William Stafford Quotes

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.

The Way It Is There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding. You don’t ever let go of the thread. ~ William Stafford ~

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music

...What you fear will not go away; it will take you into yourself and bless you and keep you. That's the world, and we all live there.

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, "Who are you really, wanderer?"-- and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: "Maybe I'm a king.

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Keep a journal, and don't assume that your work has to accomplish anything worthy: artists and peace-workers are in it for the long haul, and not to be judged by immediate results.

There is no such thing as writer's block for writers whose standards are low enough.

Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.

A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.

Everyone is born a poet - a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

I heard a bird congratulating itself all day for being a jay. Nobody cared. But it was glad all over again, and said so, again.

The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn't hear it--I breathed it into my ears.

Yes It could happen any time, tornado, earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. Or sunshine, love, salvation. It could, you know. That's why we wake and look out - no guarantees in this life. But some bonuses, like morning, like right now, like noon, like evening.

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.

Those who champion democracy, but make a fetish of never accepting anything they don't agree with -- what advantage do they see in democracy?

If it should happen you wake up and Armageddon has come, lie still.

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone, and the meaning has to go find an author again. - The Trouble With Reading

In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other If you don’t know the kind of person I am and I don’t know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. For there is many a small betrayal in the mind, a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood storming out to play through the broken dyke. And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail, but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact. And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy, a remote important region in all who talk: though we could fool each other, we should consider--- lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark. For it is important that awake people be awake, or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give---yes or no, or maybe--- should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Between roars the lion purrs.

The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing. And things you know before you hear them--those are you, Those are why you are in the world.

This dream the world is having about itself includes a trace on the plains of the Oregon trail, a groove in the grass my father showed us all one day while meadowlarks were trying to tell something better about to happen.

The wars we haven't had saved many lives.

I am your own way of looking at things," she said. "When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation

The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.

There may be losses too great to understand That rove after you and--faint and terrible-- rip unknown through your hand.

You are a memory too strong to leave this world...

I would exchange all that I have written for the next thing.

We think it is calm here, or that our storm is the right size.

So, the world happens twice-- once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

Why I Am Happy Now has come, an easy time. I let it roll. There is a lake somewhere so blue and far nobody owns it. A wind comes by and a willow listens gracefully. I hear all this, every summer. I laugh and cry for every turn of the world, its terribly cold, innocent spin. That lake stays blue and free; it goes on and on. And I know where it is.

Ask Me Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.

Anyone who dies by their own hand always has my sympathy. It's easy to sit in judgement on another's struggle from the outside without ever living in their suffocating darkness. If there is an explanation left behind, it usually confirms how relentlessly harsh and unfair they were on themselves. Mourn their release with mercy and gratitude for doing what they were capable of in their short lives.

Some people are blinded by their experience. Soldiers know how important war is. Owners of slaves learn every day how inferior subject peoples are.

Reluctant hero, drafted again each Fourth of July, I'll bow and remember you. Who shall we follow next? Who shall we kill next time?

I'll be Pavlov, you be the dog.

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.

Which of the horses we passed yesterday whinnied all night in my dreams? I want that one.

. . . On a sandbar sunlight stretches out its limbs, or is it a sycamore, so brazen, so clean and bold?

Can injustice one way be corrected without the interim reaction that tries to impose injustice the other way?

Politicians need citizens who will permit them to behave reasonably.

Poverty plus confidence equals pioneers. We never doubted.

Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.

Assurance" You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or in the silence after lightning before it says its names-and then the clouds' wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles-you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

Children of heroes have glory for breakfast.

Protest poetry -- could there be consensus poetry?

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives. Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness. Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life. Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears. Show them how to cry when pets and people die. Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand. And make the ordinary come alive for them. The extraordinary will take care of itself. William Martin*

Those times you caught them out and showed them up -- they learned how stupid they are. But now you'll never hear the little song of their purring throats, and you'll never know what they think, when you say hello.

Save the world by torturing one innocent child? Which innocent child?

Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.

