“No praise, no blame.”

Today is the birthday of American poet and pacifist William Stafford (books by this author), born in Hutchinson, Kansas (1914) and best known for the title poem in his collection Traveling Through the Dark (1962), which won the National Book Award (1963). The poem is about a man who pushes a dead deer off a cliff, but it’s also about finding the right path in life. The poem displays all of Stafford’s trademarks: a graceful humility, a plainspoken voice. Stafford’s friend and fellow poet Richard Hugo said, “I happen to not care for it much,” and Stafford, years later, agreed. He said: “It isn’t the kind of poem that I feel took me anywhere; I know how to write that kind of poem. I’m more interested in the ones I don’t know how to write.”

His family moved often during the Great Depression, but they were avid readers, especially his mother. Stafford said: “In every town we lived in, there was one great big door ready to open for anyone — the library. And I never met a library I didn’t like.”

Stafford worked hard to help his family survive: he delivered newspapers, worked sugar beet fields, raised vegetables, and took a job as an electrician’s apprentice. Once, he was even yoked to a plow. When Stafford was drafted by the U.S. Army (1941), he told the draft board that he’d learned in church that it was wrong to kill. He registered as a conscientious objector, spending four years in Civilian Public Service Camps in Arkansas, California, and Illinois, often working for the Forest Service and in soil conservation. He made $2.50 a month. When he was asked how he became a conscientious objector, he answered: “I didn’t become one; I always was one. I thought all right-thinking people would behave that way.”

It was during this time that Stafford began the daily writing practice he would continue for the rest of his life. He woke up early, before everyone else in camp, and wrote in his journal. Those entries became a prose memoir, Down in My Heart, about his civilian camp experiences (1947). After the war, he taught high school, had children, kept writing, and published his first collection of poems, West of Your City, when he was 46 years old (1960). After the success of Traveling Through the Dark, he taught for years at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, where he was beloved for his democratic style of teaching, which boiled down to “No praise, no blame.” He served as the poet laureate of Oregon (1975). When he was asked when he realized he wanted to become a poet, he answered, “When did other people give up the idea of being a poet?”

William Stafford published over 50 collections of poetry and prose, including The Rescued Year (1966), Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation (1978), You Must Revise Your Life (1986), and The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems (1998).

Stafford said, “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.”
-Writer's Almanac