Recently we added to the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel a Distinguished Poet Series video of William Stafford from 1986. As I watched and listened to it I remembered his reading very clearly but most of all because when I picked him up at the airport he was so upset that a critic had called him “simple.”
When he began his presentation, he talked about poetry and language and why he uses language as he does. It was amazing to listen to him talk about language in poetry and to hear him read his beautifully spare and moving poems and listen to his comments about poetry and about what he was trying to do in his poems.
When I drove him back to the airport he was worried that he would be late, though we were two hours early. He was so worried he wanted to jump out of the car and across three lanes of traffic to get to the door at the airport. I said to him, “No, please don’t because I don’t want to be known as the woman who killed William Stafford!”
When I introduced him at that reading, I was 46 years old. Watching the video, we had digitized to add to our growing collection, I realize how I didn’t know at the time how young I was how much more I would have to learn.
Please look at the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel and subscribe so you can see what’s new. We will be adding videos every day this month and continuing as we digitize old videos.