How far friends are! They forget you, most days. They have to, I know; but still, it’s lonely just being far and a friend. I put my hand out—this chair, this table— so near: touch, that’s how to live. Call up a friend? All right, but the phone itself is what loves you, warm on your ear, on your hand. Or, you lift a pen to write—it’s not that far person but this familiar pen that comforts. Near things: Friend, here’s my hand. — William Stafford, “Friends,” The Way It Is. (Graywolf Press, 1998)

An Afternoon in the Stacks Closing the book, I find I have left my head inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here the world looms, a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences carved out when an author traveled and a reader kept the way open. When this book ends I will pull it inside-out like a sock and throw it back in the library. But the rumor of it will haunt all that follows in my life. A candleflame in Tibet leans when I move.

If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. ... And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail, but if one wanders the circus won't find the park, I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

Stafford was late again, as he had expected he would be late. He signaled the bartender and indicated his empty glass. He burrowed a little more securely in his separate awareness, he nestled a little more deeply into his private darkness, and he waited. In the long run, he thought, that is all one does; wait for people or keep people waiting.

Your job is to find out what the world is trying to be.

You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life— What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Our Story" Remind me again—together we trace our strange journey, find each other, come on laughing. Some time we’ll cross where life ends. We’ll both look back as far as forever, that first day. I’ll touch you—a new world then. Stars will move a different way. We’ll both end. We’ll both begin. Remind me again.

You Reading This, Be Ready Starting here, what do you want to remember? How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life— Whatever can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?

Next time what I'd do is look at the earth before saying anything. I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still. When anyone talked to me, whether blame or praise or just passing time, I'd watch the face, how the mouth has to work, and see any strain, any sign of what lifted the voice. And for all, I'd know more -- the earth bracing itself and soaring, the air finding every leaf and feather over forest and water, and for every person the body glowing inside the clothes like a light.

Poetry Its door opens near. It’s a shrine by the road, it’s a flower in the parking lot of The Pentagon, it says, “Look around, listen. Feel the air.” It interrupts international telephone lines with a tune. When traffic lines jam, it gets out and dances on the bridge. If great people get distracted by fame they forget this essential kind of breathing and they die inside their gold shell. When caravans cross deserts it is the secret treasure hidden under the jewels.

With Kit, Age Seven, at the Beach We would climb the highest dune, from there to gaze and come down: the ocean was performing; we contributed our climb. Waves leapfrogged and came straight out of the storm. What should our gaze mean? Kit waited for me to decide. Standing on such a hill, what would you tell your child? That was an absolute vista. Those waves raced far, and cold. "How far could you swim, Daddy, in such a storm?" "As far as was needed," I said, and as I talked, I swam.

We were traveling between a mountain and Thursday, Holding pages back on the calendar, Remembering every turn in the roadway: We hold that sky, we said, and remember. So magic a time it was that I was both brave and afraid. Some day like this might save the world.

Afterwards Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things happen like that, and you did what you could." You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow. There's that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots. Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn.

Glances Two people meet. The sky turns winter, quells whatever they would say. Then, a periphery glance into danger - and an avalanche already on its way. They have been honest all their lives; careful, calm, never in haste; they didn't know what it is to meet. Now they have met: the world is waste. They find they are riding an avalanche feeling at rest, all danger gone. The present looks out of their eyes; they stand calm and still on a speeding stone.

You either surrender voluntarily to Shakespeare's genius or delay the inevitable collision with that cultural colossus later.

An owl sound wandered along the road with me. I didn’t hear it—I breathed it into my ears. Little

They say that history is going on somewhere. They say it won't stop. I have held One picture still for a long time and waited.

You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes.

Things you know before you hear them -- Those are you, Those are why You are in the world.

Before you have your dreams, your dreams have you, and every day pushes a night before it while the wilderness follows.

Readers should not be loaded with more information and guidance than a lively mind needs--puzzlement can be accepted, but insulting clarity is fatal to a poem.

If you find it difficult to write, lower your standards.

William Stafford was describing (though he was talking about writing) when he wrote . . . Just as the swimmer does not have a succession of handholds hidden in the water, but instead simply sweeps that yielding medium and finds it hurrying him along, so the writer passes his attention through what is at hand, and is propelled by a medium too thin and all-pervasive for the perceptions of nonbelievers who try to stay on the bank and fathom his accomplishment.6

To do it artificially, to try to hype myself into being a better writer by doggedly reading better literature, is also a mistake. I learn to use the language by the pleasures it gives me when I am able to swim in it or maneuver in it or interchange in it with the people around me.

