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
stars home missing
If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
bird earth sound
The earth says have a place, be what that place requires; hear the sound the birds imply and see as deep as ridges go behind each other.
journey snakes decided
When the snake decided to go straight, he didn't get anywhere.
rain home winning
One way to find your place is like the rain, a million requests for lodging, one that wins, finds your cheek: you find your home.
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.
artist able may
Others may be able to accept standards from another, but an artist is a person who decides.
people admirable
There are so many things admirable people do not understand.
language can-do
Language can do what it can’t say.
giving-up real kids
My question is "when did other people give up the idea of being a poet?" You know, when we are kids we make up things, we write, and for me the puzzle is not that some people are still writing, the real question is why did the other people stop?
ponds lilies dies
If you purify the pond, the lilies die
development definitions language
I am not learning definitions as established in even the latest dictionaries. I am not a dictionary-maker. I am a person a dictionary-maker has to contend with. I am a living evidence in the development of language.
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.