William Stafford was more than a mentor to me. He was also my poetry father figure. Born within months of my father and a few miles in Kansas, they blurred into one archetype. Both spoke in the laconic Great Plains dialect with long pauses, detailed descriptions of landmarks, and elastic diphthongs for emphasis. Both had a steely morality not obscured by agreeable manners. Stafford taught me how to be a Kansan—with its mix of self-deprecating humor, goodwill, social responsibility, and rigor—as well as how to parse a poetic line.
Our relationship was a curious inversion: I played the role of editor and sometimes reviewer to Stafford’s role of poet. As a new associate editor of Cottonwood Review at the University of Kansas in 1977, one of my first tasks was to make selections from the submitted poems. Not all were exceptional, and we rejected some. The chief editor assigned me the task of sending the letter of acceptances—and rejections. Terror of displeasing the patriarchal gods arose as I typed. Some months later at his public reading Stafford stated, “Editors are our friends. They keep us from publishing bad poems.” He seemed to look straight at me as he said this, and I was relieved.
Near the end of his life, I corresponded with Stafford as an editor again, as we worked to publish, Kansas Poems of William Stafford (Woodley Memorial Press, 1990). Throughout our relationship, though, neither of us misunderstood the underlying dynamic of master (him) and disciple (me). He was seventy-two years old at the beginning of these letters in 1986, and I was thirty-six. He finessed our interactions with some delicacy, perhaps because he had daughters.
In the first in our series of our letters, sent after he received a copy of my debut book Spring Geese, he wrote: “I have been luxuriating in the poems. You had a good idea, and I can understand how the museum scene could stir you. . . .” (January 16, 1986). He does not judge the poems individually, but instead he gives a general, qualitative response, his “luxuriating.” He remarks on the interesting focus of the museum setting for the collection, also indirect praise. When I first read his kind words, I seized upon these as indications of fatherly approval, crucial to me at that stage of my writerly path.
The wise old poet went on to share his own museum poem title, “The Museum at Tillamook,” to initiate a dialogue. I appreciated his ekphrastic poem that also showed interplay among the taxidermy exhibits and other objects. The poem helped me reach out of my own solipsistic bubble and read someone else’s similar, and better, work closely.
In the same letter, Stafford suggests a compatible writer I might search out, Linda Hasselstrom of South Dakota. He affirms the worth of my efforts by inviting me into the writerly community of grasslands poets, his own circle. This is another indirect teaching that I took to heart. I have sought poetry companionship the rest of my life. His next comments further the networking purpose of the letter, to invite me to his forthcoming reading at Washburn University, where he hoped we could have “a good visit.” Bill Stafford was a friendly man and also a good businessman. He no doubt was genuine about the trip as a chance to “visit,” but he also understood me as a receptive reader of his work and a book reviewer for the Kansas City Star. In many of his letters, he blends business with friendly banter, to develop his relationship with writers and readers.
Finally, as he ends his letter, Stafford lets loose with heady praise: “The book is a delight. You got to use so many good words in your diligent pursuit of accuracy. I am going to be learning from this book.” Wow was my unvoiced response. My delicate soul responded to the praise, and later, back on earth, I analyzed their instruction. “Delight,” “good words,” “diligent,” “accuracy,”—all of these adjectives are specific. He focuses on “delight” in language; the gift of the words themselves; and the importance of accuracy. He emphasizes the “diligent” practice of the craft. This was an encouraging first letter from him, and throughout our correspondence, he kept the same tone, no matter my blunders.
The letters themselves are small poems. He invents words by turning nouns into verbs and vice versa, like his comment that he and his father “Indianed” around to describe their camping and hunting expeditions (8 June 1990). (At that time “Indian” for Indigenous peoples of the Americas was not meant to be disrespectful.) He could find one metaphor for an entire poem, as in his response to my poem “Enantiodromia,” published in the journal 5 a.m. Stafford writes, “Thanks for ‘Enantiodromia’, which I feel slitherly all the way through!” (March 11, 1985). The word “slitherly” suggests the sidewinding movement of a snake swimming in water, which is exactly the rhythm I had hoped to achieve:
Enantiodromia
Another man drowned in the river
below the dam, his spirit held
under the rocks until he joined
the others—sand, turtles, and carp.
Sleeping in his boat, too late
he found the current no dream
but more real than his mother
and children. He tumbled calmly
over the dam, braced only for a swim.
Downriver his friend popped loose
but he settled under the river,
quietly, with the minnows.
Light gradually dissolved.
This killer river gives birth each day,
flowing across town in pipes.
People bathe in it, wash clothes,
and water all the dogs,
dumbly alive, and we wonder
at this man plunging into lifeblood
of the city while squirrels chew seeds,
leaves breathe, and a pregnant woman
folds the last of the laundry, sighs,
and drinks deeply from a glass of water.