Today" The ordinary miracles begin. Somewhere a signal arrives: “Now,” and the rays come down. A tomorrow has come. Open your hands, lift them: morning rings all the doorbells; porches are cells for prayer. Religion has touched your throat. Not the same now, you could close your eyes and go on full of light. And it is already begun, the chord that will shiver glass, the song full of time bending above us. Outside, a sign: a bird intervenes; the wings tell the air, “Be warm.” No one is out there, but a giant has passed through town, widening streets, touching the ground, shouldering away the stars.

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made. I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say. — William Stafford, “Ask Me,” Ask Me; 100 Essential Poems of William Stafford (Graywolf Press, 1998)

The Gift Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one that your life conceals, the one waiting outside when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at in her crochet design, the one almost found over at the edge of the music, after the sermon. It's the way life is, and you have it, a few years given. You get killed now and then, violated in various ways. (And sometimes it's turn about.) You get tired of that. Long-suffering, you wait and pray, and maybe good things come-maybe the hurt slackens and you hardly feel it any more. You have a breath without pain. It is called happiness. It's a balance, the taking and passing along, the composting of where you've been and how people and weather treated you. It's a country where you already are, bringing where you have been. Time offers this gift in its millions of ways, turning the world, moving the air, calling, every morning, "Here, take it, it's yours.

Remembering" When there was air, when you could breathe any day if you liked, and if you wanted to you could run. I used to climb those hills back of town and follow a gully so my eyes were at ground level and could look out through grass as the stems bent in their tensile way, and see snow mountains follow along, the way distance goes. Now I carry those days in a tiny box wherever I go, I open the lid like this and let the light glimpse and then glance away. There is a sigh like my breath when I do this. Some days I do this again and again. William Stafford, The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (Harper Perennial; Paperback Original edition, January 12, 1994)

Plato’s term for soul-suture: “the fastening of heaven.” Rumi’s term: “the cord of causation.” Plotinus’s: “our tutelary spirit, not bound up with our nature, not the agent in our action, belonging to us as belonging to our soul, as the power which consummates the chosen life.” And American poets have discovered this magic, too! Denise Levertov speaks of a thread, finer than spider’s silk, that pulls at her, keeps her company, guides her. William Stafford speaks of a thread we can follow as it pierces things that change, yet itself never changes. That these spirit threads, as Plotinus says, aren’t ours, that they’re the soul’s own unbreakable extensions, is why they have the

Remarks on My Character Waving a flag I retreat a long way beyond any denial, all the way over the scorched earth, and come into an arching grove of evasions, onto those easy paths, one leading to another and covered ever deeper with shade: I'll never dare the sun again, that I can promise. It is time to practice the shrug: "Don't count on me." Or practice the question that drags its broken wing over the ground and leads into the swamp where vines trip anyone in a hurry, and a final dark pool waits for you to stare at yourself while shadows move closer over your shoulder. That's my natural place; I can live where the blurred faces peer back at me. I like the way they blend, and no one is ever sure itself or likely to settle in unless you scare off the others. Afraid but so deep no one can follow, I steal away there, holding my arms like a tree.

The Dream Of Now" When you wake to the dream of now from night and its other dream, you carry day out of the dark like a flame. When spring comes north and flowers unfold from earth and its even sleep, you lift summer on with your breath lest it be lost ever so deep. Your life you live by the light you find and follow it on as well as you can, carrying through darkness wherever you go your one little fire that will start again.

Waiting for God" This morning I breathed in. It had rained early and the sycamore leaves tapped a few drops that remained, while waving the air's memory back and forth over the lawn and into our open window. Then I breathed out. This deliberate day eased past the calendar and waited. Patiently the sun instructed the shadows how to move; it held them, guided their gradual defining. In the great quiet I carried my life on, in again, out again.

When I Met My Muse" I glanced at her and took my glasses off—they were still singing, They buzzed like a locust on the coffee table and then ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and knew that nails up there took a new grip on whatever they touched. “I am your own way of looking at things,” she said. “When you allow me to live with you, every glance at the world around you will be a sort of salvation.” And I took her hand

You will never be alone, you hear so deep a sound when autumn comes. Yellow pulls across the hills and thrums, or the silence after lightning before it says its names—and then the clouds’ wide-mouthed apologies. You were aimed from birth: you will never be alone. Rain will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, long aisles—you never heard so deep a sound, moss on rock, and years. You turn your head— that’s what the silence meant: you’re not alone. The whole wide world pours down.

