Lars Nordström: You tend to use material both from the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest.
William Stafford: Or any place.
L.N.: Or any place—right! And by regional material people who talk about this, critics, seem to mean both that which is readily identifiable and that which demands knowledge of the region to identify, but which is unique to the place. Like a particular place or person … anything in time and space. I realize that you write a great deal that has no obvious regional ties, but when you do, and when you notice that a poem starts to include material from a place, say the Northwest, do you recognize any recurring patterns, thoughts, or themes in your treatment of this material?
W.S.: Yes, I have several reactions to that. One is that writers and critics like to talk about region and sense of place. It’s very popular. I’ve been on panels about it in this country. And I can understand why this attracts people, but I have another angle about it. I think that any artist is sustained by the things of this world, and the things that are near loom larger, impinge, and they are important because they are near. But they are not important because they are any certain part of the world. Or so it seems to me. But to relate easily and quickly, I suppose, to what is near you is a gracious thing. It’s a positive thing. So, wherever you are you are regional if you are an artist. Or so it seems to me, because you use the things that are there. That’s what you rebound to, reverberate with, but I wouldn’t like to make the jump to say that therefore it’s important that Theodore Roethke was in the Northwest, for instance. I think if he’d stayed in Michigan, or gone to New York, or wherever he’d gone, he’d been a poet if the other conditions had been right.
Now, there’s another thing, that is, if I find myself beginning to write a poem that feels regional—and I’m intrigued by the way you said that because I certainly do understand it—because anything you begin to write that begins to be whatever it is, if you encourage it to go on being just exactly what it is, you do so. So if it sounds regional when I’m writing it, or feels regional, I’m very likely to make it even more regional. And, I guess maybe this will be my finale too—you urged me on—that is, you use the terminology, the local names, the things that will feel exotic to someone from somewhere else for several reasons. For one reason, you use whatever names, nouns, locutions come natural to you, and you don’t change them unless there is a reason. And the reason of trying to talk like everybody else is not a good reason, because those peculiarities are sometimes the flavorful part of what you are doing.
L.N.: Yes, that seems to make sense. There are problems with the words “region” and “regionalism” too, depending on how you define them.
W.S.: Yeah, that’s right.
L.N.: The associations vary a great deal. There was a survey of regionalism made by The South Dakota Review about ten years ago, and I believe you were in it and so were several other Northwest poets.
W.S.: I remember that.
L.N.: It was interesting to read the reactions, because, first of all, most of the people from the Northwest were in favor of the word regionalism. It seemed to me that the way they reacted to the word regionalism depended on how they defined it. Because it has been, especially in this country I think, associated with provincialism, things that cannot be appreciated outside the region; you know local in a negative sense; parochialism.
W.S.: Yes, that jumpiness I think comes from a historical thing that happened in the literature of the United States. There was the regionalism group, Hamlin Garland and so on. And there was the feeling that these people are quaint, they are limited, uninteresting. So some writers get jumpy about it. I don’t feel jumpy about it, partly because everyone is regional, place is everywhere. So I have a kind of joking way of identifying this: A national writer in America is a regional writer who lives in New York.
(Laughter.)
L.N.: That’s a good way of putting it. I see your point, even though I know there are others, like Richard Hugo, who in a conversation with you in the Northwest Review said that he thought there was more landscape coming into Northwest poetry than elsewhere. As an example he compared it to the work of W. S. Merwin, who, even though having lived all over the world, has no strong, continuous sense of place in his work. In your poetry one has that sense. I think Hugo has a point there, and it has to do with your poetics, with what kind of material you use for your poems.
W.S.: Well, maybe so. Northwest writers—it’s interesting that they are the ones who impinged on your attention as the ones who embraced regionalism—they like their region. But there are other regions where the writers like it too, the South for example. I’ll Take My Stand is the title of one book from the South. And Northwesterners take their stand. Hugo worked at it pretty hard to embrace regionalism. He had Duwamish and so on in his poems, all sorts of regional words.
L.N.: Does using regional material mean, as you see it, that the user becomes part of a kind of regionalism? How would you define the difference between being involved in a sense of place or in regionalism?
W.S.: Yes, I think in the parlance used in America, regionalism would imply that the writer is deliberately exaggerating the localness of material. That part of what the writer is counting on, and that the readers are savoring, is a flavor that is from elsewhere, or that is quaint. A sense of place would be different, I think, because you would not be deliberately exploiting or making hay out of the exoticness of the material; you would just be in the material, just be using what is natural to you in your kind of life. So there is a kind of a literary posturing that goes with regionalism, and sometimes they even use the odd spellings, you know, and they use words like “tarnation” and so on.
L.N.: Well, that was the charge levelled against many of the regionalists of the 30s, and the critics then used the term “local color.” But the regionalists separated regionalism, which they saw as the realistic investigation of the place, from local color, which stood for the quaint exaggeration, distortion, or exploitation.
W.S.: I can accept any of that terminology, it would not bother me.
L.N.: It’s interesting that you say that today, giving “sense of place” a positive meaning and calling regionalism the exaggeration, because it suggests a similar situation. Meanings change.
W.S.: I’m afraid language is like that.
L.N.: I read something in an essay by you called “The End of a Golden String,” where you say: “Retreating into the snug little weaving shed of the writer, I would advance, timidly, an idea contrary to the scholarly, the masterful, the eloquent. Sometimes it seems to me that a writer habitually touches the earth, touches home, clings to all that passes. Even to start a poem is to unreel stingily from the starting place, and to make each successive move out of minimum psychic expenditure ...
Let me say that a poem comes from a life, not a study.”
First, is this an understated retort to the theoreticians of “High Modernism,” supporting
objectivity, universality, timelessness? And secondly, is it unreserved support of the
openness to the subjective and particular impulses from one’s sense of place or region?
