new film on stafford & war

"Every War Has Two Losers" tells the story of how one man, William Stafford (1914-1993), choose to answer the call to war. It is a story of confronting beliefs that swirl around war - Isn't war inevitable? Even necessary? What about the enemy? Stafford refused to fight in World War Two and served four years in camps for conscientious objectors.

--from the film's website.

On the same day I found a video online about poetry and war, The Stafford Archives posted a link to the newly released documentary on William Stafford's writings on war. The film is entitled "Every Was Has Two Losers," the same name as the book that collected WS's writings on peace and war.

The film is directed by Haydn Reiss. The website can be found at everywar.com.

Poets and writers featured in the film include Coleman Barks, Robert Bly, John Gorka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael Meade, M.S. Merwin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Kim Stafford, and Alice Walker. Even if you've never heard of William Stafford, it would be worth to see the film just for these great voices.

If the film is anything like the trailer, it should be pretty good. I'm hoping to get my hands on a copy of the dvd sometime, so check back to this blog in the next couple months for a review.

For now, here's the trailer.

Committing Poetry In A Time Of War

Here's a film not about Stafford, but one he would certainly find interest in. "Committing Poetry In A Time Of War" tells of poets speaking out against the war in Iraq during the Bush administration and attempts to control these dissenting voices.

archives unveil new website

The William Stafford Archives just went public with a new website at williamstaffordarchives.org.

As of this posting, WS's first two books, West Of Your City and Traveling Through The Dark have been entirely digitized, including book pages, early drafts and typescripts, and audio files for each poem. The site also has archival videos of WS reading poems, plus photos of the poet. Tools for teaching and research are also planned.

Book Collecting & 'Traveling Through The Dark'

I've done some research into the copy of Traveling Through The Dark I found at my local used bookstore, and found that it is not a first edition. According to First Editions of Today and How to Tell Them (4th ed., by Wanda Underhill, Berkeley, CA: Peacock Press, 1965), Harper & Row placed the words "First Edition" on the verso (copyright page) of books printed in letterpress. I confirmed that the book was printed with letterpress by the presence of ligatures, or joined characters, a common practice in letterpress to save space and ink.

While these aren't very clear, here is a scan of ligatures from the poem "Elegy" (page 13)--the "f" connected to the next letter in the words "cornfield" and "flower".






And here is the verso, which lacks any mention of the book being a first edition or first printing.





While it would be nice to own a first edition of Stafford's first book to be printed by a major press and the winner of the National Book Award, this volume is in very good condition, and likely worth more than the very reasonable purchase price. But the literary value of the poems themselves is the most rewarding.

to open this book is to spread the curtains wide

I've been pretty busy, and haven't been able to give much time to reading poetry, let alone Stafford. But then yesterday, Stafford came up in a conversation with a friend who knows of my interest in his work. The syllabus for a seminary class this friend and I will be taking together in the fall suggests WS as a possible author to research and present on as a theopoet--a writer whose work engages the imagination and reveals the divine that is within and around all of our daily living. After our conversation, I pulled "The Way It Is" off the shelf for the first time this summer, and happily started reading again. Then just as I begin to think of WS again, he enters my world in an even more tangible, and exciting way.

As I was running errands today in downtown Richmond, Indiana, I thought I'd go browse my local used bookstore. I wasn't planning on making any purchases, but was just interested to see what was there, and if anything new came in I might find worthwhile. I spent my usual five or ten minutes in the religion section, then stepped over to the poetry books. I always check first for any work by Stafford, even though the store owner said he didn't ever sell any Stafford when I had asked a few years back. It's rare that my Stafford searches are successful, but today, my eyes fell on a copy of Traveling Through The Dark, Stafford's 1962 National Book Award winner. The store owner said, jokingly I think, that he might raise the price if I kept saying how amazing of a find it was, so I bought it quickly.

When I got home, I did some looking around online, and found a signed first edition in fine condition for $450. There's no direct evidence that my copy is a first edition (I still need to do some more research on the book and publisher), and the condition is not quite fine (though my untrained eye says it's pretty close), but I would think it would be worth more than the four dollars I payed for it. Whatever it's worth, it's now sitting on my shelf with my growing Stafford collection, but it's too valuable in other ways to just sit there unappreciated. Before I got the book I had read most of the poems in the book in other places, but as I read the title poem from those 1962 pages today, it was a completely new experience. Here's what I wrote soon after I got home from the store.

Upon Finding “Traveling Through The Dark”
by Travis Poling

To open this book is to spread the curtains wide
in the middle of the day; reading
“Traveling Through The Dark” brings
as much light into the room, eyes opening
to images and brightness of what is most real
but barely seen. The yellowed pages
of the first printing years ago is daylight pushing out past
the bookstore two miles away, into my house as I rise early—
this sun calls me to its bright source. In the store I read
of messengers and premonitions, then return the book of angels
to its slot between prayer and scripture, turn again, and step
to the stacks of poetry, scanning the named edges
beside the window.

I happened to find two new sites from the Stafford Archives today as well, William Stafford Archives blog, and StaffordArchives.org.

Stafford's college receives his papers and journals

Last week Lewis & Clark College reported that the personal collection of papers and journals from William Stafford are moving to the college's archival facilities. The college already houses a substantial collection of Stafford's works, but this bequest contains much more:

The William Stafford Archive is a collection of 40 years of daily journals and papers representing the poet’s methodical and disciplined writing process, as well as his world travels on behalf of writing and reconciliation...The collection also includes 90 discs of recordings from William Stafford poetry readings, fine press broadsides, and 15,000 photos he took over the course of his life

The college's president said

“This vast treasure will enormously enhance the capacity for the research and study of Bill Stafford for writers, students and scholars from around the world.”

The possibility of traveling to Portland and sitting in the archives for weeks is tempting, but for many, unrealistic. Fortunately, the news gets even better:

The library plans to digitize the entire collection over the next two years and make it available online, enhancing scholarly research for historians, writers, and students alike.

New webpage on Stafford scholarship

This spring I've been toying around with a website, and finally put up a page on Stafford. A major purpose of this new page is to link specifically to scholarship on Stafford that is already online--articles, tributes, interviews and more. The url is a a little bit of a hassle to remember, but here it is: http://poling.travis.googlepages.com/stafford. I've entitled the page "Pieces of a Different World" after a poem in the new collection of Stafford's early work. If there's anything you would like to see on the page, let me know. This blog will keep going, but I will start to migrate some of the content from here over to there. This blog will remain as a home for more reflective pieces, while the webpage will play home to deeper scholarly work.

Article on Stafford in Brethren news publication

In the April 22, 2008 issue of the Church of the Brethren Newsline, Brian Nixon, a member of the Church of the Brethren recounts a poetry reading William Stafford gave at the denomination's 1991 Annual Conference in Portland, OR. I'm pretty certain I was at that conference, but I didn't know anything about Stafford then, at age 12.

Nixon tells this story:

As an impressionable college student, I looked over the plethora of lectures, seeing one that read, "Poetry Reading: William Stafford." This sounded great to me, but I was unsure of exactly who Stafford was. As a member of the Church of the Brethren, I had heard of Mr. Stafford, but was not yet quite "into" him. I knew he published a book of poetry with Brethren Press called "A Scripture of Leaves," and was well loved among the Brethren folk.

But as I stood there and looked at the other conference offerings, I finally decided upon a folk group concert instead (you see, I was "into" music).

Read the rest here.