РефератыИностранный языкOnOnline Interviews With William Stafford Essay Research

Online Interviews With William Stafford Essay Research

Online Interviews With William Stafford Essay, Research Paper


Jeff Gundy


from "A Conversation with William Stafford"


What follows is part of a conversation between William Stafford and


myself in August 1988 at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Having received a summer


research grant from my college to explore Stafford’s work in relation to his pacifism and


his experience as a conscientious objector, I had certain kinds of questions in mind. But


our talk ranged widely, as you’ll soon discover.-Jeff Gundy


Jeff Gundy: Einstein remembers his father giving him a compass, and


the critic Gregory Ulmer has also commented that the compass is not something that


restricts, that means you have to go in this certain way, but something that gives you a


sense of direction. This reminds me of the little paragraph that’s at the beginning of You


Must Revise Your Life where you say you have to have security of character to be a writer.


William Stafford: You know, the strange thing, I was thinking about a compass.


Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this


way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says-north. That’s what we


count on. And I think writers have to count on something in themselves, that means if


they’re not going to do it when they’re writing, then who is? They’ve got to make the


decisions.


I can remember taking a compass to class, when I was teaching. And I’d put it on the


desk and get the kids to look at it, and sort of spin it around, and it would go north.


And I would say, "There’s something in this room that we’re not aware of, that the


compass knows. We’re surrounded by these things. Why should we assume that our senses are


bringing us what’s happening?" And we’d start a discussion.


JG: I’ve had that kind of thought too, that there is always something here we’re


not aware of. Radio and TV signals are another fascinating thing: you go down the road, or


I turn on this stupid radio/ tape recorder here.


Stafford: Yeah, yeah; it’s there. But you don’t know, without help. My son Kim


tells about this woman who went over to teach at the Warm Springs Indian reservation, and


this woman worked up her first lesson very carefully, and she went in, and she told them


what they were going to learn. And she wasn’t getting any response out of them. They were


just sitting there, looking down, looking away. So the next meeting she tried even harder.


But though she thought she really had a lot to give them, and she was giving it to them,


they just sat there. So she had a friend on the Warm Springs reservation, an Indian, a


good friend, so she went to him and said, "I can’t understand it! I’m teaching this


course and I’m all prepared, I really knocked myself out the second time. And he said,


"Well, tell me, what was it like?" and she told him how they sat there and he


said, "Oh, it’s very simple. They’re embarrassed for you. They felt sad that you had


to claim all this knowledge. And they just didn’t want to look at you. They were being


kind to you! So she had to go in at the same level with them, get them to respond to her,


things like that.


JG: In college I was in a fine arts class that I was pretty hostile toward


really. And I was in the middle of the fourth row of this great big lecture room. Toward


the end of the term I met the teacher in the hallway and she said, "Oh yeah, I


remember you! You’re Gundy! You sit in the fourth row. I like you! You react!" I was


out there and I was not very good at not acting bored when I was bored or hostile when I


was hostile and she liked that-it surprised me to no end, but she did.


Stafford: I remember someone said in the Civilian Public Service, "I feel


that if struck I should give off a clear note where I am. But I don’t have to go around


beating myself like a gong." You know-this is really getting at little things-but I


have felt sometimes when I’m present, say on a panel or something, and I’m up there where


people are seeing my face, and I’m sitting there listening, and there’s something I don’t


agree with that I can’t show what I’m feeling. But if I keep my pleasant smile, I’m


betraying myself. I can remember even in class, sitting there listening to teachers. And I


didn’t want to keep my pleasant, accept-everything face, I wanted to show enthusiasm or


doubt, or… it’s a kind of feeling of wanting to ride the contours of human relations


alertly and purely at all times.


JG: You want to avoid that kind of mask we put on.


Stafford: A person ought to know, not just when you’re breaking with them, but


when you’re enthusiastic and less enthusiastic and a lot less enthusiastic. I mean, it’s


not just "Everything’s fine until it’s war." It’s a dailiness. I believe it is


part of our responsibility to each other.


JG: And now when I stand up in front of a class, I’m just so thankful for


anybody who reacts, rather than just sitting there with that blank look on their face.