W.S.: Well, if I’d use your terminology I would embrace the last thing you said. I think it is openness to what comes to the person. In fact, I would base my aesthetic, such as it is, on this concept: That art comes from total experience, not just experience of other art. So it often seems to me that many people who are in the arts, and who are critics of art, assume that an artist is a person who learns from other artists. That art is like a relay race passed from Picasso to somebody else to me, you know. Well, Picasso is a little kid in some town and all those experiences have a bearing on his life and on his art. So to narrow it down to say that his art derives from other art is a drastic exclusion of the influences on a human being. So I would try to make art, and conceptualize art, and let my own art be an embracing of the whole experience. So I’ve tried, I even have some terminology, but it hasn’t taken a hold: It’s the tradition of total experience, rather than the tradition of art.
L.N.: Yes, I realize that there is an ironic line in one of your poems about Yeats, Eliot and Pound and how they studied art.
W.S.: That’s right, I remember how it goes. It’s from the poem “Things I Learned Last Week”: “Yeats, Pound and Eliot saw art as / growing from other art. They studied that.”
L.N.: In the Northwest, has the local poetry community been of importance? By “local poetry community” I simply mean other poets living in the area, local poetry magazines, local poetry readings, local presses, the various grants which have enabled writers to stay at home and dedicate themselves to writing, and so on. In short, does this reinforce a sense of place?
W.S.: Yes, I think those things are all important. To the community of artists here I’d also add bookstores, libraries. These things that are a part of your life are either convenient or inconvenient, and it helps—it helps me at least—to feel a part of a community. I feel sociable, and the existence of these other writers, say, just to restrict it to one element that is local, would be gratifying and stimulating. Partly because, maybe mostly because we just happen to be interested in the same things, and when we get together we have a lot to interchange about. Contrary to what many people say that writers are a close-mouthed group, and hide what they are doing from others, I found they are just as eager to sprawl all over the place and tell what they’re doing and try out things that they have done. Trying out things that one has done is not my style in the sociability of a group. I think it inhibits sociability. But I do enjoy the company of others who are doing writing.
L.N.: You have published seven major collections of poetry, but you have also published over two dozen small editions of poetry, mostly in the Midwest, but in the Northwest too. Can one interpret this as support for a decentralization of the literary publishing business, and support for local publishing?
W.S.: Yes, I’m a participant in small press publishing in the sense that it includes many small collections that I’ve published, still, I’m an outsider in the sense that it happened. I did not engineer it to happen, it just happened to me.
L.N.: Is that right?
W.S.: That is, people would say: “Don’t you have some poems we could make a chapbook out of?” This happened very recently, maybe things you have not seen which I have around here. I’ll show you. So whenever that’s part of sociability they say: “Well, I have this press, and I’m thinking of doing this and that;” or “I’ve already done a few and I would like to do something of yours. Do you have anything?” Well, if they’re really interested, sure I have things. I’m writing all the time. So these things have just trickled out by invitation, and they have been in the Northwest partly because I am here, and would meet people here, but they have been in other parts of the country, even in the central parts of the country, and so on. Wherever there is a small press. Just recently someone from New York had a press, and they published something of mine called The Quiet of the Land. They did a good job with the printing, and it happened just the way all the others happened. Someone said: “Don’t you have some poems we could put together?”
L.N.: Why do you think there is this great interest in publishing small editions? Is it the result of the National Endowment for the Arts, or is it partly because of the dissatisfaction with the New York publishers?
W.S.: Yes, well I guess it would seem that you would have to account for it since it grew up out of nothing. And you immediately alerted me when you said the National Endowment for the Arts; it’s true that they have nourished these things with money.
L.N.: They did in the past.
W.S.: Yeah, that’s right. Well, these things come and go, but there are always sources around here and there. The way I’d see it is this: You live somewhere in the country: you are interested in reading and writing and printing, and making things. And you don’t move to New York just in order to make a chapbook. You happen to be here, why go anywhere else? You have got a press here, the mail costs the same all over the country, and you can get as many poems in Hawaii as you could anywhere else. That is, if people are alert enough to realize that you don’t have to go and hand it to someone: you mail it. So, you know, you can live, you can put out Milkweed Chronicle in Minneapolis, or put out “Poetry Southwest” or something, wherever you are.
L.N.: It’s a fascinating situation, but it makes it very difficult too for the scholar to track things down because there is so much that is not available.
W.S.: Yeah, that’s right. The channels of distribution are centralized, but the printing is decentralized, so how do you get into the channels? That’s where the National Endowment tried to help, that’s where all sorts of things like Poets & Writers tried to help.
L.N.: Do you feel that establishing a major publishing house in the Northwest is of great importance? Do you think such a thing would alter Northwest poetry?
W.S.: Well, you know it’s happened, again and again. So establishing it and seeing it nourish and grow, those are two different things. Of course, there are publishers here who have been here for years, but in order to survive they have to turn to something other than pushing little chapbooks around in bookstores. They just can’t live like that. Now there are some that are doing fairly well now, I suppose Copper Canyon, Graywolf, Breitenbush, and so on. But the ones that have been here a long time and have sort of got solid like Binford-Mort; they do everything, rock climbing books, everything.
L.N.: The university presses seem to have cut down on their poetry publishing. In the 70s they published a great deal of poetry it seemed-the University of Washington would publish poetry, but now that does not seem to be the case.
W.S.: I have not really been aware of that myself, because what one university decides not to do, another university decides to do. It’s sort of like things bumping up all over the country, Ohio, Georgia. Southern Methodist, University of Utah, I don’t know, all sorts of places. It’s true, I do remember Washington put out quite a few, but for all I know they’d do another one if they get a hold of a good manuscript.
