William Stafford

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William Edgar Stafford (January 17, 1914 – August 28,1993) was an American poet and pacifist, and the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He and his writings are sometimes identified with the Pacific Northwest.

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Life

Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, the oldest of three children in a highly literate family. During the Depression, his family moved from town to town in any effort to find work for his father. Stafford helped contribute to family income by delivering newspapers, working in the sugar beet fields, raising vegetables, and working as an electrician's mate.

He graduated from high school in the town of Liberal in 1933. After attending junior college, he received a B.A. from the University of Kansas in 1937. He was drafted into the United States armed forces in 1941, while pursuing his master's degree at the University of Kansas, when he became a conscientious objector. As a registered pacifist, he performed alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps, which consisted of forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month. While working in California in 1944, he met and he married Dororthy Hope Frantz with whom he later had four children. He received his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1947. His master's thesis, the prose memoir Down In My Heart, was published in 1948 and described his experience in the forest service camps. That same year he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis & Clark College. In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

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Career

One of the most striking features of his career is that he began publishing his poetry only later in life. </blockquote>

He was also a close friend and colloborator with the poet Robert Bly. Despite his late start, he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies and eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry. James Dickey called Stafford one of those poets "who pour out rivers of ink, all on good poems."[1]

In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate. In 1975, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon. In 1980, he retired from Lewis and Clark College but continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. In 1992, he won the Western States Book Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.[2] He died in Lake Oswego, Oregon on August 28, 1993, having written a poem that morning containing the line "Be ready for what God sends." [3] His works are archived at the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis and Clark College.

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Bibliography

Poetry
  • West of Your City. Los Gatos, Calif: Talisman Press, 1960.
  • Traveling Through the Dark. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.
  • Someday, Maybe. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
  • In the Clock of Reason. Victoria, B.C.: Soft Press, 1973.
  • Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
  • Wyoming Circuit. Tannersville, N.Y: Tideline Press, 1980.
  • Roving across Fields: A Conversation and Uncollected Poems, 1942-1982. Edited by Thom Tammaro. Daleville, Ind.: Barnwood Press, 1983.
  • Smoke's Way: Poems from Limited Editions, 1968-1981. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1983.
  • Stories and Storms and Strangers. Rexburg, Idaho: Honeybrook Press, 1984.
  • Passwords. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Prose
  • Down in My Heart (memoir). 1947. Reprint. Elgin, Ill.: Brethren Publishing House; Columbia, S.C.: Bench Press, 1985.
  • Winterward. Ph.D., diss. University of Iowa, 1954.
  • Writing the Australian Crawl. Views on the Writer's Vocation (essays and reviews). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978.
  • You Must Revise Your Life (essays and interviews). Ann Arbor. University of Michigan Press, 1986.
  • The Animal That Drank Up Sound (children's book, with illustrations by Debra Frasier). New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992.
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External links

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/William_Stafford"