IN 1975, KIM Stafford was sitting in the Town Tavern on Water Street with Sam Hamill, founder of Copper Canyon Press.
Stafford knew that Hamill, an icon in the poetry world, printed chapbooks and broadsheets of poems on an old letter press.
Having worked up the nerve to talk to him in the first place, Stafford ventured a question: “Do you take apprentice printers?”
Hamill replied, “If you can get it working, you can print your own damn book.”
Stafford did, setting every letter of type by hand, and in 1976 published his first volume of poems, A Gypsy’s History of the World.
On Saturday, he shared a poem, “The Basket Deep,” from the book, part of an hourlong reading that blended poems, songs and stories about how Stafford has taken chance encounters and shaped them into verse.
“At the workshop, people ask, ‘How do I turn this into a poem?’” he said. “They should be asking, ‘How do I structure the poem that is starting to be revealed to me?’”
‘The Understory’
The workshop, called “The Understory,” was offered by The Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend, which is owned by Peter and Anna Quinn.
Peter Quinn attended Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore., from 1972 to 1976, he said, where he was a student of Kim’s father, William Stafford, also a poet.
Quinn recalled the first time he saw Kim Stafford striding across campus. The next time he saw him was two years ago on the street in Port Townsend, when he reported to Anna, “I think I saw Kim Stafford.”
A year ago, Stafford came into their store.
“I made some suggestions to him and kept making suggestions during the year,” Peter Quinn said, about how he got Stafford to agree to come to Port Townsend and lead a poetry-writing workshop.
Stafford began the reading with “Basket Deep,” about the wild-honey man who used to come around his neighborhood and “listened at the flower places” to find the bees and follow them home.
The poem is full of bright images — cherry trees in bloom, honeycomb glistening in the man’s beard, a woman standing at the garden gate — along with a darker vision of the man, fire in one hand and ax in the other, turning and scaring off the children who followed him to the hive.
Stafford, whose grandfather was a preacher, breaks up the narrative with lines that echo the sound of a gospel song:
From the basket wide and deep, O Lord, all seed is cast aside.
Another poem, “Chaucer’s Agent,” was written for Stafford’s English teacher at Lake Oswego (Ore.) High School. When the class read The Canterbury Tales, Mrs. Pittman announced that some of the tales had sexual themes and that people might not want to read them.
Stafford, who now teaches at Lewis and Clark College, said he looked up the stories, read them and “today, I’m an English teacher.”
In the summer warm and green, My Lord, The pollen all will swarm.
Stafford, who plays the guitar, changed up the reading by singing two of his original songs.
Clerk’s life story
One was based on the words of a clerk who poured out her life story to him when he stopped at a store during a drive to the Fishtrap writers’ gathering in Wallowa, Ore., in 1985.
The young woman, who was from Portland, said she had been sent to work at the store after her life had taken some hard turns. Part of the healing: getting up in the morning and climbing the hill behind the store.
The start of the chorus: That’s when time opens the sky and Grandma never died.
Another poem grew out of his encounter at a Quaker meeting with a man who made violas.
After an aborted attempt to try his hand at instrument-making, the man told Stafford something that rang his creative chimes: A physicist had discovered that the molecular structure of a musical instrument changes when it is played, the notes of the tune forming a ripple in the wood’s surface that starts to fade after a few days.
That led Stafford to write “Writing Daily, Writing in Tune,” which draws an analogy between a musical instrument and the pen.
“Everything dreams aloud,” the poet wrote.
Another poem, “No Shame,” grew out of a trip to the home of poet Gary Snyder, who, repeating Allen Ginsberg’s mantra, told Stafford that once you choose the life of a writer, there is no room for shame.
Stafford said he liked Snyder’s system of organizing his desk — inboxes marked “Long Wait,” “Wait” and “Now”— and that there is an old, dusty box in the rafters of Snyder’s house marked “Western Hemisphere.”
In the standing field so tall, My Lord, By the scythe brought low at last.
Among the longtime friends who came for Saturday’s reading was Carol Jane Bangs, a poet who lives in Port Townsend.
