tim barnes_the abandoned poems

7/18/2019 Tim Barnes_The Abandoned Poems

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The Abandoned Poems of William Stafford, A Preliminary Report

William Stafford: An Annotated Bibliography tells us that Stafford “produced at leasttwenty thousand poems in over fifty years of daily composition” and that “he chose to

type and submit around six thousand pieces.” Of those submitted, “it appears almost four

thousand were published.” That leaves a couple of thousand finished, unpublishedWilliam Stafford poems.This summer I was graciously invited by Kim Stafford to be a Stafford Scholar at

the Stafford Studies class he teaches in the Special Collections Archive at Lewis & Clark.In the exploratory phase, when each of us talked about our interests, Kim mentioned

these abandoned poems. Some time ago I had heard that Stafford had a file of poems hecalled “orphans,” the poems sent out but never published. Having been intrigued by these

poems for years, I took up an investigation of them as my project for the week. This ismy report on that adventure.

There are two boxes of abandoned poems in the archive. Box 15,Typescripts of Mostly Unpublished Poems, has three folders: D1, Unpublished Poems:

1950s to 1970s, Mostly 1970s (299 items); D2, “Tired Poems and Their Wanderings”:1950s (122 items); D3, “Tired Poems Put Away June 1965”: 1950s and 1960s (116

items). Box 16 of Typescripts of Unpublished Poems has one folder: D4, UnpublishedPoems: 1940s and 1950s (520 items). These are listed in the Guide to the William

Stafford Archives, the Finding Aide on the Watzek Library Special Collections website,under the heading Series 1, Sub-Series 3: Documentary Copies of Poems 1937-1993.

Here the title, first line, and date of the poems are listed.I started at the bottom of Box 16, a single folder, with the handwritten poem, “A

Christmas Uncle & Aunt-thology,” dated 1942 (item 520) and during the four days I wasin the archives read (making notes on interesting poems, recording the title, place, and

date) through to item 309, “Our Night Street,” written in Iowa City on April 4th

, 1951,211 items, about 40% of the box. Should that seem slow, I would mention that the class

included wonderful discussions led by Kim, daily writing and sharing, and orientationsled by Zack Selley, assistant archivist in the Special Collections.

Some of the places he sent poems to: New Yorker, Poetry, Harper’s, Western Review,

The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Saturday Review of Literature, Hudson Review, New Mexico Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Pacific Spectator, Illiterati, Lady’s Home Journal,

The Atlantic, Furioso, Swanee Review, Tiger’s Eye, Accent .

Places where poems were written: Los Prietos, California (1943-44), Susanville SpikeCamp (1944), Fredonyer Pass, California (1944), Glendale, California (1944-51),

Gansner Bar, California (1945), Elgin, Illinois (1945-46), Barrett Canyon, California(1946-1947), Berkeley, California (1946-47), Claremont, California (1947), Mill Valley,

California (1947), Richmond, California (1947-48), Lake Grove, Oregon (1948-50),Boulder, Colorado (1949), Portland, Oregon (1949-50), Iowa City, Iowa (1950-51).

Undated places include Magnolia, Arkansas, Big Springs, California, and Lawrence,Kansas.

Los Prietos, Susanville, Fredonyer Pass, Gansner Bar, and Elgin are all places hewas during his time as a conscientious objector in civilian public service camps.



Magnolia was the first camp he was in, where he was almost lynched (see “the MobScene at McNeil” in Down in My Heart ). Barrett Canyon was where he taught high

school for a year. Berkeley, Richmond, and Mill Valley were places he lived whileworking as secretary for Church World Services in San Francisco. Lake Grove and

Portland are connected to being hired at Lewis & Clark in 1948. Iowa City is where he

studied for his Ph.D. Dorothy’s parents lived in Glendale.