L.N.: Perhaps I am projecting a non-existent pattern onto some of your poems, but it seems to me that in those rare instances when other poets find their way into your poems, they seem to be Northwest or Western poets, like Roethke, Hugo, and Jeffers. And you have edited a book of Western poetry. I also know that you have written on other writers from other parts of the country, I can think of Thoreau and Willa Cather right off the top of my head. But does this mean that you feel a sort of kinship with Westerners, that these poets are somehow more intimately connected to you? Is that why they come up in poetry, or is this not really true?
W.S.: Well, I think it’s not my volition that has made this happen. It’s circumstances. For instance, one book that I wrote was called The Achievement of Brother Antoninus. Scott Foresman wrote to me and asked me to write in their series “The Achievement of …” They have several ones, and they said: “There are two people we are especially interested in at the moment, Richard Wilbur, up in New England, and William Everson. on the West Coast.” Well, I wrote back and I said: “I’ve always been fascinated by Richard Wilbur, and I have a lot of his books here. I’d like to write a book on Richard Wilbur.” Well, they ran into trouble because they could not get permission to use a lot of poems we needed for that book from Richard Wilbur’s publishers. So I wrote the book about Wiliam Everson, then you come along and say “How come you always write about Western writers?” And I say, well, you know, they thought of me in relation to Everson because we were both conscientious objectors, that’s one thing. And I did know him, not much, but I knew him a little. I knew him a lot better than I knew Richard Wilbur. But those things are partly in the minds of publishers.
I’ll give you a story that will maybe help you on your whole outlook. When I was in Alaska, the writers complained: “When we write something we send it out: if we get a pleasant response from a New York publisher they usually say something like: ‘Don’t you have some Alaska material?’ Because they think we live in Alaska, we must represent Alaska.” So you see that’s forced upon them.
L.N.: That’s been a complaint often, that things are imposed from the East as to what you are supposed to do as a Western writer too.
W.S.: Yes, I don’t feel imposed upon, I just feel it’s a quirk of the human mind. So it’s going to happen wherever you are. You know, if you are running a magazine you think: “Well, I want to know what the scene is like in New York.” So you get in touch with New York writers because they would already be steeped in it.
L.N.: I was thinking also when I said this about Western writers that you have written poems about Roethke and Hugo and Jeffers.
W.S.: That’s true. What you meet you react to. I have met them. I have also written poems about Eberhardt and ... (Stafford’s pause) Keats (laughs), and so on.
L.N.: But it seems to me though, that you do have an interest in Western poetry?
W.S.: Yes, I’m not denying an interest, but I’m just saying that it’s not a deliberate thing; it’s a spontaneous reaction to things that come to my attention.
L.N.: Yes, being in the West, they would come to your attention.
W.S.: Not long ago I had a letter from someone down in Kentucky. He sent me a newspaper clipping that was listing Southern writers, and it listed me. He said: ‘How come you’re in it?” Well, I have been sending things to Southern magazines.
L.N.: That’s interesting. Earlier I mentioned that dialog with Richard Hugo called “The Third Time the World Happens,” because in it you ask Richard Hugo: “Dick, some people are asking if there are characteristics peculiar to NW poetry.” And he replied: “I think maybe in Northwest poets there is a tendency to use more landscape ... There’s just less of the outside world gets into Eastern poetry, at least less than I see in the Northwest. I think that we go outside more than people do in the East.” So now, more than ten years later, I would like to ask you the same question.
W.S.: Well, I rejoiced in Hugo’s opinions, and his voicing of them, good and emphatic, and he sort of welcomed the world when he talked. But I don’t really feel this. I immediately think of someone like Robert Frost, “I’m going out to clean the pasture spring,” and so on. I don’t know whether you are outside in Montana in the winter (laughs) or outside in Florida in the winter, or something like that. So I just don’t quite know what to say about it. I think Hugo himself was a fisherman, and he liked those place names, so he was outside. Once he bought himself a car without a top you know. He took us for a tour in it, and we went to an Indian reservation and so on. He liked the outdoors, so he’d see that way.
L.N.: So you think that would be more his point of view?
W, S.: I think so.
L.N.: I don’t know if I mentioned it to you, but when I first read A Geography of Poets it really struck me that Northwest poetry had a lot of responses to the natural world to a much higher degree, it seemed to me, than poetry from other parts of the country.
W.S.: Well, editors choose. That is a geography of poets, you know.
L.N.: You know the book, right?
W.S.: Yeah, I do know it. I have copy. And they choose the things that link to the area they have chosen to make the focus. So it’s the Northwest, the California scene, the East, and so on. And I guess, if you are from somewhere else you think: what makes a Northwest poem? How are they going to tell it is a Northwest poem? Well, if it says Dungeness Spit, or it says Puget Sound or something like this, then it is the Northwest. So they do it that way. That would be one influence.
L.N.: I realize too that there is the bias of the editor, still I was just wondering.
Participating in a panel on regionalism in 1981, called “The Realities of Regionalism,” during a discussion on the importance of research, you wanted to put less emphasis on research and instead “maximize the sensitivity.” You said: “I think there’s another way to think about literature and regionalism. And that is that it’s not something you decide to do; it’s the recognition of a place you’re already in. And you just accept this, and you can’t help representing your region, because, to the degree that you belong there, you exactly do.” My question here is, if not this approach implies an established poetics with commitment and attention to the specifics and details of a place? A different kind of poetics would, under the same circumstances, produce an entirely different poem, perhaps entirely separated from this “place,” and still be a valid and good poem. We talked about this a little bit earlier, and perhaps I’m repeating the same question.
W.S.: Well, it’s always a little different; you come at it from a different angle. I can give you an example, and I can narrate my plight on this kind of issue. When I was travelling in Pakistan someone said to me: “Are you writing poems about Pakistan while you’re here?” And I was able to say, yes. But I did not want this person to go on and ask me more, because actually what I had been writing that morning, was a poem about the pattern of cracks on the ceiling in the hotel room. Now, is it in Pakistan? Yes. Is it a Pakistan poem? No. In fact, I think later that I modified that poem and sold it as “Cracks On the Ceiling in a Hotel in Pullman, Washington,” (laughs) or something like that. But that’s the way it started, and that illustrates what I am up against. You can say, yes, but it might signify more than you really mean.