Stafford: Strange, but I think of something I just read in Nietzsche. I was


reading Beyond Good and Evil, and he has this part in there in which he said,


"There’s an element of cruelty in teaching, and in learning." I think what he


was getting at is this: that if you force yourself to learn, you’ve got to be stern with


somebody. It’s you that you’re being stern with. But, there was another phrase he had,


"A certain courtesy of the heart is lacking," which came when he was talking


about Mozart. He said, "How lucky we are to have had a person like this, with such


courtesy of the heart." I had the feeling that what he was doing was recognizing that


although the process of creating something is a kind of a joyous thing, it’s a finding, a


current of closures and satisfactions in the material of the heart you’re working with, if


you have some kind of overarching purpose you’ve got to override some of those feelings,


you’ve got to turn away from the enjoyment of encounter and suppress part of yourself in


order to get to a predetermined goal. I guess my ideal is a kind of artistic creation and


a kind of living, too, in which we enable each other to live by those little signals from


now, now, now.


JG: So if you’re trying to do a Cantos…


Stafford: Yeah, yeah. "I want to be number one. So move over Dante, here I


come!" Something like that. But there could be other reasons to do something as


magnificent as the Cantos, and I would like it if these were the way it came to me. I


wouldn’t like to do the Cantos in order to be number one. In fact, in this thing I have


called "Making Best Use of a Workshop" I raise the question, "Did you come


here in order to write the best possible poems?" The students expect this to be one


of those innocent things, and they say, "What else?" Then I try to push them a


little farther, say, "Or did you come here in order to learn how to do the poem most


likely to be published?" It’s different, it’s different! "Or did you come here


to learn how to do a poem that’s the least vulnerable to criticism?" Or did you come


for something else? That’s what I want to get the whole workshop to be about.


JG: Something else.


Stafford: And I think it’s related to this courtesy of the heart. Courtesy of


the heart, a way of living, and of converging with experience. Somewhere I’ll say


something like, "Successful people can’t write poems."


JG: Well, it all depends on what you mean by success, I guess.


Stafford: Maybe in another tradition someone would say, "Successful people


can’t do the blues."


JG: I’ve been in workshops too where by the second or third day you can tell


that there are various agendas, and some of them don’t seem to have much to do with


actually trying to learn more about the business of doing poems.


Stafford: That’s right. A workshop is a fascinating place. Whenever I do one, I


learn from it. And actually, I wouldn’t want to make it seem that when I do it this way,


"How to Make Best Use of a Workshop," it is boring to people. They love it. Once


they get a taste of it, they’re addicted to the kind of life in which you are finding your


way forward by what’s given to you, using the person you are and the situation you

are in.


It’s different from trying to craft a poem, or being number one, or getting published.


JG: I remember a guy bringing a paper to class in graduate school. We were


critiquing papers, and he told us about how he had written this so he could get it


published in this particular journal, that was what he wanted to do with it. And we


started talking about it, and I had some kind of question about some part of it, something


that I wanted to understand better, and he said, "OK, I’ll leave that part out! And


here, oh, if you don’t like it, I’ll just get rid of that…" And I just sighed for


him, he was a friend of mine, and you just kind of…


Stafford: And pretty soon you get the piece of writing written by the committee.


JG: Yeah… and it seems to me that that comes back to that idea of security of


character that we were talking about at the beginning. That he had no sense that he really


had something that he wanted to say, he had this terrible sense that he wanted to publish


something.


Stafford: Oh, right…oh, yeah, yeah, that helps me! I’ve thought of it in a


much less nuancy way, that it takes a combination of humility and arrogance to be a


writer. I mean, I suppose there’s a humility about any presumption about yourself. But


there’s the arrogance of "Nevertheless, this is the way it’s going to be!" And


this sort of relates to what I remember someone said to me, "Do you judge a piece of


writing by how it sounds? Or by how it reads on the page?" And I said, "I judge


it by how it smells!" I think there are these innumerable little nuancy decisions you


make, what order things come in, how long you stay with a part of it, how soon you go to


another part, all those little revelations of where you are, you know, where your


priorities are, and how they might better be. So if you were alert enough, listening or


reading someone, sometimes it would begin to stink, even if they were saying the right


things.


JG: I’ve had experiences like that, at readings, all of a sudden…


Stafford: There are a million little signals in language.


JG: And sometimes it doesn’t have anything to do with language-you may think


that you agree with the opinions that are being expressed, and the language is capable and


all that, and all of a sudden you just find yourself-


Stafford: You know, I think this is related. Just a couple of days ago I was


thinking of a book called From Two to Five, by a Soviet child psychologist. I love that


book. From two to five, that’s the age when the human individual masters language. By the


age of five they’ve got the-oh, what would you say, the syntax-the way to find the way


through the language. But then I got to thinking later about writers’ conferences, or the


way you say "Has your child learned to talk?" and you say yes or no. Actually,


the answer is "no", no matter where they are. Because nobody has got there


finally. You’re still learning, at, say, seventy-four. And the ability, that is the


language skills, is not something that you suddenly fill a cup and you’ve got it. It’s


forever.


