Poet of the Small Place
Born on an island, you long to venture
to the smaller island, more remote and
strange. Distant metropolis has no call
as piercing as the gull’s cry when tide
threatens to dash the tiny craft you step
from, struggling toward obscurity
that alone will let you speak syllables
pried from the hid heart bone.
Kim Stafford
In my experience as a writer, there are two kinds of infinity: the constant local arrival of the intuitive, which gets put down in the notebook in my pocket; and the occasional recording of thoughts, which find their place in a folder on my computer. In general, the handwrought notebook gets the poetry; the machine gets the prose. The notebook is for my use in the life of creation; the computer files are for shared use in the life of conversation and collaboration with others—in Australia, Alaska, Scotland, and Oregon.
The Notebook in My Pocket
The notebook, the field book, the journal—the private, handheld prelude to typewriter or computer or anyone’s eyes but my own—is the location for my own first handshake with the infinite.
The notebook should be small—shirt-pocket size, the size of the palm. The reason is suggested by one definition of poetry: Any utterance that sings in short space. To sing, we need all the resources of language—sound, rhythm, beauty, and toughness. The tighter the arena for the wild dance, the greater our sense of no limit. We seek a few words with boundless promise.
Sometimes in class, a student will put a few words together, and I feel a rush of envy. A student writes, “As a child, I was a swimmer—my only way to handle armloads of tears.” We all sit stunned. “There is no limit,” I say, “to what you could do with that.” A writer’s infinity is not time without end, but a brief time—a minute, a day, a lifetime—with too great an abundance of vitality and story. If you embrace the particular intensities that are yours, you will be blessed with hard work you may learn to cherish.
Sometimes, looking back, I find phrases in my notebook, a few words that recall some tremendous story, epoch, and understanding. I cherish those little signposts:
—the whole rhythm of water arguing softly with the ways of men
—“turn and look at your village”
—the times when we had songs for supper
—the moment when I touch my daddy’s hat
As a writer, I find in these fragments abrupt doorways to the infinite. For example, that moment I picked up my father’s hat, just before the woman I was to marry came into my house for the first time, the sentence went through my head, “My daddy got out of the way so this could happen.”
Then there was the phrase in my notebook: “the times when we had songs for supper”—a reference to the Great Depression, a time of such privation for my family that its stories cast a light through life ongoing, like evening sun through the orchard. To have songs for supper instead of food is one extremely compact way to characterize a time of both hunger and glory. I can look and look into the little room of that phrase and never run out of all the stories whispering there.
In my notebook the phrase “‘turn and look at your village’” comes to me from my Alaskan friend, the Inupiat artist Joe Senungetuk from the tiny village of Wales, north from Nome, where he grew up. He told me of his fourth-grade teacher there, Mrs. Coonz, back in the 1950s, taking the class on a field trip into the arctic darkness, leaving the school and walking two by two through the deep cold to the hilltop above, and then saying, “Turn around now, children, and look at your village.”
Joe says in that moment, consciously turning to look at his village for the first time, he became an artist. He saw the work that was his to do. All my life, I will repeat that action, as I turn and look at my own village—my neighborhood, my city, my place on earth. The record of the story is a phrase in my notebook, put there so the seed can grow. Six words and no limit.
The hint in my notebook about “the whole rhythm of water”? What is that about? Carved on a stone by the river in my hometown is a line from my father’s writing: “Water is always ready to learn.” My father, the poet William Stafford, was magnetically drawn toward moving water. We were raised by rivers. The human equivalent to the rhythm of water, for me, is the daily rhythm of entering little discoveries into my notebook. The whole rhythm of the writing hand argues softly with the ways of men, and the ways of silence, violence, and injustice. The river, like the writer, keeps seeking the meeting place with other waters, on and on.
I call such phrases in the notebook miniature infinities, windows to stars, crevices glimpsed, inhaled, barely heard, never forgotten. Writing—especially in a notebook small enough to welcome “small” ideas—is my way to identify them and give them a chance to grow.