L.N.: I see your point. But I really do think that you have a strong commitment in your poetry to the language you use, to details. And there is a concreteness, certain specifics in your poetry, which someone like Merwin does not have. In this respect he is not as specific; on the whole there is a certain vagueness as to the physical locality, even in a poem which might have been triggered by the same place. So what I’m saying is that two different kinds of poetics could react to the same place in totally different ways.
W.S.: Yes, I feel alive by touching the earth where I am, and this is said in various ways by various people. But I do feel local, willingly local, in fact gloriously local. And it’s just a matter of liking to eat the diet where you happen to live, and that’s both a fact and an ideal.
L.N.: Responding to the place you live in, is, as you have said, important to your work. This seems to me also to be related to the concept of home as well--something which comes up again and again in your work. In a relatively early essay called “Problems with Landscapes in Early Stafford Poems,” by Richard Hugo, he basically argues that you lack “emotional possession” of the Northwest landscape, something which, he also argues, is not true of course for your Midwestern poems. In 1970, how did you respond to this? And how do you feel today--has the Northwest become a home emotionally possessed?
W.S.: (Laughs) It’s easy to respond how I responded in 1970. I did not do anything. It did not have any effect. I like to hear Hugo, I like to read Hugo, but I did not take it seriously. And there are two reasons not to take it seriously: I did not feel that his harpoon got me. And the other thing is, that even if it should be true, or make a difference--and those are two different things--I would not want to respond to it because I wouldn’t want, artificially, to become a Northwesterner. I mean, if it happens naturally, that’s the way you do it: You are an artist. If you try to put it on, because grants are given to people who do that, then you’re neglecting those essential parts of your art that have to do with where it comes from in the most sensitive parts of your being. So there would be several reasons to shy away from paying much attention to that.
Now about now, oh ... yes, I’m at home. I’m still at home in the Midwest. I’m at home in the Northwest, I’m at home in the South. Anywhere--is the feeling, because for me the crucial parts of writing have to do with what is shared by all human beings. And what is shared by all human beings is so much more important than those superficial differences. Inhale, exhale. We share these important things with all living beings.
L.N.: Do you feel that living on the far edge of Western civilization, the “end” of European thought and culture--At the End of the Open Road, as Louis Simpson has called one of his books--gives you a perspective which enables you to evaluate it more easily?
W.S.: Yes, I’m familiar with Simpson’s At the End of the Open Road, ending in a used car lot in California and so on. Part of me says yes. I value perspective wherever it comes from, but there’s a part of me that isn’t quite ready to be sure that the geographical location of a writer in this age of communication is more than just kind of a metaphorical thing. I mean, I don’t think it’s an essential perspective giver. Of course, anything that helps is welcome, and you do want the perspective tied into events that are happening far away. Maybe the most crucial events are happening in China, in which case people in New York are as far from it as I am. Maybe they are happening in the Soviet Union, or Sweden, or wherever, and my suspicion is that they are happening somewhere none of us has figured out yet. So how can I tell how far away I am from it?
L.N. I should perhaps have been more specific in my question--to some extent I was asking about the end of the frontier. Perhaps there still is a frontier left in Alaska, definitely more so than here. But I see it as a clash, when the frontier myth which is so widely embraced by popular culture in this country, suddenly finds itself out of space here at the edge. There is no way left to go. You all of a sudden have to look back and you have this continent that has already been settled. And you have this myth which embodies so many things: That there is still open space, so go ahead and grab what’s there, use it and move on. And it seems to me that at that point when you have reached the end, there must be a reevaluation of this myth, or perhaps an emphasis on a different myth.
W.S.: Yes, well in my own life I feel a kind of yearning for the frontier, and I feel reluctance to rely on other people, for instance. And when Daniel Boone needs elbow room somewhat within a hundred miles, I understand that. So John Haines is a spectacular example of someone who sought all those miles, and I understand that too. It’s partly the impulse to do it yourself; if a tree is in the way my impulse is still to use an axe, and not a chainsaw. If I take a picture, I want to develop it, print it myself: if I could, I’d make the film and the camera. It’s sort of wanting to start at zero. Zero based technology. That is not a way to get ahead today. I mean nobody can do it, of course. It’s a real fantasy. If you’re into computers, that does not mean that you’re into the theories of computers and doing the parts, it means that you are using what other people have done. I’m still reluctant to do that.
L.N.: That’s interesting. It strikes me as a European too, because we don’t have that desire to the same extent, because we, for so long, by necessity, have been forced to rely upon each other, and also, the government has had such power over people’s actions for centuries that people know that they cannot do what they want to do because the government will restrict them.
W.S.: Yeah, there is that different feeling. I am very much part then, of that Western feeling. But our son Kim has a story for you. He was with a group of writers, and when they were talking about someone who had a word processor, somebody spoke up and said: “What, you use a word processor? I couldn’t do that, I have my electric typewriter.” Another person said: “Electric typewriter! I have my manual typewriter.” Someone else spoke up and said: “I use a pencil!” Right on down.
L, N.: I really sense this, especially in Western poetry, a Western myth or something
related to the frontier feeling.
W.S.: Well, I’d like to put in this, that maybe all artists have that feeling of frontier, and maybe this is too closely tied to the chances of history when we think of it as a human impulse. It may be the impulse to do it yourself, you know, do the painting yourself, do a piece of music, compose the music, write the book, and in that sense we all always live on the frontier. It’s just a question of recognizing it. And maybe people who create things, or people who feel that edge, that others don’t feel, want to go beyond that edge. That kind of Daniel Boone impulse to get into Kentucky or to get into “How would it feel if I put in more violins?” sort of thing.
