Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford - Hardcover

Stafford, Kim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1555973728 ISBN 13: 9781555973728

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2002

Synopsis

With incredible insight and love, Kim Stafford offers a view into the remarkable life of his father, the poet William Stafford

The unspoken deep affection he lived by was like the idea in his poem about the Eskimos―their disdain for "People who talk about God." In his world, a fact so pervasive as love never need be named.

William Stafford wrote a poem nearly every day of his life, most often before dawn, as he lay on a much-used couch that bore the imprint of his body after years of use. He was a prolific, highly acclaimed poet, famous pacifist, and extraordinary friend to nearly everyone he met. But Kim was given perhaps his father's greatest gift―and greatest challenge―to be his literary executor.

Carefully sifting through his father's papers―thousands of poems written on napkins, grocery receipts, letters―Kim follows a copious trail of words matched only by his father's silences. Kim is able to visit his father's life in a deeply personal way and, as a result, beautifully illuminates William Stafford as someone who was unafraid to stare into emptiness and to live a life so fully in the moment that he was able to touch countless lives with a single poem.

About this title

About the Author:

William Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914 and is the author of over fifty books. He received the National Book Award for Traveling Through the Dark.

Kim Stafford is an Artist in Residence and Director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Writing with the same elegant precision that distinguished his collection of personal essays, Having Everything Right (1986), Stafford remembers his father, poet William Stafford, through a creative blend of memoir, poetry, and criticism. "His words seemed plain to some, his subjects ordinary," Stafford writes of his father's poems, which often celebrated the landscapes of his native Kansas and his inherited Oregon. "His response was to offer as an alternative to the loud and aggressive a quiet language of reconciliation." That profound quiet and that hard-won reconciliation--with nature, with other people, with himself--is everywhere evident in this moving account of the man and his work. Stafford spent WW II in a camp for conscientious objectors and was reviled by friends as a "conchie." His pacifism was unwavering, however, and became one of the hallmarks of his poetry and his character. If Stafford's story is free of confrontation, it is not free of tragedy. Moving fluidly from his father's poems and "daily writing" to memories of his life, Kim recalls the suicide of his older brother and its effect on the family. If quiet brought power to Stafford's poems, his often-protracted silence sometimes brought distance to his relations with his loved ones. And, yet, there is something touching and intimate about witnessing the son using his own words to bridge his father's silence. For anyone who has read William Stafford's verse and marveled at the way he could capture the pulse and power of life, his son's words help reveal the source of that power: "My father used to say that poems are not made of words, but of contexts." This remarkable tribute gives new life to those contexts. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1555973728
• ISBN 13: 9781555973728
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304