The poems in the abandoned poem files are finished poems that were not published in his

lifetime. Some of them appear in Another World Instead : The Early Poems of WilliamStafford , edited by Fred Marchant (2008). Two of the poems, “Late at Night” and

“Homecoming” are eventually published in periodicals and appear in his books,Traveling through the Dark and The Rescued Year , respectively. These poems appeared

in a group of four poems labeled “Pre-Engle” and “Post-Engle” that I will talk about in alittle bit. A typical poem in this file is typed on a half sheet with three holes. The paper is

usually off-white, though sometimes it’s onion skin. The holes suggest he kept them in asmall three ring binder before abandoning them. The example below, “When through the

Rain,” (item D4.442 in the Finding Aides) is typical.



Stafford would usually put the place and the date at the top of the sheet. Some early

poems just have a place followed by a question mark, “Magnolia?” Magnolia, Arkansas,was the first CO camp Stafford was in. There is almost always a title but often, as in this

example, the title is written in, suggesting it came sometime after the poem was written.

He would often center a hash mark below the poem. The text of the poem usually hassome correction. Sometimes he has just struck out the first letter of a line if it wascapitalized and not the beginning of a sentence. Early on, it would seem, he found

capitalizing each line of a poem a bit formal, pretentious, perhaps undemocratic. Hewould cross out words and write others above. Sometimes he would cross out whole lines

and stanzas and write the revision below. Occasionally, he would retype the poem on theother side of the page. Below the poem he would write the place he sent the poem to and

cross it out when it came back. Not all poems have names of magazines crossed out below. Many have just one name; some have as many as twenty, often abbreviated: SLR

for the Saturday Review of Literature, for example, or LHJ for Ladies’ Home Journal , asabove. If the New Yorker is on the list, he probably thought the poem pretty good.

Stafford’s corrections are clear, even though there are sometimes scads of them. In theexample above, he changes lines breaks with a slash and indicates indentation with a

caret. It would appear that when he sent out a poem, he used the original copy, with all itscorrections, as the basis for the submission copy, which he did not save.

One thing that looking through this file makes very clear is that Stafford meantwhat he said when he said he entertained any whim, any impulse, when composing.

Many of these poems are light, short, and insubstantial, though they contain good lines, potential, and glimmers and hints of what we recognize now as his genius. These poems

also show how often he worked with rhyme schemes, particularly in quatrains. And hereally did believe, as he writes in Writing the Australian Crawl , “That an editor is a friend

who helps keep a writer from publishing what should not be published.” He seems tohave sent out many poems almost as inquiries, maybe just once, just to see if they would

get ahold of an editor’s fancy. Rejection was a dialogue for him. He was published manytimes in Poetry and The New Yorker but rejected many more times by both, especially

early on.During the Stafford Studies week, Fred Marchant, editor of Another World

Instead, in response to a query, wrote Kim and me an email speaking of the abandoned poems as “templates, tacit drafts.” He talks of thinking of them as showing “contexts of

thought,” a phrase originally Stafford’s, as being a good way to understand andappreciate the early poems that orphaned in to this file. Marchant is right about this.

Stafford was practicing poetic-thought moves, the measure of the quatrain, the lyric,receivable forms. It might be helpful to think of a number of these poems and lines in

them as seeds. I offer three examples with the caveat that the reader doesn’t think everyabandoned poem is a ghost-seed of a published one.

In the first example, “The Forever Phone,” (written at Barrett Canyon on February8, 1947, item D4.369) Stafford touches on the question of a phone line that connects to

the past and gets broken. In “A Farm on the Great Plains,” he expands and enriches theidea with a series of beautiful (Seamus Heaney-like) quatrains that end in with a

Midwestern aphorism, “wise as winter is gray,” and a stark, plain-folk folk image, “pureas cold posts go.”



The Forever Phone

I called you on the forever phone.

In the dark you awoke and were on the

wirethat gleamed hills where Orion shonewith stars on fire.

Your voice broke words like peanut hulls

and flipped the smaller bits to me;the forever phone was like sea shells

that roar but are empty.

