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[From Here We Speak, an anthology of Oregon poetry, Ingrid
Wendt and Primus St. John, ed., Oregon State University Press, 1993]
The first Oregon poet to win the National Book Award for poetry, William
Edgar Stafford (1914-1993) was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and came to
Oregon in 1948. In his early years he worked a variety of jobs-in sugar
beet fields, in construction, at an oil refinery-and received his bachelor's
and master's degrees from the University of Kansas. A conscientious objector
and pacifist, he spent the years 1942-46 in Arkansas and California work
camps, fighting forest fires, building and maintaining trails and roads,
and halting soil erosion. After the war he taught high school, worked for
Church World Service, and joined the English faculty of Lewis and Clark
College in Portland, where (with time out for earning a Ph.D. from the
University of Iowa) he taught until his retirement. Married to Dorothy
Hope Frantz in 1944, the father of four children, Stafford authored 35
books of poems, the first of which, West of Your City, was published
when he was 46. In addition to the 1963 National Book Award for Traveling
Through the Dark, Stafford's many honors included Poetry Consultant
for the Library of Congress (1965-1967) and the Shelley Award from the
Poetry Society of America. He was appointed Oregon Poet Laureate by Governor
Bob Straub in 1975. An enormously loved and admired poet, a generous mentor
to aspiring poets everywhere, Stafford traveled thousands of miles in his
later years, giving hundreds of poetry readings in colleges and universities,
community centers and libraries, throughout the United States and in Egypt,
India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Germany, Austria, Poland, and other
countries. Characterized by a quiet, everyday vocabulary, common speech
rhythms, an understated manner, and close observation, Stafford's poems
are, in the words of Glen Love, a "repeated encounter with the otherness
of the world", in which the individual comes to new realizations about
the earth and also the self. |