JG: It’s like with writing you say they’re "competent" or


"incompetent," and that sort of thing, divide everybody up that way.


Stafford: Yeah, that’s right. You say, "It’s good-is it perfect?" You


know, that’s a surreal question.


JG: I’ve had poems that I tried to write five or six times. And three years


later all of a sudden it occurs to you that the way to write that poem doesn’t have any of


the same words in it as it had before.


Stafford: Like it’s born again?


JG: Yeah. It’s something almost completely different, but now it’s got a


language that seems to be at least halfway equal to what’s there.


Stafford: You know, I realize that in one of George Eliot’s novels she has a


saying, someone says, "So-and-so ought to be born again. And born different!"


JG: I could think of some candidates there! On that business of personality, I


have a collection-it was a Bread Loaf Quarterly-Writings for a Nuclear Age. You had a


little piece in there-


Stafford: Yeah, that’s right, I do remember that.


JG: And there’s an article in there by Eric Larsen about individual nostalgia,


which is really critical of a lot of current writing, as tending toward a sort of easy


nostalgia. At one point he says, "In extreme cases there is in fact a wistfulness for


the past so pervasive and so numbing of perception that it creates a failure to see


clearly, as any art must, what the true material of its own present age really is."


It seemed to me descriptive of a lot of poems that I read too. "Here I am," you


know, "back when I was nine I did this and I did that … and it was all sort of neat


then, or something." You have a lot of poems about the past, too, but I don’t get


that same sense of sort of dwelling in it, or…


Stafford: I have the feeling that-this is partly just intellectual-but I would


just have the feeling that in any kind of material in a poem, what happens to it-whether


it’s participial, or finite verbs-where the transitions are, that’s where the dance is.


And so the critic comes along, and says, "Yeats’ poem about Byzantium I don’t like


very much because I’m not interested in Byzantium." Well, there’s a lot such a person


is missing. I guess hardly anyone would be that dumb. But they do the equivalent, often,


when they criticize modern poems. Nostalgia, yes, but I often have the feeling that it’s


engaged nostalgia. I think it’s making a judgment, and using its material to do that. But,


then again, I guess one reason I came to the conclusion John Ashbery might be really OK is


that I was impatient with poems and poets who were measuring their relevance only by


engagement. Thinking and poetry are beyond engagement, although they serve engagement.


JG: Your poem "Next Time" is in that same collection, and then there’s


a little comment on it as well, which says something about "anticipated nostalgia, a


mood of trying to realize things that pass."


Stafford: I remember the poem "Next Time." I’ve read it in readings a


number of times. It’s really a pretty emphatic poem, when heard. "Next time what I’d


do is…"


JG: And it’s really about not waiting until things are past to be nostalgic


about them.


Stafford: Yeah. Anticipated nostalgia.


JG: I was reading a book by Louis Simpson this summer, and he too says several


times, using Jay Gatsby’s phrase, that poems shouldn’t be "just personal."


Stafford: Well, I think I understand what he’s getting at. And if I translate


this to my own life, though I’m not sure I do, I’ve often come away with a feeling of loss


and mushiness from poems because people think that what a poem does is to indicate some


feeling they’ve found out, or something that has happened to them, and so forth. But poems


are much more than that, other than that. And so I’ve been at a reading in which almost


every poem had something like this, "I was walking down the street, and I found this


thing or the other." And then there are those poems in which the person speaking


might be the actual writer, but then it also might be something else, a hill, a river. For


one thing, to have the persona always be the writer is just too narrow. For another thing,


the experience that comes out of writing, that feels precious to me, is more adventurous


than just the reporting of something that’s already happened. It’s the giving off a clear


note.


from Artful Dodge.


The Editors at Artful Dodge debated for quite a while on


whether to present the full text of these interviews on our web page, or to give only


brief taste of each interview, hoping that you would send us $5.00 for a back issue in


order to finish it. Luckily, we decided to err on the side of literature. But, if you


enjoy these interviews and would like to have a part in supporting us so that we can


continue to publish new interviews just as fascinating, not to mention intriguing new


poetry and fiction, please subscribe or order a back issue by sending $5.00 to the same


address. Thank you for supporting us and helping us continue our mission to publish fresh,


illuminatingwork.


—The Editors

Сохранить в соц. сетях:
Обсуждение:
comments powered by Disqus

Название реферата: Online Interviews With William Stafford Essay Research

Слов:3218
Символов:19569
Размер:38.22 Кб.