Orion threatened the sleeping night;dark flowed still and the stars had

swords.The forever phone pulled me so tight

the small wire broke on your last words.

The Farm on the Great Plains (without stanzas 3-5)

A telephone line goes cold; birds tread it wherever it goes.

A farm back of a great plaintugs an end of the line.

I call that farm every year,

ringing it, listening, still;no one is home at the farm,

the line gives only a hum.

………………………………

“But you—are you the one . . . ?”Then the line will be gone

because both ends will be home:no space, no birds, no farm.

My self will be the plain,

wise as winter is gray, pure as cold posts go

pacing toward what I know.

The poem “On the Right Road (written in March 1951, probably in Iowa; D4.312)closes “while the night stretches and hums under our feet / and we sway toward it hoping



we followed // the real, common things on the right road.” This idea of staying true to thecommon things as an essential loyalty can also be found in “Allegiances,” published in

his collection Allegiances (1970): “we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love /where we are, sturdy for common things.”

One of Stafford’s most trenchant poems, “At the Chairman’s Housewarming”

(published in The Rescued Year, 1966) finds an early template in “Cold Parties,” (writtenat Iowa City in February of 1951; D4.335).

Cold Parties

I saw fur foxes drinking lemonade,the ladies ladling ice in their husband’s gin;

and on each fox’s face the steel-snap grinsuch parties click after goodbyes are bade.

The gentleman’s eyes all rolled after the maid,

then swiveled behind their glasses and plunged far infor a thought that tinkled. The ice was thin.

They skated the verge of something life unsaid.

It was so cold that summer; it froze the fox.Alcohol couldn’t thaw the splintering tinkle.

Smiles bobbed up through a hundred negative shocks.

The wisest animal was going around in a circlein some kind of trap, with snarls lemonade couldn’t check

biting itself about a lady’s neck.

At the Chairman’s Housewarming

Talk like a jellyfish can ruin a party.It did: I smiled whatever they said,

all the time wanting to assert myself by announcing to all, “I eat whole wheat bread.”

The jelly talk stole out on the cloth

and coated the silver tine by tine,folding meek spoons and the true knifeblades

and rolling a tentacle into the wine.

And my talk too–it poured on the tableand coiled and died in the sugar bowl,

twitching a last thin participleto flutter the candle over its soul.

Nothing escaped the jellyfish,



that terror from seas where whales can’t live(he could kill sharks by grabbing their tales

and neither refusing nor consenting to give).

Oh go home, you terrible fish;

let sea be sea and rock be rock.Go back wishy-washy to your sheltered bay, but let me live definite, shock by shock.

Both of these poems share a certain satiric tone and a tough critique of cocktail parties in

America. The latter, though is subtler, more detailed, and focused on academia.

The four pre-Engle / post-Engle poems (D4.355-358) are interesting because they showthe influence of the workshopping process at the University of Iowa, the oldest and most

respected writing program in the country, where Stafford did his doctoral work in theearly 1950s. The workshops were lead by Paul Engle, director of the Iowa Writers’

Workshop from 1941-1965, and a poet, playwright, novelist, editor and literary critic. Alook at the revisions of “Homecoming” (published in The Rescued Year , 1966) is

instructive in terms of how Stafford’s revisions show classic poetry workshop advice: useimagery–show don’t tell; use the present tense, active verbs; explore available metaphor.

The second line of the poem changes from past to present tense: “at homecoming Iglanced and remembered your street” becomes, after being workshopped with Engle, “at

homecoming I glance and remember your street.” The third and fourth lines of the secondquatrain change to a more precise, focused image: “Through the big door we went in.

‘There’s Potter’s Lake.’ Clear through the window I followed our path down straight” becomes “You balanced one night on that step and leaned. / ‘There’s Potter’s Lake.’ I

follow our path down straight.” In The Rescued Year , “and leaned: becomes “thenleaned,” with a comma after “step.” This may not have been Engle’s advice but it adds a

certain dramatic timing. The fourth stanza, which was originally,

We met in math and went around together.The best thing at college comes back now, in a poem.

