Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford by Kim Stafford

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford Reviews

• 
  Derek

  Kim Stafford’s Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford is mostly meta. It’s a book about words and growing up with the great poet William Stafford as a father; it’s a book about being designated William Stafford’s literary executor; it’s a book about writing a book about a man who works with words. Clearly, Kim writes for an academic audience, and for people familiar with his father’s work. Some people would hate it. I ate it up. William is a badass, a pacifist who carries a gun but uses it to light a book of matches lying on the pavement. William is a stoic father like mine: “Most expressive in his poetry,” Kim writes, “he could be reticent in life”; my dad has little affinity for speaking but loves Shakespeare. I am like William in that I wake early to write.
  
  William had a lifelong habit of writing each day before dawn, and his customary writing time was 4 a.m. “In the cell of his writing time, [he was] alive earlier than anyone, more alert in the welcome, listening,” Kim writes (5). William wrote several times about this routine: “To get up in the cold, then make a warm place, have paper, pen, books to hand, look out at gleaming rain, shadows, the streetlight steadfast… (148). More extensively appreciative:
  
  This way of writing is available to anyone who wishes to rise and listen, to put words together without fear of either failure or achievement. You wake. You find a stove where you make something warm. You have a light that leaves much of the room dark. You settle in a place you have worn with the friendly shape of your body. You receive your own breath, recollection, the blessings of your casual gaze. You address the wall, the table… (6)
  
  As William got older he got up earlier, rising at 3 a.m. instead of 4. He could afford to “squander everything before light, and take a nap later in the day.”
  Yet better than the pages that worked as mirrors for me were the pages that worked as windows, where I read about what I did not understand or already (try to) do myself. There are so many lessons in this book, and here I take them from Kim, who paraphrased them from William, and offer them again:
  
  LESSONS MOSTLY ABOUT WRITING, TEACHING, AND WORDS
  Words can begin to express how it is in hard times, especially if the words are relaxed, direct in their own plain ways (4). Maybe I should have made shoes, like Tolstoy. With shoes, you know when you are done. With teaching, you never know (83). Do it now; do the hard part first (93). Can I write words to carve in stone at the transit mall? Can I write a song for saving a river? Can I write a blessing for an art school? Can I write a play to honor the life of a particular child? Can I write a poem for the wall of the pediatric intensive care waiting room? Yes, always yes (97). When I write a poem… it’s like seeing a strip of the universe between the slats of a picket fence. You are passing, and between the pickets you glimpse a little of what’s beyond (112). I don’t want to write good poems. I want to write inevitable poems (135). If you don’t welcome all your ideas when they first appear, pretty soon even your bad ideas won’t come to you. They will learn to stay away (156). If you are writing and you get stuck, lower your standards and keep going. (And my standards can get really low) (156). When you are writing and it gets hard, don’t stop. It’s hard because you are doing something original (156). The question isn’t when did I start writing, but when do most people stop – and why? (183). One should think like a philosopher, but speak in the common idiom (245). Writers are not called upon so much to be smart, as to be alert (276).
  
  LESSONS ABOUT WHAT WILLIAMS CALLS 'THE EMERGENCY OF BEING ALIVE'
  A fact so pervasive as love need never be named (10). Do what the world needs and lick your wounds alone (13). Let your true self appear in a wild state. Do not be a saint (17). The Great Depression could be rich for a poor family that loved to read and talk. Without prosperity, we were free to revel in the local and the everyday (36). I work at a college, but I work for a cause bigger and farther away – the unknown good in our enemies (52). Two unspoken rules: Don’t do the wrong thing. Don’t live the wrong life (69). Obey any request, but with an independent spirit (97). The last star will not know how small it is (98). Let me be a plain, unmarked envelope passing through the world (108). You are safe because you have been educated by the world’s variety. Yet you know you are not safe, because you recognize the world’s terrible variations (113). Favor the small, the hidden, the hard-to-pin-down (128). Pay attention to the assaulted spiritual life of ordinary people (146). It is legitimate to crawl, after the wings are broken (150). Life is inexplicable, and those masterful people who base their lives on confidence and explanation deserve our sympathy (131).
  
• 
  Nathan Albright

  For some time I have been deeply fond of the poetry of the late poet William Stafford [1], and this book by his son Kim gives a thoughtful and deeply personal look at the enigmatic poet, a man who was gracious and friendly and sociable with others but often rather quiet and distant from his own family.  As some writers tend to be, he communicated into the silence with his writing and was not an easy person to get to know well, coming as he did from a Midwestern background of farmers and inhabitants of small towns, a past from which he was greatly alienated as a result of his service as a Conscientious Objector during World War II.  The book is highly quotable and Kim meaningfully describes his father as having been a porcupine turned inside out with the soft side on the outside and the prickly side inside, something I can relate to myself as well as concerning other members of my family.  This book is a moving and eloquent attempt on the part of a son who happens to be the literary executor of his late father to understand that man through memories and through fragments of writings that he discovered after Stafford's death in 1993.
  
  This book is not organized chronologically, but rather topically, with parts titled after phrases from Stafford's well-known poem "The Way It Is."  First the author relates his confusion and struggle to deal with his father's death and his responsibility as the keeper of Stafford's great literary output.  After that the author looks at William Stafford's Kansas background during the Great Depression and the price of being a CO during a "good war."  After that the author examines his own struggle with work and his childhood crimes and the role of vocation in Stafford's poetry.  This then leads into an examination of Stafford's indirect way of dealing with others.  The most poignant section of the book comes when the author talks about the tragedies of life, including the suicide of the author's older brother after a period of profound isolation and loneliness.  The author then closes the book with two sections that discuss Stafford's tendency of having many intricate moves that are hard to understand and the thread of words absent and forgotten that run through Stafford's life and writing, ending with a touching epilogue.
  