(Starwater, Cottonwood Press, 1988. 47)
Stafford’s made-up adverb “slitherly” is not vague praise but rather a qualitative response to mirror the entire poem. His language play also occurs in his comments upon the arrival of my letter, which “sparkled up our July lives” (6 July 1992). The “sparkled up” usage evokes the sparklers of Fourth of July fireworks, and it amplifies a routine letter.
Stafford loved etymologies of words, as he demonstrates in another letter. After he received a copy of my 1988 book Starwater, lyrical meditations on regional rivers, he wrote:
Isn’t Wakarusa a wonderful word? And I’ve always wanted to do more with the Smoky Hill. By the way, in Emporia [Kansas] I asked my nephew Pat Kelley what “Neosho” meant, and as he didn’t know we looked it up wherever we could. I don’t know if I romanticize it, but my definition came to be “water made muddy by buffalo crossing farther upstream ….” (7 January 1988)
That translation of “Neosho” is “water made muddy,” according to a local resident T.H. Morrison in his address “The Osage Treaty of 1865” (St. Paul Journal, 1925). The buffalo reference may be improvised, or “romanticized,” by Stafford. His poem “By a River in the Osage Country” begins: “They called it Neosho, meaning/ a river made muddy by buffalo” (The Darkness’ Around Us Is Deep, 45). The poem ends with the inversion of the beginning, so the muddy river becomes clear—beyond human sight:
But still, I have waded that river
and looked into the eyes of buffalo
that were standing and gazing far:
no soul I have met knew the source
that well, or where the Neosho
went when it was clear.
He immerses himself in natural elements at the end, the river and the buffalos’ gaze, and he articulates how these are mysteries beyond rational comprehension. The Neosho runs through my hometown of Emporia, and under the sway of Stafford for some ten years at this point, I wrote about the same river not long after in “A Snapping Turtle” (Starwater, 38), with a similar conclusion. The poem veers (or “swerves,” to use one of Stafford’s favorite verbs) at the end to embrace the irrational in a Staffordly manner:
A Snapping Turtle
Not the squirming one,
fighting fingers
at the end of fishline,
mouth bloody and curved beak ready,
not this hooked outlaw
but the one on a bleached log,
eyes hooded against the glare,
its orb, roughhewn, set to rest.
This turtle stays in mind
and the river in repose
like it would last this way forever,
like I could understand
the green Neosho muffled
and filled with sun,
silent dragonflies
and a sleeping snapper
that bit deep, years ago,
into my young eyes
and never let go.
The Neosho River, with its Siouan name that sounds like water currents and wind, has a specificity as Stafford uses it. Critic Phil Heldrich notes this precision in a Midwest Quarterly article, “as Stafford’s Kansas poems reveal, Stafford’s focus is not on the ‘play’ of language so much as how precise names closely signify what they represent. . . . Stafford’s language seeks signifiers or words tightly linked with their signifieds, . . ” (“William Stafford’s Mythopoetic Kansas,” 7). Precision, accuracy, diligence—these continued to be essential values to Stafford, as he stated in his first letter to me. These pertain to both poetry and personal integrity.
In the next few years, I continued to send a few poems to Stafford occasionally and also my books. We did not exchange comments as equals, and so our dialogue is somewhat one-sided. I dared not suggest changes to his works, but he made courteous comments on mine. His letters exchanged with Nebraska’s Ted Kooser, former United States Poet Laureate, suggest a more mutual critique, for one example. Their correspondence at Washburn University includes discussion of “Traveling Through the Dark” and pronouns (Feb. 16, 1978).
In 1990, Stafford and I began to search for mostly uncollected poems for the Woodley Memorial Press publication, Kansas Poems of William Stafford. He patiently walked me through some editorial details. He praised freely in a June 8, 1990, letter when he described how he was “pleased” and “awed” by my compilation of poems. He also disclosed how much he appreciated the connection to his home state:
I gloat over having these “home’ poems together in one book. I guess all the time I have been spreading work around I have felt wistful about scattering my home feelings so widely. Now I can take a good look at the center of my life. (June 8, 1990)
Here he is, 76 years old, kindly, and perhaps nostalgic for his Kansas roots, what he calls his “home feelings” and “center of my life.” Elsewhere, he writes that “I feel I have many, many Kansas poems (maybe all of my poems…?)” (November 17, 1989). Now I wonder if he saw me, in some small way, as Kansan kin, a niece or at least an admirer who followed his life’s work as a model. He shares the teaching on how early experiences imprint us for life. He shares how those experiences return in later life as “wistful” feelings.