A star hit in the hills behind our house up where the grass turns brown touching the sky. Meteors have hit the world before, but this was near, and since TV; few saw, but many felt the shock. The state of California owns that land (and out from shore three miles), and any stars that come will be roped off and viewed on week days 8 to 5. A guard who took the oath of loyalty and denied any police record told me this: “If you don’t have a police record yet you could take the oath and get a job if California should be hit by another star.” “I’d promise to be loyal to California and to guard any stars that hit it,” I said, “or any place three miles out from shore, unless the star was bigger than the state—in which case, I’d be loyal to it.” But he said no exceptions were allowed, and he leaned against the state-owned meteor so calm and puffed a cork-tip cigarette that I looked down and traced with my foot in the dust and thought again and said, “OK—any star.

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.

How to Regain Your Soul Come down Canyon Creek trail on a summer afternoon that one place where the valley floor opens out. You will see the white butterflies. Because of the way shadows come off those vertical rocks in the west, there are shafts of sunlight hitting the river and a deep long purple gorge straight ahead. Put down your pack. Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built, when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon and then shines back through the white wings to be you again.

A Walk in the Country" To walk anywhere in the world, to live now, to speak, to breathe a harmless breath: what snowflake, even, may try today so calm a life, so mild a death? Out in the country once, walking the hollow night, I felt a burden of silver come: my back had caught moonlight pouring through the trees like money. That walk was late, though. Late, I gently came into town, and a terrible thing had happened: the world, wide, unbearably bright, had leaped on me. I carried mountains. Though there was much I knew, though kind people turned away, I walked there ashamed— into that still picture to bring my fear and pain. By dawn I felt all right; my hair was covered with dew; the light was bearable; the air came still and cool. And God had come back there to carry the world again. Since then, while over the world the wind appeals events, and people contend like fools, like a stubborn tumbleweed I hold, hold where I live, and look into every face: Oh friends, where can one find a partner for the long dance over the fields?

Each newcomer feels obliged to do something else, forgetting that if he himself is somebody he will necessarily do that something else," said Valéry. And Roethke told students to "write like somebody else." There are those usual people who try desperately to appear unusual and there are unusual people who try to appear usual. Most poets I've met are from the latter and much smaller group. William Stafford, at his best as good as we have, is a near-perfect example. It doesn't surprise me at all when the arrogant wild man in class turns in predictable, unimaginative poems and the straight one is doing nutty and promising work. If you are really strange you are always in enemy territory, and your constant concern is survival.

Waking At 3 a.m." Even in the cave of the night when you wake and are free and lonely, neglected by others, discarded, loved only by what doesn’t matter—even in that big room no one can see, you push with your eyes till forever comes in its twisted figure eight and lies down in your head. You think water in the river; you think slower than the tide in the grain of the wood; you become a secret storehouse that saves the country, so open and foolish and empty. You look over all that the darkness ripples across. More than has ever been found comforts you. You open your eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast and as far as your thought can run. A great snug wall goes around everything, has always been there, will always remain. It is a good world to be lost in. It comforts you. It is all right. And you sleep.

A Phantom Banquet by Stewart Stafford Forego the seminal salad, Lest it retraces your lips, As ambushing vomitus with, Greasy, peccant aftertaste. It is not willing regurgitation, For the young's sustenance, But spitting of venom, I say, Rendering venting of spleen. Savour secret ingredients, All shall emerge in the end, A reading of the entrails, And of potted plots afoul. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved

The Great Dane by Stewart Stafford Martyr father of poison sleep, Rotten carcass of a slain beast, Wicked stars cast against him, Beloved, that loved him least. O maggot of gnawing doubt, Wriggling along life’s tightrope, Sleepwalking this broken path, To a coup de grâce last stroke. The players unmask dark play, Trampling nightshade that reeks, Honour's duel in a snake pit, The shadow castle grows weak. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Justice is a matter of yielding to delight in human variety.

So to you, Friend, I confide my secret: to be a discoverer you hold close whatever you find, and after a while you decide what it is. Then, secure in where you have been, you turn to the open sea and let go.” —William Stafford, Tomorrow Will Have an Island