My students once gave me a fancy journal—leather bound, hand sewn—but I have never had an idea worthy of the book. I prefer the small notebook that welcomes all.
One time, during a concert in Nevada, the voice of Tish Hinojosa held us at attention, alert and amazed. She suddenly disappeared like smoke into an old song, La Llorona, that lifted me out of the world. I forgot my friends, my needs, my fears, everything. In that moment I understood a new kind of geometry in which my soul must dwell: life has a beginning, and an end, but no ceiling, and no ground. Within this brief span, we each may travel our boundless stories of ravishing grief and delight. There is no limit.
The words of the song, although greatly mysterious, were not the cause. The beauty of the voice, though exquisite, was not it. The age of the song, its anonymous origin in someone long gone, its connection to the tragedy of a whole people, its merciless beauty—perhaps was the cause. The song possessed me, and lifted me into a realm with no horizon and no circumference.
I looked at my friends beside me. I do not think they knew. I looked into the face of Tish Hinojosa, so talented and so young. I’m not sure even she knew the power of her song. She carried something she did not fully understand. May I do so! I looked ahead through my life to the end. It seems as if there is much good work to do. No limit.
Tápame con tu reboso, Llorona, |
Cover me with your shawl, Llorona, |
In my life as a writer, it is precisely at such a moment when the notebook is my closest, most understanding friend. Dear human companions can’t yet understand what I have seen … and the explaining, the wrestling for meaning—by poem, song, essay, story, manifesto—is somewhere in the future. In this moment, however, I can put a few words into the notebook, this smallest, most intimate, most mysteriously sophisticated time machine available to take me back to this moment of illumination from wherever I may stray as time moves on.
The File on My Computer
During moments every day like a weather-watcher I sense a gathering storm of correspondences that I would be a fool to ignore. Conversations, patches of yearning thoughts, recent dreams, a chance remark by someone nearby that frightens or invites me—these gather and begin to represent a cold front moving in, or an advancing episode of sudden spring. It’s a twinge that quietly signals the need to gather considerations and see how they connect, how they reach, what they do.
When this happens, I take to the computer in my bag, because what’s waiting is not a thread but a flood. The pocket notebook is for the hint, the computer for the deluge. The notebook is for the first move, an interlocking sequence of poetic lines—a fragment with rhythm, voice, and atmosphere whispering in my ear. The computer is for the encyclopedic mass of resonant data impinging deliciously on the mind.
The computer journal will let me wallow, if that is what I need to do, but the act of writing lifts me out. The facility of the computer keyboard enables me to reach in multiple directions quickly—a dream a decade old, a survey of possessions, a consideration of good chance or a challenge. And again, from this passage on the day of its creation, I find myself pasting language into another document—this time a personal writing plan as a companion to the budget plan I am preparing for my job. The journal on my laptop’s hard drive is the chapter in invisible ink for the plan I will give to the college dean.
Sometimes, I take a journey, to feed a writing project I already have in hand. When I heard that the librarian at my late father’s high school in Kansas had decided to dedicate her domain to two graduates who had become writers—William Stafford and B. H. Fairchild, leading her to name the school library the Stafford-Fairchild Library—I knew I had to attend the ceremony. Once there, I began gathering information like mad on the computer in my bag.
Below are three computer journal entries, the first one being most recent:
17 October 2004
The journey to Liberal, Kansas, which began as a formality, a dedication of the “Stafford-Fairchild Library,” became a quest with the extra day the drive over prairie, the night and morning visits to the Cimarron … and then conversations with Pete Fairchild, wanderings, connections. But what have I learned?
William Stafford in high school seems to have been a shy, nonassured person in tight circumstances. A teacher got him to words (Miss Arrington), and with words he recovered a sense of self and a place in society. (Imagine him going through the privations and isolation of the war without a sense of being a writer.)