In the letters, Stafford emphasizes his continued Kansas-influenced perspective, as noted in various interviews and comments, as Heldrich noted (1-2). He wrote in 1992, a year before his death at 79, about my connection to Kansas, “I like to think about you back there, in a place I remember so well and with so much affection” (July 6, 1992). He goes on to include a recent poem, which indicates the continuing presence of his home state, “From Tombstones Back Home,” nine epigrams, like “God said come in. I came/ Then God said get out” and “Vini Vidi Abscondi.” He ends with the wistful, “Sometimes I looked at the sky” (published in Kansas Poems of William Stafford).
Later that year, I wrote, “Dear William, Thanks for ‘From Tombstones Back Home.’ It brought smiles and thoughts. ‘Bad brakes.’ Where will it appear?” (Oct. 9, 1992). I imitated Stafford a bit, in emphasis of the poem’s ability to move me—my “smiles and thoughts” being a parallel to Stafford’s “luxuriating” in his first 1986 letter— and also I pointed out a particular bon mot, as he did. I commented about a forthcoming book, Touching the Sky (Penthe, 1994):
And the new book (always something in progress, isn’t there—writing is my process of being) is mostly essays on Kansas, trying to break some stereotypes and be individual and specific in my experiences. One piece in progress is about the recently constructed medicine wheel at Haskell. It’s an amazing revival of mound builder earthworks plus High Plains medicine wheels. (Low, October 9, 1992)
I was writing every day, publishing where I could, and extending my knowledge of grassland experience. Into my forties, I was following Stafford’s lead in many ways. Because he was unashamed to poeticize the land, long before “ecopoetry” was a genre, I felt I could also.
During those times, my father and Stafford met in a moment that was mythical to me. When he visited his nephew, Patrick Kelley, in my hometown of Emporia, the two came to my parents’ house for lunch. My father trotted out a newspaper clipping that turned out to be my review of Stafford’s Smoke’s Way, which I had published in the Kansas City Star. Smoke’s Way includes some of Stafford’s second-tier poems not included in Harper & Row publications. My review is descriptive, rather than lavish in praise. He read it slowly, very slowly, it seemed. And then he said nothing. We dined, and he was polite; I said little as my mother described her chili recipe. Yes, it was awkward to see a poet read my review in real time. It did not, however, end our sporadic flow of letters.
Our last correspondence again concerned a literary project, Phoenix Papers, a collection of poets in Lawrence, Kansas, edited by Stephen Addiss and Stanley Lombardo, including Kenneth Irby, Luci Tapahonso, Jim McCrary, Judith Roitman, Victor Contoski, me, and others. The occasion was a protest against the destruction of a virgin tract of grasslands, the Elkins Prairie. The editors asked me to approach Stafford to write an introduction. This appealed to Stafford. What did not appeal to him so much were the poems themselves. He titled his introduction, “Approach with Caution” (February 1993). The short essay was so problematic that the editors rejected it. He describes, not praises, the exploratory spirit of the verse in Phoenix Papers and cautions readers about some poets’ language that could be “creaky” and “breathless.” I noted his stand for his own aesthetics, carefully worded. His steely core prevented him from banal praise he did not believe.
The last letter I received from Stafford, dated May 11, 1993, included a press release for his forthcoming book, The Animal That Drank Up Sound (Harcourt Brace), as well as an order form for a video about him. He mentioned a forthcoming visit to the state six months away. This was a business letter, yet he included good wishes, “I hope you are flourishing,” along the way.
He died suddenly August 28, 1993, just as Herman Swafford of the literary magazine re-PUBLISH corresponded with Stafford about me doing an interview with him for a special section that included, eventually, the last poems Stafford sent out. The interview evolved into a remembrance as I wrote my essay, “William Stafford 1914-1993: The Patron Saint of Poets.” It felt like the final letter in our series.
My father died a year later, and no patriarch remained in my life, biological or poetic. I was fully adult, at least in life experience. They were no longer there for guidance. Their lessons were similar and appropriate for poets at any time: Work diligently. Have convictions and stand up for them. Be practical about business matters. Further, Stafford modeled how to enjoy friendships, even kinships, as they arose in the fellowship of poets. The poet further showed, in the texts of his letters, how any writing, even mundane correspondence, can be an occasion for wordplay. Poetry’s boundaries go beyond the page, as a means to delight in life itself. The poet’s responsibility to social justice is likewise not bound by occasion. Every choice, whether a phrase or a personal matter, leads back to a person’s real values. Many poems are mythical, but none is a fiction.
Denise Low, former Poet Laureate of Kansas, is the author of House of Grace, House of Blood, University of Arizona Press, the memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart, and other books of poetry and prose. Recognition includes a Red Mountain Press Editor’s Choice Award, 5 Pushcart Prize Nominations, 4 Kansas Notable Book Awards, and other honors. She taught at Haskell Indian Nations University, where she founded the creative writing program. She is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) and programs the Indigenous Voices series for The 222, an arts organization in Sonoma County, CA. Her Ph.D. is in literature and MFA in Creative Writing. www.deniselow.net