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Kim Stafford

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Today’s blogpost comes to you courtesy of Bellingham poet, peace worker, and my tireless friend Carla Shafer.

On Tuesday, 27 April 2021—6:00pm to 7:00pm—Village Books hosts Kim Stafford for the Bellingham launch of his latest collection, Singer Come From Afar. (Click on the link to go to Village Books.) This event is part of the Nature of Writing Series run in partnership with the North Cascades Institute.

I love this book. Kim Stafford writes from a deep well of gratitude and human goodness. Some of his poems are furious, some are sly and funny, some are simply beautiful, and all create a space for readers to catch their breath and reflect on the glories of this lovely, reeling planet and the sins against it. What greater gift could a poet give a worried, weary world?

—Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Earth’s Wild Music

Kim Stafford is the founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, and the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including Having Everything Right (a collection of essays); Early Morning (a biography of William Stafford); We Got Here Together (a children’s book), and The Muses Among Us (a book about the practice of writing). In 2018-2020 he served as Oregon’s poet laureate, and he has taught writing in Mexico, Scotland, Italy, and Bhutan.

Here’s a poem from Kim’s website.

Home School Thoughts for All of Us

In the pandemic, what should we all be learning?

Self reliance
How to cook a meal. How to clean a house, a porch, a yard.
How to plant a garden. How to use tools. How to fix
broken things: sew a button, mend a hole, do laundry,
wash dishes like a pro.

Buoyancy
How to be sad and get over it. How to find the music
that restores you. How to walk so your troubles fall from
your shoulders. How to write your troubles to make them
visible, then manageable, then smaller, and finally funny.

Friendship
How to know a true friend. How to let go old friends
who make you feel bad about yourself. How to give
generously to a friend by listening, asking, wondering.
How to feed a friendship so it roots, deepens, grows.

Thought
How to think something through. How to question
your fears, interrogate them, talk back to them. How to remember
something so precious you are less afraid. How to make clear
what most calls to you, what you love, what you will do to sustain it.

Dreams
How to have a dream toward a life worth planning for, saving for,
working for. How to design ways to make steady progress toward
a worthy goal. How to identify a dream that is so important, you will
let go lesser things to achieve it.

Thrift
How to know what you need. How to pare away what you do need—
objects, habits, false wishes, propaganda coming at you that is foreign to
who you are—so you can give your energy to what you really want.

Love
How does it feel in your body when love is real—love for a person,
for a place, for a feeling about who you really are, a longing for
what you most want to do with this life? This is your compass,
your inner landmark, your truth principle. Only you can know.

Maintenance
Health. Rest. Calm. Breath. Patience. Affection. Humor. Active hope.

—Kim Stafford

 

Solstice: Light & Dark of the Salish Sea

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Tomorrow evening — Sunday, 11 April 2021, 7 p.m. PST — I’ll be participating in the launch of Solstice: Light & Dark of the Salish Sea (Chuckanut Sandstone Press), a delightful collection of poems, selected (solicited!) and edited by Carla Shafer. The collection features the work of 29 poets in two sections, Summer Solstice and Winter Solstice.

The reading is on Zoom, hosted by Village Books. You can find a list of the poets and register for the reading,  here.

This is my winter solstice poem:

Solstice Song

Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
—Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

At the winter solstice, darkness
falls early, thin band of copper

as the sun winks out.
No matter how faint the light,

I walk the shore,
hands in my pockets, my hood

pulled up against the wind.
I might be a witch,

muttering incantations.
I might be a raven,

dreaming of spring.
The year turns, indigo,

burnt umber. My words

rhyme with the green weeds,
thick tendrils that lay in windrows

along the dark shore.
What chains are these, light

and lengthening?
What song is this, the sea

bids me sing?

      —Bethany Reid

Carla Shafer

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AUGUST POETRY POSTCARD FESTIVAL 2011, Carla Shafer. 2011. self-published, 32 pages,  https://chuckanutsandstone.blogspot.com/.

My dear friend Carla Shafer is a force to be reckoned with. In addition to being a fine poet (and coordinating multiple poetry events in her hometown of Bellingham, Washington),  she’s a political activist for peace and justice, and a fierce advocate for indigenous peoples, as well as our beleaguered planet.  No matter how bleak the headlines, she never despairs, but always sees a way through. She inspires me every day.

I have several of Carla’s self-published chapbooks of poems and I’ve been after her to pull together a collection to submit to presses. Here is one poem, written nine summers ago. (To learn more about the August Poetry Postcard Festival, visit Paul Nelson’s https://popo.cards/.)

Beauty and My Story Return

To see for the first time (with your own eyes),
the steady up and down flux of wings
by a stilled butterfly and realize what it means–
that it is sucking nectar through its proboscis
in rhythm, feeding from the pool below the petals.
When you compare that to something you have watched
all your life–noisy bees hovering over borage
and lavender–you continue to wonder, follow the
threads of your own unanswered questions
step again to the drum, apply pressure
from your fingers wing-like, tap in steady motions
repeat the throbbing of the earth, buried in your heart
somewhere between the buzz and the silence.

–Carla Shafer

Carla Shafer, “Ten Good Lines”

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My dear friend Carla Shafer is retiring from her job as a grant-writer at Everett Community College. (Click on her name to find an interview.)

Yesterday was the retirement party and today is the poetry reading. You kind of have to know Carla to understand why retirement = poetry reading. But I will be there, along with a few other poets, to read and pay tribute to this amazing person. Two o’clock, Russell Day Gallery, if you are interested. (Come early! It will be crowded!)

This poem is from an early collection of Carla’s, titled Rain Song, which William Stafford called, “a rich array…so sweet…so warm…and onward.” I have at least a dozen other favorites to choose from, but this one strikes me as a tribute-poem, through and through.

TEN GOOD LINES

Rilke says to wait to write the poem.
Experience must pile up like laundry.
Later picked through, it will relinquish
maybe 10 good lines. Worthy of one’s life time.

Once I watched William Stafford construct
a poem. Early in the day he planted seeds —
“…a picnic on the beach, a campfire in the sand.
You bring your violin, I heard we have a banjo player…
come…sometimes people choose to sing.”

Under a cool summer sky, kicking sand,
we gathered around the fire.
Bill was there early and stayed until the end,
collecting the scene’s pieces and
sensing careful phrases. The next day
he shared ten good lines.

So I thank Rilke for telling me that
I might spend my life to reap
a meager, but worthy, feast.
And I thank Stafford, who lives
each minute as a source for poems
cooked and served up daily.