L.N.: It seems to me that the complex of values and attitudes commonly referred to as the “Frontier Mentality,” stressing the lack of restrictions on personal behavior; that progress always is seen in terms of expansion of human enterprise; the vision of waiting resources or potential for the ambitious individual, and so on, even though firmly rooted in the popular culture, has very little support among poets. And I’m thinking now about its ecological implications. Because as we have seen, the consequences of technology have been disastrous. Do you feel that Northwest poets especially take a stand, and do you yourself take a strong stand on this?
W. S.: I do take a stand myself, and I do think Northwest writers take a stand on this. For several reasons. For one thing, it’s possible from out here to view Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and say no, no, let’s not have it happen. So it’s a perspective that we are talking about. Also, the Northwest happens to exist in a more pristine--it’s not pristine, but it’s more so--than places that have suffered the disasters that have alerted us to this danger. So in my own life I feel living at the edge, that’s always interested me, but I also feel the vaingloriousness of assuming that you can bend the world any way you want to. You can’t do that. And I’m quite ready to knuckle under, and to say uncle to the forces of nature. So it’s sort of a complex situation for me: I like the Daniel Boone impulse, but I do not trust the universal and everlasting availability of that kind of frontier.
L.N.: In a fairly recent issue of the Northwest Review, called The Nuclear Peril, you contributed a poem which clearly had, I think, what most people would call political implications. Just as a great many medical doctors have organized “Physicians for Social Responsibility,” do you feel that poets, or perhaps more generally poetry, has a responsibility to stress humanistic and life preserving values, and provide a sense of ecological awareness? Or is it simply a responsibility we must have as human beings?
W.S.: Well, I think it would be desirable if all human beings had this feeling of responsibility, but it is true that the activities of some human beings promote in them vision, perspective. They are sort of outriders for civilization, and the poets live by that commitment, I guess, to being available to the implications of things. Northwest poets, and poets in general of course, have been gung ho participants in these reforms, or in the perception of the need for reform. So that’s very much part of my life and it would be nice if we all agreed about that, but I can understand that someone who is working in a coal mine wants to know where the job is going to be before he wants to quit mining coal. So it behooves us not only to see the danger from black lung, and, you know, smoke, hut also to stay and be sympathetic with, and cooperative with people who are going to do something that will enable all human beings to have that kind of perspective.
L.N.: In poetry though, you have said too in an essay that “intent endangers creation.”
W. S.: Yes.
L.N.: And to adopt a stance where you say that poets have that responsibility, does not poetry move into that dangerous zone again here, where intent, where trying to provide a perspective could be dangerous for the creative act?
W.S.: Well, maybe you noticed that I sidled into that last issue by saying it seems to me that it would be a nice thing if everybody were alert, but the circumstances of some people make them alert. And if that alertness comes naturally to you out of your whole life, that’s what you use when you write poetry. But if you have been persuaded by someone who comes to your door and tells you about the ecological peril, and won’t you quickly write us a poem about it, then your intent to be helpful will make that sensibility that you use suffer, because you will be turning away from some of the signals you get from your whole self in order to devote a part of yourself to what someone else has told you you ought to be. It just seems to me as a writer, that you lose something when you do that, Of course, you gain something too, but what you gain in social effectiveness you lose in that outrider feeling, that uniqueness that you have.
L.N.: In 1970, in an essay-review called “At Home on Earth,” you wrote: “There is a stillness about the ecological threat. We are surrounded, but the danger hardly appears--but it is there. Was there yesterday, but not so demanding.” How do you feel about those words today, 15 years later?
W.S.: Of course, the threat is getting louder and louder, more things are getting through to us. I remember--I had forgotten the title of that review--the editor of The Hudson Review sent me this big box of ecological books and asked me to do that review. I thought it was a burden, they were so big!
L.N.: Yes, you mentioned in the review that some of those books were about 900 pages long, and there were a dozen books.
W.S.: Yes, I went through those, and was properly horrified in various ways. I feel essentially the same way, I mean, the ecological threat is still relatively quiet. It’s possible to go live in polluted air for quite a while, it may not get you for years. But it’s getting you all the time. So our intellect can be alerted, we can supplement our senses with our intellect, and that’s what we ought to do.
L.N.: That review, “At Home on Earth,” reveals that you gave twelve books on various aspects of ecology a great deal of sustained critical attention. Have your concern and interest in ecological matters continued with the same intensity over the years?
W.S.: Yes, you know the magazines we get here, such things as National Wildlife, the Sierra Club things and so on. Like many people in our circumstances, in the arts, or in academic life, we are aware of these things. Now, I did feel that as a burden when I got that boxful of big, heavy books, and it was a distraction from my usual life and kind of writing--it was not poetry. I felt harnessed to the plow. Still, I felt it was something I ought to do, and I would probably feel the same again, but I would be sorry: Why not somebody else?
L.N.: Many of your poems evoke an ominous and pessimistic view of man’s fate, which you seem to relate to the application of modern technology to nature. Just to quote one little thing here called “Scientists” in Tuft by Puff’
These intellectuals banging their heads
till they flare—
they are burning the world down.
W.S.: I had forgotten about that.
L.N.: There are several other poems like “Stadium High, Tacoma” from Sometimes Like a Legend, or “Ferns” from the same book which opens: “After the firestorms that end history,” or the one “With a Gift of a Flower, for the First / Birthday of the Computer of Humble / Oil on the North Slope of Alaska” from Going Places, and so on. There are several other poems, but I’m not going to list them all here. Is the position of poetry in today’s society like giving a flower to a computer?
W.S.: (Laughs) No, I don’t think so. It seems to be natural to compare art to something fragile like a flower, but I never have felt that way about art. I have felt that—well, Wordsworth said something like this: “When the scientist goes as far as he can, poetry will be right beside him.” I have this feeling too, that it is not something that is a frill, or an expendable thing, but it’s going to be with everyone forever. I mean, that kind of impulse. I mean the distinctions you make between natural impulses and inhibited ones. The joy you feel on some occasions and not on others, so long as you are alive you feel these differences, and those differences are what make poetry.