Subtle and quiet, resigned, home-come,I close my eyes and try to bring you home.

seems to have encountered the advice to exploit the mathematics metaphor, which

Stafford does in the post-Engle version:

We met in math and went around together,calculating on powers infinite.

I counted gold by the way you turned your head.I close my eyes, home-come, to celebrate.

In the version found in The Rescued Year , the final one, Stafford makes another revison

which turns outward from remembering the woman, called Goldy in both workshopdrafts but Ella in the published version, to the community, the society:



Oh all you revelers, back of the songs you’re singing

they have torn down Ella’s home–you’re forgotten it;

and Ella is lost, who brightened all our class,and I stand here, home-come, to celebrate.

An anger toward society, his classmates, and a blaming, almost an accusation, enter the poem: “you tore down Ella’s house” and now she is “lost.” This shift in focus and tone

add a dimension to the poem that moves it beyond elegy to social critique, something Iexpect Engle would have doubted the wisdom of. My conjecture is that one of the things

Stafford learned in the fifties, the McCarthy Era, was how to carefully smuggle politics,the recognition of societal culpability and error, into his poems.

The middle two lines of the penultimate stanza in the three versions, pre-Engle, post-Engle, and published version, show this progression toward concreteness and toward

a recognition of the speakers on culpability and betrayal quite clearly:

pre-Engle: None of these places or voices gives what you gave.

Blending and blending, one day slid to another,

post-Engle:the slant to a laugh, the light to a room you gave;

and finally the dates and jobs that led us apart”

The Rescued Year : passing the places, betraying them all with a wave,

adding past dates and jobs that led us apart

Here, as in the three versions of the quatrain above, we see the move to concreteness andthen to social conscience.

Also found in the abandoned poems are poems by other people. Winona Brettman (nee

McClintock) has three poems (D4. 519-517), dated April 17th

, 1946. A group of items(D4. 459-455) contain six poems by Ercel Lynn, two by Bill Read (one a translation of

Théophile Gautier’s poem, “Les Papillons”), a poem by Tom Polk Miller, and one by JimHarmon (also spelled Harman in some places).

Another group of seven poems (D4.426, “A Sheaf of Poems) seem to be BillRead’s, though his name only appears on two; one of these is a poem by Charles

d’Orleans translated by Read. Item D4.350 is three poems by Mary Emily Miller. Thenext item (D4.349) is a poem by Chuck Worley, George in Down in My Heart .

I could find no information about Brettman or Mary Miller. Read, Lynn, Harman,Tom Miller, and Worley were all COs with Stafford.



Bill Read was from Missouri and served in several CPS camps, one of them theGlendora camp in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains north of Los Angeles, not

too far from the Los Prietos camp where Stafford served.Ercell Lynn, also from Missouri, was in seven CO camps, including Magnolia,

and may have known Stafford there though I’m not sure. Lynn was also involved with the

short-lived camp sponsored by the American Friends Service committee, CPS camp 099,the China Relief Unit. Stafford was also involved in a unit that was supposed to gooverseas, also short-lived, CPS Camp 101. This was taught at Manchester College in

Indiana and trained nurses, social workers, and clerical staff to serve in war zonesoverseas. From 1955-56 Stafford taught at Manchester, where Lynn was a education and

religion professor. Both of the camps training people to serve overseas were operative forless than a year, squelched by a rider Alabama congressman Joseph Starnes attached to

an appropriations bill in January of 1943.Jim Harman (also Harmon) was at the Magnolia camp and may have met Stafford

there. He ended up at the Waldport fine arts camp where he was involved in dramatic performances and readings. Harman was a walkout, like Worley, and spent a year at the

McNeil Island Prison in Washington. In the fifties he co-edited Ark II/Moby I with the poet Michael McClure, a magazine that featured Beat poets, Black Mountain poets, and

Buddhist thought. His book of poems, In Praise of Eponymous Iahu, was published in1957 by Bern Porter Books, which also published Henry Miller and Kenneth Patchen.