  The book is itself full of intriguing incidents.  I found William Stafford, as discussed in these pages, to be a man not dissimilar from myself, if certainly less loud and less fractious, but a man who cared deeply about the silence and isolation of the reader and the need for personal space and for connection across the lonely void to others.  The author's portrayal of his father was a deeply moving one, full of humorous little notes, full of a love of questions and an unwillingness to be too loud and too dogmatic about his own work or its layers of meaning.  Making the book even better is the way that the author includes a great many fragments of writing and gives the personal side to a reticent and highly reserved poet whose works were nonetheless deeply beautiful and inspirational.  Those who love the poetry of William Stafford and are curious about his life and the legacy he left for his own family would do well to look at this book and see Stafford as a complex and highly nuanced man who was not easily understood even by those who by rights should have been closest to him.  Some people are full of so many layers inside that they remain a mystery perhaps even to themselves.
  
  [1] See, for example:
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
  
  
  https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...
• 
  Andrea Mullarkey

  Almost everything I read gets reviewed here except for some professional development books and a handful of books where I have entirely too personal a reading experience to share. This one is right on the edge of that “too personal” boundary so you’ll forgive me if this review is not as helpful as others. A lovely friend is helping me expand my experience with reading poetry and the poet that has been the subject of this expansion is William Stafford. His work is affecting and there is no way that I could meaningfully begin to review it here. But as part of my quest to understand how poetry works I have now read this book about Stafford’s life and writing, written by his son who is also a writer. It is a very personal work that is part biography, part memoir and part literary criticism. And what I learned about Stafford in reading this book shifted the way I experience his poetry to a certain extent. Not entirely; at some point the poetry means something to me separate from the context and intention of the author. But William Stafford was a fascinating man and his poetry is infused with the themes and experiences of his life. He was raised in a stern Midwestern home, spent early years working in a conscientious objector camp during World War II, and continued his long life as a writer, teacher, pacifist and non-traditional family man living in the pacific northwest. And his poetry has a spareness, a candor and an appreciation for nature and peaceful interaction that reflect this background. I appreciated the context this book gave me for understanding his poetry on this level. But this book is also about his son, Kim and the parts of the book about their relationship were something of a distraction for me. The impact of William’s parenting style on Kim is clear from the way Kim writes about his father. He idolizes him as much as he misses him, and that is an important part of Kim’s story. But for me as a reader trying to understand William Stafford and his poetry I wouldn’t have minded if these parts had melted into the background. Nevertheless I truly appreciate the deeper understanding I have of the work of the elder Stafford, and indeed my understanding of poetry as a literary form, that came from reading this book along side Stafford’s poems themselves.
• 
  Joy Kidney

  Kim Stafford's "memory of a mysterious and evocative man," his father. I probably enjoyed this biography of William Stafford even more than his poems. I appreciate the history and stories behind what's going on in the foreground. Kim Stafford sifts through his father's writings, things that became poems, things that didn't. I was a huge undertaking as his father wrote every single morning, early before anyone else was awake. (My own practice.) Kim Stafford also tries to glean how his father came to think the way he did, his way of bringing up his children, their several moves, his being a conscientious objector during WWII, his silences. Questions: Is writing a retreat from life, then, a place to hide? An admirable book to ponder and savor.
• 
  Mary

  I think I have every William Stafford book. It was nice to hear of Kim's view of his father.
• 
  Meg

  I was already inclined to like this book -- William Stafford being one of my favorite poets. The Oregon connection and the presence-based simplicity of Stafford's language have long made me feel like he is kin. But it is a big book, with lots of historic background and academic references, and I don't know Kim Stafford's work the same way that I know his father's. So it took me a while to get around to reading this. It was delicious. Kim is thoughtful, real, honest about his relationship with his father. William Stafford came alive on the page, and the excerpts from his daily morning writings were both relevant to the narrative, and so creatively rich. I loved seeing the seeds of poems in the common words of his everyday life. Actually, even though Kim's writing and reminiscence was awesome, those excerpts alone would have kept me reading this book.
  
  I don't think I'd recommend this to anyone who was not a Stafford fan, but if you are, you are in for a treat.
• 
  Janet

  Brilliant. I can't remember reading a memoir of late that I enjoyed so much. A beautiful tribute not only to a father, but also to living a creative and thoughtful life. Am going to dive in and read more by both William and Kim. Big Thanks for Christian McEwan's mention of this title in her fabulous book of essays "World Enough & Time." Wouldn't have found it/read it otherwise.
• 
  Bob

  Engrossing memoir by Kim Stafford of his father, William Stafford, with looks at his poems and journal entries. William Stafford wrote "I do not want to become good in any way but my own way." This book illustrates how he did that.
• 
  Shelly

  I've long enjoyed William Stafford's poetry. I bet many of you have too. This book, written by his son, is a great look at the life of a great poet and his process... and how it fit in the context of his life - how the context of his life created his poetry.
• 
  Linda Leaming

  Beautiful writing and sensitive telling of a complex relationship.
• 
  Christine

  Beautifully written biography of one of our best poets. Was privileged years ago to take a week-long writing seminar led by both Staffords and Naomi Shihab Nye. Highly recommend this book.