L.N.: Are you pessimistic though about man’s fate?
W.S.: Yes, yes I am, intellectually. There were a couple of people here yesterday, or the day before from up at Tacoma, or near there, who are doing a kind of oral history. I want to mention them to you. One of them is named Steve Jaech, he teaches at Steilacoom Community College, and he and a historian from Seattle were here and they had told me they had also interviewed a historian who is an unusual, unusually good professor up there. And they said: “He is very pessimistic, but he seems happy!” (Laughs) Yeah. I understand it. Animal spirits is one thing, but cool assessment is another. But there is another way to look at it, and that is--and I tried this on those two who came too--we don’t know enough to be pessimistic.
L.N.: It’s a good thing to keep in mind.
I would also like to quote a passage from the essay “Writing the Australian Crawl:” “We must forgive ourselves and each other much, in our writing and in our talking. We must abjure the ‘I wrote this last night and it looked good, but today I see it is terrible’ stance. When you write, simply tell me something. Maybe you can tell me how we should live” This last line interests me a lot. There seems to be an implication here that even if the individual poem is started without direct, willful intent as far as writing a particular poem, there seems to be an underlying assumption behind the creative act that would like to discover a guide of some sort. That is, that the poem to some extent is defined in terms of its moral function. And this, then, relates to man’s relationship to other men, to nature, and to God. Would you agree to this?
W.S.: Yes, I would agree to that. And just to expand on it a little, or try to justify this quick embrace of that idea: It seems to me that moral positions are really derived from aesthetic considerations. That is, “the Good Book” is a good book. If it weren’t a good book, it wouldn’t be “the Good Book.” That back of, unbeknownst to individuals, their positive response to life giving things is the source of their moral values. So, it might seem as if you were heroically harnessing art to something that is different, but I think that you are just recognizing that the trouble with the bad life is that it does not feel good, ultimately. And all decisions that you make have to do with the quality of living.
L.N.: There is a revealing anecdote in the opening section of the essay “Making a Poem / Starting a Car on Ice,” which says something about the function of poetry on the most elemental and pragmatic level. Do you remember, the poem about no smoking while you were at the University of Washington?
W.S.: Oh yeah, yeah.
L.N.: The moral of the story, with that explicitly created poem representing poetry that “should function as a part of the information system for society,” as that student put it, is that poetry does not work on this level, that poetry is not read as instruction. The poem is understood as a message which has no relation to the actions of one’s daily life.
W.S.: (Laughs)
L.N.: Is it correct to assume, then, that in view of your hope for poetry--”Maybe you can tell me how we should live”--that the problem resides in the general reader, and not in the ambition of the artist?
W.S.: Yes, I, you know … I’ll have to think this one over. But to respond as directly as I can, it seems to me that even instruction is literature. I mean, this person who sees the sign which in effect says “No Smoking,” when I say it’s a poem, he says: “Oh, well,” and then smokes. It’s an attitude toward what is creative, and what is creative is a trying out of things. You read it not as gospel, and not as instruction, but as an excursion of the intellect and the feelings.
I guess I can’t go do it as bluntly as I started out when I said even instruction is a poem. But I would say, ideally for me, no matter what anyone said to me, I would view it, or take it, as something aesthetic. I mean, not--What does that person say? but What does that mean?--when a person says that. Enlarge the frame. Political speeches think they are delivering information. No, no. I say, what does it mean when so and so says that. And of course analysts, that’s exactly what they do. They say: “Well, the reason this happens is that this is a certain kind of posturing getting ready for the summit, you know, something like that,” Sure. So we understand that. It still has meaning, but it’s not true. (Both laughing)
Well, I think you’ve got to take in art, and in reading, and in thinking that there is no local determination. That is, there is no holding place; there are just a whole bunch of influences. So you could have this little poem that induces people not to smoke--it does not instruct them not to smoke--it induces them not to smoke, So it could still have an inducing value, without being prohibition. I don’t know, it’s complex.
L.N.: Yes, it is a complex thing. The effects of art, as you say, are inducive ...
W.S.: A poem is something that enlarges your life. Even when it seems to be instructing you to do something destructive, in the context, it might be something positive. I mean, there are ironies, even I, in my mild way, have those in my poems. And if someone would isolate a part of it, they’d say: “Why do you say that?” Well, the total effect of the poem might be the opposite. Well, I’m just stirring around in the complexity of all this.
L.N.: Yes, it seems to me too that the poems that are written, say, about nuclear peril in that Northwest Review issue, are basically saying: “Don’t drop the Bomb!” That’s the bottom line of all those poems.
W.S.: But apparently that’s not enough. You know, the poem’s got to do something else. It’s got to give the reader an experience of a life that’s so good they don’t want to drop the bomb. Something like that. So it’s not enough to give instruction, even when you are giving instruction. Human beings have some bounce in them, that will react. They won’t be just an inert receiver of a message.
L.N.: In “The SAR Interview” in 1972 you were asked: “What new writers on the current scene impress you the most?” You answered Robert Lowell. But then you went on to say the following: “The next, sustained, influential poet will come with few sounds of bells and cymbals, I suspect; he may come looming at us from a regional or somehow a continuous sense of aim--maybe someone like Wendell Berry.” No poet, except for possibly Gary Snyder, has been more intimately associated with a combination of sense of place and ecological concerns. How do you see your statement today about Berry or the next poet coming from that direction?