Tom Polk Miller served in several camps with Stafford: Magnolia, Los Prietos,and the Manchester College camp that trained workers to serve overseas, CPS 101. Miller

transferred to Waldport, where he participated in theater productions and musical performances (as a pianist). He also helped produce The Illiterati, the literary arts

magazine begun at Cascade Locks by Kermit Sheets and Kemper Nomland , whichmoved to Waldport with them.

Charles (Chuck) Worley’s poem in the files is titled “Lines Written Leaving for aFederal Road Camp at Tucson.” Worley, as those who have read Down in My Heart

know, was in two camps with Stafford, Magnolia and Los Prietos. “The state is a great,awkward, ignorant, plundering, bully” is the first line to his poem. I showed Kim the

poem and he called Worley, who is 96 and lives in Colorado. He is a retired plumberwhose son is the head of the California water system. In 1998, he published a memoir,

Ruminations of a Certified Groundhog .This biographical information was gathered from The Civilian Public Service

Story: Living Peace in a Time of War , the CPS website (http://civilianpublicservice.org)and Here on the Edge: How a small group of World War II conscientious objectors took

art and peace from the margins to the mainstream by Steve McQuiddy.

Thoughts: I began my investigation with the idea that there might be some gems, a fewtreasures, among the poems Stafford abandoned. In what I read, there are some strong

poems, some gems, though not of the quality of Stafford’s mature work. I came to realizethat Stafford gave the poems he thought worthy a chance. He was an intrepid submitter.

In an autobiographical essay that opens You Must Revise Your Life, he writes that “anaverage of fifty [poems] were in the mail to editors all through the fifties, sixties, and

seventies.” This file, though, many of the poems were written in the forties, shows that



Stafford sent out poems readily and perhaps just to see if he could get a nibble. His ratesubmission makes them a lot like inquiries, “Is this any good?”

This chunk of abandoned poems also makes it clear that Stafford was willing to pick up on any impulse, to be “willingly fallible,” to use one of his phrases. He

experiments with rhyme and slant rhyme, with form, with compression, with language

(often making nouns verbs). In a journal from the early fifties, he writes, “Typed poemsup from last month of scribbling: 2 or 3 are potential, maybe.” He was committed to a belief in what might be called a shotgun approach to composition: write and listen, write

and listen, follow any odd impulse, neglected things, and something will happen.Beyond the search for treasures and the confirmation of a compositional

philosophy, one can see in these poems how Stafford worked with the concerns thatmakes his poetry his own: the common, the neglected, the long/wide/deep gaze, listening,

the lessons of the natural world, and the political in its sense of thinking aboutconciliation and the counsel of peaceful things. One sees as one reads that indeed

Stafford did have “contexts of thought” and that certain poems are seedlings, templates,for the poems we know and love. One can see Stafford thinking through his art.

I print below a poem that might be one of the treasures; perhaps because itovercomes its own awkwardness, its risks, with a closing quatrain that seems absolutely

Stafford. However, the most significant imprint these files give me is of artistic optimism.He sent what seem to be very slight poems to the most respected literary magazines of the

day again and again. He didn’t think they would start to think of his poetry as weak,unworthy. He believed in himself, the process, his poetry, and the editors who rejected

him. He was engaged and enjoying the engagement at whatever level it was. Writerswrite and magazines need them. That is how literature lives its life.

Agate

The crude jaggeds from our mouths

have so often broken my bones,I roll out agates of hope,

tongue them easy over the edge:--

Stones falling on stonewon’t wear away rain.

The earth burning some day

will brighten an old story

Flawed in the casting a broken bell will ring

more clear than all the tall chimes.

And an old shard will gleam, caughtin that fire

and carry a sigh of lightto the last star.



Claremont, June 10, 1947 (D4.477)

Tim Barnes

August, 2014

tim barnes_the abandoned poems

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