“The key to writing poetry may be a readiness. Relax, don’t resist.”
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– William Stafford
Over the course of his lifetime, William Stafford wrote more than 20,000 poems, a mountain by anyone’s standards. The kind of rousing lyrical softness he used in poems like You Reading This, Be Ready and Looking Across the River, comes across even in his advice to other writers, like in this excerpt of aphorisms from the anthology of interviews and teachings, The Answers are Inside the Mountains. ‘Some Suggestions from Experience’ can chime well with other guiding pieces from E.E. Cummings, Archibald Macleish and June Jordan.
Some Suggestions from Experience
If you can get dumb enough you can write marvelous poems about things that are really close to you.
Where you live is not crucial, but how you feel about where you live is crucial.
The key to writing poetry may be a readiness. Relax, don’t resist.
Be a receiver.
Writing is effective in so far as it has verbal events in it, not the assertion of feelings.
We need to write poems that won’t last forever.
Treat the world as if it really existed.
Try to listen to poems in neutral.
What starts a poem must validate itself. We need the sense of being in worthy company. Also the poem must earn its way.
Every advance must be earned.
Competition is bad, I think. Even competition with yourself is Language is never the same. The same sentence repeated is not the same.
Inside the language we speak lies a secret language, an induce language: the language of bare syllables which have their own. meaning.
An artist is a person who makes the decisions about the work the artist is doing. If you give that away it’s not art.
Any chunk of carbon under pressure will turn into a diamond.
Poems are expendable, but the process is not expendable; it is lifelong.
What a person is shows up in what a person does.
We torture the limits of the language. Simplicity is more difficult than complexity.
What’s on the page is more important than who is the writer.
Writing takes a lot of forgiveness, freedom, and welcoming. You should welcome the impulses that come to you. Don’t try to stiff-arm your own feeble little thoughts. They are all you have.
Don’t “strain the ratio”- don’t ask the reader to do too much.
Be content to say the things we always wanted to say.
William Stafford 1914-1993
From – The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life. Published by University of Michigan Press in 2003. Copyright by the Estate of William Stafford
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William Stafford’s wisdom about writing is precious to me.