W. S.: I think I was maneuvered into identifying someone of influence rather than someone of transcendent poetic value. They are two different things, and it is just as hard now as it was then to know who that is. You know, I could give you some different names. Lowell’s gone; Gary Snyder is a guru, rather than a poet in a certain sense, and maybe the same is true about Wendell Berry. So, I’d give you different names, but I’m subject to the same fallibility as everybody else, of course, so that my criticism of those who are now recognized would also be, implicitly, criticism of the unrecognized. But of course I have my opinions. And that’s the way we gradually come to realize: Who is this, who has begun to loom?
L.N.: Well, I was thinking about what you said here during our talk, that poetry should come from one’s whole way of life, and so on, and I understand that ecological concerns and these other things that we have talked about are of great importance to you. Do you also see that they would be important, or be an important part of another new, major American poet?
W.S.: No, I don’t. I think, insofar as I am adequate to conceptualize all this, that poetry is always a surprise. I couldn’t predict that a person would have ecological concerns who would be a transcendent poet. For all I know, there are more insidious dangers than the ecological one. Insidious may not be the word, but, you know, less seen or less understood, less perceived. On the other hand there may be more positive glories, incipiently, in the surrounding human beings than I perceived. That’s what I hope to find out from the speaker. So I couldn’t predict what kind of concern they would have. For instance, Lowell, I don’t remember any ecological concerns in his poems. They are all something else--they were social, that is, within the psyche. And there may be wondrous, new developments in the psyche, or, on the other hand, terrible ones that no poet has happened on at the moment.
L.N.: I think one can safely say that a poet like Theodore Roethke was a kind of neotranscendentalist, believing that the divine is manifested in nature, and that man’s goal is a mystical union with nature, and so on. In several of your poems, for example “By the Deschutes Shores” and “Crossing the Desert,” you also explicitly see nature as a religious domain. Apart from Roethke’s mystical desire, do you share his views in this respect?
W, S.: Well, one short answer is no. But that human beings should find themselves writing poems in which the things and processes, the sort of flavors and emanations of nature, should be significant, and mysteriously significant, is not to make those poets very close: it just indicates that they are both human beings. I mean, nature has this all but universal effect, and if you find yourself oriented toward that kind of metaphor it is not surprising that you would come up with what seems to be similar religious attitudes. But my own religious attitudes would be not necessarily connected with any of my poems.
L.N.: So you don’t have a fascination for the transcendental movement then?
W.S.: Oh, I’m interested, but not committed.
L.N.: There is a poem of yours called “Atavism,” in Roving Across Fields, and it struck me that it is very close to a passage in Roethke’s “North American Sequence,” in the poem “The Far Field,” where the protagonist of the poem--a young boy--sits on a log in a river and slides into the sand, and sort of experiences having been a part of evolution. Which is also something that comes into your poems, a feeling of close kinship with animals and plants. You know, accepting the fact that we have been different natural forms.
W.S.: Yeah, I remember a Roethke poem like that, you know, a worm or something. “I may be a worm someday.”
L.N.: Is there a connection here?
W.S.: Well, I can’t help smiling when I think about this because for me, writing a poem is trying on a coat in a store. That’s a coat I tried on, and it felt good. But there are other coats, is the sort of feeling I have. It’s not an identification of me or my views or commitments, it is an excursion into an area that I have heard about and want to try. Something like that. No one poem feels like the coat I wear all my life. You know, I’ve got sweaters, sweater coats, hooded jackets, all sorts of things.
L.N.: I wish I had brought the quote from the critic who said something like: “Mr. Stafford never uses persona.”
W.S.: Is that right?
L.N.: Yes, somebody said that. I can’t remember exactly where I saw that, I have gone through so much stuff.
W.S.: That’s fantastic!
L.N.: Yes, because it really threw me off.
W.S.: Well, maybe he is saying that you don’t reach for a voice, find a voice. I don’t like that idea myself. However, I immediately think of a poem in which I’m an old guitar up in Alaska. Is that persona or not? (Laughs)
L.N.: Yes, Jonathan Holden points out that somebody had interpreted “Some Shadows,” the line about Hawk, “I am his son” as straight biography and drawn some interesting, but obviously false conclusions from it.
W.S.: Yes, I just tried on that coat.
L.N.: Yes, that was another coat. But I had another little question that I thought of when we talked about being part of evolution. What are the consequences in your life and poetry of acknowledging this heritage?
W.S.: Well, that’s different. I do feel a part of evolution, as a short way of saying a complex thing. A consequence of accepting that is that you are suspicious of individual human beings who speak to you as if they have corralled some total wisdom in the world, or something like that. I feel a part of it. We’re all worms together there. (laughs)
L.N.: I was wondering about the poems where you assume the perspective of nature, adopting the view of a plant or animal. Roethke said: “I can project myself easier into a flower than a person.” There are several poems of yours which speak from an animal persona. For example, the untitled poem which begins: “After they passed I climbed / out of my hole and sat I in the sun again” in Eleven Untitled Poems.
W.S.: (Laughs) Yes, persona again.
L.N.: And in “Terms of Surrender” in Going Places, “Beaver Talk” in Tuft by Puff, and so on. For Roethke, many of these animistic impulses had a religious-mystical purpose, from where do these impulses come in your work?
W.S.: Just variety, just to be somebody else like a beaver or something for a while. What he said about speaking for a flower more easily than for a human being is a creative thing to say. Not necessarily true, but it’s a challenge, it’s an exercise, it’s exciting, it’s an exploration to be somebody else or something else for a while. I like to try that.
L.N.: There is another dimension too. Somebody like Gary Snyder takes it up on the level of responsibility from the ecological point of view, that poets have a responsibility to speak for the wilderness, to be their representatives since they have no way of speaking out for themselves against the destruction from us.
W.S.: It’s scary out there when you get to thinking about such things as that. It might be that the animals have a responsibility to die for the wilderness that we are creating, which is a different wilderness but a wilderness nevertheless. I mean, human beings have a feeling that what they create will be ordered, somehow superior. Alas, I don’t think that. It’s a wilderness all over again with different animals called human beings.
