insouciance in his soft, “country” voice, was like hearing a fence post at the edge of a farm field come to life.) Another poem I came to love, “Our Kind,” juxtaposed the might of nations with the deeper psychic power of a mother to approve or withhold approval.
Our mother knew our worth —
not much. To her, success
was not being noticed at all.
“If we can stay out of jail,”
she said, “God will be proud of us.”
“Not worth a row of pins,”
she said, when we looked at the album:
“Grandpa? — ridiculous.”
Her hearing was bad, and that
was good: “None of us ever says much.”
She sent us forth equipped
for our kind of world, a world of
our betters, in a nation so strong
its greatest claim is no boast,
its leaders telling us all, “Be proud” –
But over their shoulders, God and
our mother, signaling: “Ridiculous.”
In time, Stafford’s voice on those recordings came to seem like the voice of a distant, poetic father, a spirit who encouraged me to write about the land and the way it made me feel, and to approach poetry the way he did – with great patience and with confidence that when I sat down to write, a poem would eventually show up. When two of my poems appeared in a short-lived journal called Minimus, I felt I was onto something.
But just five years later, I found myself seriously doubting the viability of my writing poetry. I hadn’t published any poems after the initial two poems in the now-defunct Minimus, and I’d been rejected by several MFA programs. I was more prosperous, having found a professional niche as a technical writer, and I was getting married to a woman I loved and respected, but the muse of poetry seemed to be backing away from me warily.
Perhaps, I thought, what I needed was a kind of poetry mentor. Since Stafford’s work had first inspired me, I decided to send a bunch of my poems to him and ask him, with appropriate respect and deference, to be my poetry mentor. (I thought of how William Carlos Williams helped champion the young Allen Ginsberg’s work – maybe Stafford would end up loving my work and help me get some recognition. Literary history was full of such stories, so why couldn’t it happen to me?
In the fall of that year, I received a bulgy business-size envelope with a return address in Lake Oswego, Oregon. He began with an apology for his scrawly, angled handwriting – his typewriter was on the fritz. With astonishingly genuine courtesy, he gently declined to take on the role of mentor due to some recent health issues. He assured me that he found praise-worthy qualities in the unpublished poems I’d sent him. He’d made little marks in pencil in the margins of several of my poems – they seemed to me to be something like check marks, as if indicating that he got the point of a stanza or line. I remember him using the phrase “trenchant subject matter”. Unfortunately, I lost Stafford’s letter during one of our many moves. Still, it was an honor to have received a letter from the poet whose work I most admired at the time.
One day in August of the following year, I discovered his brief obituary in the Washington Post, beside an uncharacteristically stilted essay of appreciation by the Post columnist Colman McCarthy titled “Shaman of Subjectivity.” Who knows what Stafford’s health was like a year earlier when he’d taken the time to write his letter of encouragement to me?
Today, I remember that brief, awkward meeting at my friend’s back gate in the mid-80s, a moment graced and softened with Stafford’s subversive, generous-spirited good humor. It was my own sense of propriety, I guess, that kept me from acting on my impulse to head back to the party, call off my date, and instead listen to Stafford read his lovely, dreaming poems so full of casual beauty.
© Copyright Clark Bouwman 2023
