Learning to Live in the World: Earth Poems by William Stafford

by William Stafford

A poetry collection by the late author of The Animal That Drank Up Sound reflects his struggles with the world and his respect for the earth.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published November 30, 1994

About the author

William Edgar Stafford was an American poet and pacifist, and the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He and his writings are sometimes identified with the Pacific Northwest.

In 1970, he was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that is now known as Poet Laureate. In 1975, he was named Poet Laureate of Oregon; his tenure in the position lasted until 1990. In 1980, he retired from Lewis & Clark College but continued to travel extensively and give public readings of his poetry. In 1992, he won the Western States Book Award for lifetime achievement in poetry.


Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William...

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who greatly enjoys reading the books of William Stafford, the late poet laureate of Oregon [1], I am intrigued at the use to which his poems have been put in the years after his death.  Stafford was such a prolific writer that not only did he write books for major publishers but he also wrote smaller print-run books with smaller, even local, publishers, and write poems for other magazines and anthologies, and wrote at least a poem every day in his early morning writing, such that it has been judged a sisyphean task to know exactly how much he wrote.  One of the consequences of this is that his poems are anthologized in many posthumous "best of" collections that are divided by topic so that one can see the peace activist poetry or, in this case, earth poems that reflect Stafford's interest in creation.  Reading this book and others like it is a reminder that poems can take on a different context based on the other poems around them.  This is a good thing as it makes the layers of poems, especially poems that are as deceptively simple as Stafford's, all the more deeply resonant.

This short book of about sixty pages is divided into five sections.  After an introduction that discusses Stafford's prolific writing habits, the five short sections of short poems are titled thusly:  "The World Speaks Everything To Us," "Even Far Things Are Real," "It Might Go Wild, Any Time," "I See The Darkness; It Comes Near," and "You Live By The Light You Find."  After this there is a short epilogue and an index of poem titles as well as first lines to make the poems easy to find.  The poems are a mix of ones that are very familiar to me because they are frequently anthologized.  Other poems, like the following beautiful one, were new to me but no less lovely for that, and a reminder that Stafford's oeuvre contains a great deal of mysterious and unknown poems that have not yet been brought into the light for many of his potential readers:
"Meditation"
Animals full of light
walk through the forest
toward someone aiming a gun
loaded with darkness.
That's the world: God
holding still
letting it happen again,
and again and again.
Obviously, those reading this book are likely to be fans of William Stafford.  This particular collection of books was published on the 75th anniversary of its mainstream publisher, and the book was likely well-received, at least as well received as poetry books are.  This is an worthwhile compilation that has something old and something new for many readers.  Given William Stafford's tendency to frequently reflection on creation, man's place in it, and the place between people and other people and people and other beings, these poems prompt the reader to engage in reflection as well.  Perhaps we take it for granted that plants and animals seem to instinctively know how to live in the world, but human beings have to be taught and have to learn the same thing.  There is something gained, though, in not doing things automatically, and that is being able to reflect on them because one knows such matters to be contingent and not automatic.  It is in that reflection on our choices, about which these poems reflect often, that allows us to make good ones instead of bad ones, or to improve in the quality of our choices as we reflect on that awkward combination of connectedness and isolation that we feel in our lives with other people and with the wider world around us.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

[David Rush · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let’s get this out of the way…I am usually perplexed by most poems. I am baffled that so many of them are so hard for me to figure out the rhythm. Why do so many poems I try to read feel like a foreign language on my tongue? Obviously Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe roll easily off the tongue but, for me, most modern poetry is like chewing rocks. Well that last sentence may be an exaggeration, but sometimes….

However, sometimes I come across a poem that grabs me and I can’t turn away.

That happened when I landed on Traveling through the Dark by William E. Stafford. I followed somebody’s comment on Goodreads about something else and BLAMMO! I had goose bumps all over.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

Even this one stanza still brings a shiver

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

Powerful, powerful stuff, and the pauses that come at the end of each line seem right.

But in...Why I Am Happy

Now has come, an easy time, I let it
Roll. There is a lake somewhere
So blue and far nobody owns it
A wind comes by and a willow listens
gracefully.

What am I supposed to do with the first sentence? Why wrap the last word around to the next? It breaks any rhythm and any continuous thought, and the same with the last two lines. So it 4 or 5 lines I am lost.

I don’t deny I could be an idiot and am overthinking it, but the upshot is it feels disjointed and is just not fun to read or say aloud.

However, reading all of Learning to Live in the World I found 2 or 3 more poems or parts of poems appealing, so I Am Happy I read it.

[Sem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep
a sound when autumn comes. Yellow
pulls across the hills and thrums,
or the silence after lightening before it says
its names- and then the clouds' wide-mouthed
apologies. You were aimed from birth:
you will never be alone. Rain
will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon,
long aisles- you never heard so deep a sound,
moss on rock, and years. You turn your head-
that's what the silence meant: you're not alone.
The whole wide world pours down.

[Professor · Rating 5 out of 5]

A friend in Seattle send me this book by mail. It arrived quietly but with great power, like most of the poems. It is full of beautiful, earthy poems. William Stafford is amazing. Check out lines like, "Up and down all highways / weed flags proclaim, "Great is Earth our home!" A line that truly blows me away is this: "What I believe is, / all animals have one soul. / Over the land they love / they crisscross forever." Enjoy!

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

William Stafford writes deceptively simple poems that reverberate and return to memory. This collection focuses on the natural world, with standards like "Ask Me" and "Traveling Through the Dark" and less familiar (to me) poems like "Climbing Along the River", "Glimpse Between Buildings", "Fall Wind" and "Keepsakes". Here is the short "Storm at the Coast": "What moves on, moves far,/ here. What holds, holds long./ But it is the wind and water will stay,/ after the cliffs are gone."

[Katherine Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry to savor. The images and sense concerning the natural world are uplifting and ponderous.