L.N.: I would like to ask you a little bit about your use of American Indian material in your poetry. One thing that interests me is, again, the function of poetry. The function of the stories, myths and legends within the culture of the North American Indians was--and now I’m loosely paraphrasing Jarold Ramsey’s introduction to Coyote Was Going There--to transmit practical knowledge, history, morality, religion, myths, and to entertain. All this was through story telling. By adopting the American Indian story form in many of your poems, or using that type of material, do you hope to see poetry established on similar terms in our culture today? Is it even possible to talk about the function of poetry in today’s society, or is poetry, as some critics have it, simply a fairly exclusive club?
W.S.: I do think it’s possible to talk about function of poetry in today’s society; it’s a problem, but talking about anything is as far as I am concerned. That’s a function.
But so far as the material in my poems is concerned, it’s just something that happened to come along to me when I was writing and thinking. I suddenly realized that just this morning, again, when I was writing, there are some Indians in that thing! It’s about some people who come down from timberline to the Yukon Highway, and they watch the cars go by. And they think: “This is civilization? Does this go on for ever?” And things like that. And the last line says something like: “They do not feel the need to tell their story.” Now, I don’t know whether that would be true of Indians, but it occurred to me, when I was writing, that they do not feel the need to tell their story. It was just the line that appealed to me. So I put it in my poem.
So I’ve just used that as a kind of emblem of how it comes to me, They are a salient group, they are in evidence around us, some of my best friends are Indians. That sort of feeling. By the way, there are some in Portland that might interest you. Do you know a person named Ed Edmo?
L.N.: I’ve seen the name in several periodicals.
W.S.: He’s an Indian, and he frequently calls up to let me know of his latest triumphs.
Sort of a war dance, Ed Edmo. And there are others around, Klamath Jackson, he was in a Conscientious Objectors’ camp and he lives in Portland. So it’s just part of the world, it just gets into some of-the poems.
L.N.: I recently also saw that a part of your heritage was American Indian.
W.S.: Well, Dorothy laughs about this. My father had this story, he said: “Uncle Charlie, he said that he were part Indian and were from the Crowfoot group in upstate New York.” and so on. Actually I have heard that anyone who has been in America very long, I mean some generations, have got Indian blood because the Indians were here. But I couldn’t get any allotment on the reservation or anything like that. But every now and then Ed Edmo sort of treats me as an Indian, and other Indians do partly because I show up in those anthologies of Indian writers. I like that.
L.N.: So it’s an identification with their values or their attitudes that in many ways appeals to you too?
W.S.: It does appeal to me. But if I could claim to be black, I would, because that’s also part of the scene that I would like to share.
L.N.: What do you think the most important contribution of the culture of the Indians would be to modern American civilization?
W.S.: I think for most Americans they are a metaphor.
L.N.: You mean as place is a metaphor?
W.S.: Yeah, they are a reference point in thinking. The people who were here before, the old days, something different, from outside looking in. They stand for difference, they stand for when the continent was unspoiled. They certainly are not that now--they are in the continent as much as we are. Someone said when I was up in Alaska: “If you want to see pollution, you ought to visit an Indian village.” So they said. So, you know, the mystique of it is on a shaky foundation I think, but the metaphorical significance of it is very important. So you can have literary articles on palefaces and redskins and so on.
L.N.: So it’s primarily as metaphor rather than as anthropological source.
W.S.: I’m afraid so.
L.N.: Today several American Indian writers have established themselves. This is a fairly recent development in American literature, and in terms of your own work, has this been an important source of stimulation?
W.S.: Yes. But it’s not just recently. Well, when I was a kid, I would be reading people like Lew Sarrett. Have you ever heard of him?
L.N.: No.
W.S.: Canadian poet. Or I would be reading James Willard Shultz. He was white, but he lived with the Blackfoot Indians. He wrote My Life as an Indian. I just devoured these books. Come to think about it, I just reread James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, about Chingachgook, the Mohican (laughs) and all that. Well, these books are part literary, they came to me through literature. But they came through to me through literature by way of some Indian writers. Eastman was one. Very few Indians went to Harvard in those days and became writers, but they were imaginatively important in what I read. And I would read books by someone named Altsheler, old series of frontier books. Or many, many Stewart Edward White, James Oliver Curwood, Jack London, people like that.
L.N.: It’s perhaps more that the Indian writers are receiving a great deal of attention now.
W.S.: Yes, it’s like saying that the women’s movement started in the seventies or sixties. No, no, it started in day one. (Laughs)
L.N.: In an interview with Kip Stratton in The Greenfield Review, you talked about your interest in native American culture a little bit. You said: “And then when you begin to write, one of the many effects of entering an art is, I think, that you are ready for the salient and extreme elements in your life. And one of the salient elements is the Indian element. It sort of stands for when the continent was cleaner and purer and better, more interesting.” This last sentence sounds like something Gary Snyder would say ...
W.S.: Yes!
L.N.: ... when he argues that the life of pre-historic man, or before man was organized into cities, was actually superior to that of modern civilization.
W.S.: Yes, unspoiled countryside. Yeah, I share that. You know we go hiking into the wilderness looking for it. People will walk a long way and scramble over mountains to get that feeling. People go to Alaska for that reason, and stay there. And they go off to Hawaii-or the South Seas or the Alps, and go skiing and so on, and all those impulses I share. Or to Sweden. (Laughs)
L.N.: Yes, lots of wilderness there. I also have that instinctive desire to get lost in the woods; it’s easy if it’s right outside your door.
W.S.: I like the idea of getting lost, but in one of my poems I have someone accuse me of not being able to get lost. It’s called ‘The Preacher at the Corner.” He suddenly turns to me and says something like: “You can’t get lost!”
* * *
This interview was originally published in Studia Neophilologica Vol. 59, pp. 41—57, 1987.