Bangs and Stafford went to grade school and high school together, she said, and when they were graduate students at the University of Oregon, they shared an office.
They were both married, and when she was pregnant and had morning sickness, Stafford wrote her a poem, which she still has, because he wanted to make her feel better.
Degree in literature
He later earned a Ph.D. in medieval literature but at the time was collecting oral histories, she said.
One of the poems Stafford read Saturday was based on the story a hunter told him about waiting on top of a tall tree stump to shoot a bear.
“Bear hunting is like prayer,” the hunter says. “You expect something so strong it comes to you.”
When Stafford came to Port Townsend in 1975, he lived with Bangs and her family.
His morning routine: get up, make muffins, put them in his Amish hat and eat them while walking to Fort Worden.
While he walked, his mind gathered images of things he saw through the seasons — the cemetery, the spring rain, the budding trees, the limbs dropping their seed — and formed them into verses.
He vowed never to write down the words but, preparing for Saturday’s reading, wondered whether he could remember them.
He could and launched into the verses, the meter matching his footsteps, the stanzas interweaving questions and answers like an Appalachian folk tune.
The first question: “Do you like the living best walking upright in the lane, or do you like the pale ones less all sleeping in the rain?”
On the threshing floor alone, My Lord, Beneath thy flail so long.
Trip to Bhutan
Stafford also read a poem he wrote during a trip in Bhutan about a village dog barking in the night and related the acceptance speech he made at an awards dinner at which Dick Cheney was the keynote speaker.
A Thousand Friends of Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1976-1998 is dedicated to the Staffords’ son, Guthrie.
On a sparkling sunny day, he and Guthrie were riding bicycles, Stafford said, when Guthrie looked up and said, “What if the sun is doing Morse code telling us the meaning of life, and every day is a new message?”
“There are thousands of meanings of life out there,” Stafford said.
To close, he shared the story behind the title of his new book, Prairie Prescription.
When his grandmother was pregnant with her third child (his mother), the doctor informed her that unless she did exactly what he said, she would not survive the pregnancy. What the doctor ordered: an hour of beauty a day — watching the sunset, reading something she loved.
“If my grandmother had not followed that prescription, I would not be here today,” Stafford said.
His grandmother was “the listener in my life,” Stafford said; she never changed the subject when she was talking to him but would say, “Tell me more about that.”
His grandfather was a farmer and a preacher; “A Sermon on Eve” is from a collection of Stafford’s poems called The Granary.
Stafford was named after the title character in the Rudyard Kipling novel Kim; when his mother went to the hospital, someone told her, “The labor may be long. Take a book.”
Stafford said he remembers every letter of that first book of poetry he published at Copper Canyon, a book he said was no “airy-fairy thing” but weighed about 10 pounds.
Memoir about father
He has since written more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford.
Sonja Schoenleber, who lined up to have Stafford sign her copy, said she read Early Morning on the recommendation of Anna Quinn after taking a memoir-writing workshop sponsored by the Quinns’ store.
Also waiting to meet the author were Brenda Miller of Bellingham and Holly Hughes of Port Townsend, who have a book about writing, The Pen and the Bell, coming out in May.
In their book, they quote several times from Stafford’s memoir about his father, Miller said.
In the winnow wind so high, My Lord, All seed that falls is thine.
The second song Stafford performed was about what it feels like to be the last of your kind.
It should have been a sad song, he said, but the song refused to be so — much like life and poetry.
His tombstone, Stafford said, should read: “He was easily pleased by a few words.”
In the basket wide and deep, My Lord, In the basket wide and deep.
The Writer’s Workshoppe is at 234 Taylor St., Port Townsend. For information, visit www.writersworkshoppe.com.
Stafford’s reading also was sponsored by the Commander’s Beach House bed-and-breakfast and Sunrise Coffee.
Excerpts from “The Basket Deep” are from A Thousand Friends of Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1976-1998, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2005.
For more on Stafford’s songs and poems, visit www.kim-stafford.com.
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Jennifer Jackson writes about Port Townsend and Jefferson County every Wednesday. To contact her with items for this column, phone 360-379-5688 or email jjackson@olypen.com.
