William Stafford
William Stafford
Prolific American poet and 1970 U.S. Poet Laureate who won the National Book Award for Traveling Through the Dark. His numerous other works include In the Clock of Reason, Brother Wind, Passwords, and Wyoming Circuit.
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth17 January 1914
CountryUnited States of America
breathe rhythm
Anyone who breathes is in the rhythm business.
enhancement literature flow
Literature is not a picture of life, but is a separate experience with its own kind of flow and enhancement.
process found new-things
A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.
ownership glances
The greatest ownership of all is to glance around and understand.
serious crafts jokes
A poem is a serious joke, a truth that has learned jujitsu.
snow quality done
It is this impulse to change the quality of experience that I recognize as central to creation. . . . Out of all that could be done, you choose one thing. What that one thing is, nothing else can tell you--you come at it over unmarked snow.
ponds lilies dies
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
ocean sea shapes
The ocean and I have many pebbles To find and wash off and roll into shape.
attention speech
A speech is something you say so as to distract attention from what you do not say.
moving teaching writing
A student brings something to discuss, saying, "I don't know whether this is really good, or whether I should throw it in the wastebasket." The assumption is that one or the other choice is the right move. No. Almost everything we say or think or do - or write - comes in that spacious human area bounded by something this side of the sublime and something above the unforgivable.
exercise self quirky
You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.
secret use ordinary
It is as if the ordinary language we use every day has a hidden set of signals, a kind of secret code.
ifs
If you can say it, it begins to exist.
dream matter save somewhere
When I dream at night, they save a place for me, no matter how small, somewhere by the fire.