Just the glimpse of him in the graduation photo—in company with his narrator in “The Osage Orange Tree”—suggests a person very much at the edge of incapacitating shyness. Like my brother. My father, my brother, and I each began with a limited sense of belonging. My father and I found words—we could make something out of nothing, and this artifact had the power to move others, and by this we had something negotiable in the world.
My brother didn’t have this. What does this mean? Do word artifacts really amount to identity? My brother is gone, and my father, and I think I have figured out how to be a human being. At heart, it isn’t the negotiations in the human world that I am about—it is the moment in the marsh when the blackbirds fly … turning fifty-five anonymous in a prairie town … meeting Lois and reaching back to the time of mystery … wandering in the cemetery at dusk … driving north out of town in the dark. Poetry gives visible evidence that confirms my life as mystic seeker, boy, wanderer, Ishi.
The writing life confirms the importance of my own experience to me. That’s what it’s about. The word-artifacts that result from this search are crumbs of bread that lead me back to dawn.
A geographical journey may be to a place that teaches you. The computer welcomes the abundant transfer of this experience to an archive for future use. Once I get home from my visit to the little prairie town where my father attended high school at the depth of the “dirty thirties,” I have this trove of sensations connected to ideas which will form the matrix for multiple uses—writing, reconsidering my job, watching the growth of our son in a new way.
Here is another computer journal entry made the year before.
16 October 2003
I don’t know what I’m doing. I pontificate as a teacher, I flounder as a traveler, I turn away from true creation as a writer, I have a faint grasp of my real duties on the job, and I’m present intermittently as a father, letting the precious days and years of our son’s life slip through my fingers, the presence of my daughter in the world tumble farther from my presence. When does my wife see me? When do I see myself?
Why do it this way? Is the root problem my confidence that I can do all that comes toward me, and so I promise the world and myself too much, and I churn in frenzy and miss connection? Class tonight: I babbled, let people talk a little which moved us along to the next thing like climbing a ladder through time, rather than entering a meadow out of time. Three hours feels so short to me—what can we really get done? I’ve lost the ability to see the magnitude of such a workshop session, “the illusion of infinite time.”
Here’s another even earlier entry from my computer-based journal in 1995:
As I walked home from the college, through the green of the wood at evening, I understood that my wife and I would live in our small house for some years, perhaps always. I understood that my work at the college would not become easier, or better supported by the administration. I understood that my father’s papers would take a great deal of energy, and would be an emotional challenge within the context of the family. I understood that my sister would not tell me the secrets that distance her, nor my mother embrace the parental work that belongs to her. I understood that important conversations with my former wife would never become easy or supportive of our daughter’s inner growth. I understood that there would not be much money, and that I would take up all paying work that presented itself. I understood that my own writing would be done slowly, and only with great difficulty, in the small spaces I could find. I understood that somewhere in the midst of these difficulties, never to be completed, my life would end.
By the time I reached home, the little house where my wife was cutting up garlic in the kitchen, and out the window the hazel tree blazed in its greatest glory of green against the low sun, I understood how it felt to be ready, and to be free.
Much comes at you as a writer—myriad languages of word and memory, dream, sensation, instinct—with no limit to what you might do as a writer with all of this. The journal is the hinge between two infinite realms, the meeting place, the pivot. The journal in the pocket or on the hard drive is the arena for first apprehension, for private considerations of arrangement. From the darkness comes treasure, into the little light in hand comes composition, and into the darkness again go stories.
A writer has ambidexterity—to scribble by hand in a tiny notebook, or to use a computer to connect with friends and strangers far away. Gutenberg’s moveable type can now move a tiny story across the globe. Gutenberg started, however, by printing the Bible, a work of tremendous substance. Our work now is to develop new content worthy of the new tool—to craft e-mail messages that make readers weep, or laugh, or change. The joining of the notebook and the computer is an intercultural marriage. We are all growing up in this lively household.
My sense of the modern shifted when I realized the computer screen is the size of a folksong. What we once composed orally now fits neatly on the lit face of the box. Something very old is about to happen in a new way.