Monday, June 15, 2015

Speaking Poems

Speaking Poems

While I have no clear exit strategy and am not working with a fixed timetable, it is safe to say that I am in the last phase of my teaching career.  This phase may last for some years or I might get a late career burst of energy and want to keep going.  I just don't know. But what I can say for certain is that the 40 years I have spent teaching and the nearly 50 practicing the craft of poetry now affords me the luxury of taking the long view back toward what has transpired during that half century.

One of the sure things that has emerged as I consider where I have been and what made me who I am is that I owe a great deal to people who served as teachers and mentors to me, especially to people from my own father's generation. Poets don't generally have patron saints; but if we did, William Stafford would make a strong candidate.

I don't know where I first encountered William Stafford although it was likely during my graduate school years in San Francisco in the early 1970's, and it likely involved his poem "Traveling Through the Dark." That poem, much anthologized and much loved, reappears from time to time as if it were an answer to questions I had been harboring. It is one of a handful of poems by a handful of contemporary American poets that crosses nearly all the barriers posed by "modern poetry"; it works almost as well for those who do not often read poetry as it does for people like me.


In "Traveling Through the Dark" the narrator finds himself miles from town or from human habitation, faced with a minor crisis: a doe, recently struck and killed, is obstructing one lane of the narrow canyon road Stafford has been navigating. The car that hit the deer is gone.To one side the canyon wall rises sharply; to the other side, a precipice. The road itself, one imagines, hangs precariously on the canyon wall.

The narrator, perhaps Stafford himself, can just drive around the deer, so he might have kept going himself. Instead, knowing the carcass poses a problem to the next driver, he gets out of the car to appraise his dilemma, only to discover that the doe is pregnant and the unborn faun has apparently survived the collision that killed its mother.

Those are our details. What should he do?


As readers discover so often while reading his poems, Stafford puts his finger on exactly the point where our certainties are most vulnerable.

"I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;/ around our group I could hear the wilderness listen," he writes. "I thought hard for us all -- my only swerving --,/ then pushed her over the edge into the river."

The temptation for readers, frequently, when they reach this stanza, is to fasten onto that last line without considering the implications of the three lines that precede it. In these lines Stafford is doing his best work. To judge too quickly is to mistake the narrator's last action, pushing the dead deer over the edge, for a cold heart and a lack of sensitivity. But his hesitation, his asking of questions, is weighted with the responsibilities and implications of his decision.

Before I actually knew much about him, and shortly after I moved to begin teaching at Houghton College thirty years ago, William Stafford came to our campus to read. This would have been in 1984 or 85. I must confess I was not so much impressed as puzzled by the man and his manner.  He was dressed, if memory serves, rather casually in a flannel shirt, Dickeys slacks, and a sports jacket that I remember as shapeless and dark. He played down the reading aspect of the occasion, and he played down his role as a visiting poet. He brought no folder of poems-in-progress nor, to my memory, no books to read from, although he had written many at that point.

Instead Stafford leaned against the lectern on his forearms and chatted after being introduced as if we were all old friends and he just happened to be in the neighborhood.

He was grateful to be asked to come to Houghton, he said. He was happy to see those of us who had come out that evening. He hoped we would not be disappointed. About when I was concluding he had arrived unprepared and was filling time with chit-chat, Stafford pulled a bundle of folded papers from his jacket pocket and spread them open on the lectern in front of him. He told us, almost as if he were asking permission, that he would like to "speak" some poems.

I do not remember what Stafford read on that occasion, but I have read his many volumes of poems over and over in the intervening years.  Every time, I find myself delighted, as if I were discovering his work anew.What I have learned about the value and impact of poetry, about the qualities of direct language from reading his poems has been invaluable in my own work. Although I have scarcely been conscious of it, it would be fair to say that I have served a valuable apprenticeship with Stafford the poet.

Ten or twelve years into my teaching career I became aware that Stafford had written and spoken about his own approach to teaching -- and that I had begun a second phase of apprenticeship under his guidance, my apprenticeship as a teacher of writing. Here, too, his many books on writing, writers, and teaching -- often collections of interviews and essays -- have directly informed my own approach and strategies. Here, too, he has influenced me in ways that would be hard to number or to name.

Chief among these ideas, to choose but one, is the idea of permission to fail. Permission to fail, odd as it may seem, allows the writer to take risks necessary to discovery, to take risks that permit success. Like my other teaching mentor, Donald M. Murray, Stafford taught students so as to empower them; that was his aim and objective. He thought a teacher's primary role was to remove obstacles for the apprentice writer, obstacles that too often include the teacher.

Learning is not a competition in Stafford's view, whatever benefits we might derive from knowing how to distinguish good from better from best. Each student brings something important to the task of learning; the teacher's role is to help the student find ways to identify and develop that important thing.

The third phase of my apprenticeship under Stafford's mentoring must have begun a long time ago too, although, as with learning to write and learning to teach, I have only recently become conscious of what I have been absorbing. It has to do with living a principled life.

Stafford served his country during WWII by performing alternative service. That is to say, he declined to join the Army for reasons of conscience. Instead he spent the war living in Civilian Public Service camps, first in Arkansas and later in several west and mid-western states, and working on public works projects. It was a decision filled with considerable consequences.

It was a dangerous thing to be a pacifist, a conscientious objector, during a war that virtually everyone thought we needed to fight. Discussion of those beliefs will have to wait for another occasion; but for my purposes here, it is enough to note that Stafford's stand was both costly and courageous.  The personal risks were great.

More importantly, for me, Stafford's commitment to his beliefs is reflected everywhere, in his positive and encouraging attitude toward his students, and in the humble stewardship of language evident in his poems.

Maybe the most valuable lesson I have derived from William Stafford is the lesson of "Traveling Through the Dark." In that poem, Stafford, the narrator, stands on that little-traveled canyon road and ponders what he ought to do. He weighs the antagonisms that exist, the forces that pull in opposite directions. He weighs moral implications, and he thinks of both broadly and narrowly. The point is not that he pushed the dead deer over the precipice, however necessary that may have been.  The point is that he accepted responsibility for the situation he found himself in, a situation not of his own making;  he considered the consequences of his options, and he did his duty.