Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford

Editors’ Preface

vii Editors’ Preface An aphorism is a metaphor in work clothes, the kind of statement that “delivers groceries,” as William Stafford put it. This volume includes nearly four hundred of the thousands of aphoristic statements that occur at regular intervals throughout William Stafford’s fifty years of daily writing. It was part of William Stafford’s writing practice to create or, as he might say, “discover” aphorisms; often one will appear on the same journal page as a description of a dream and drafts of a poem. Or they might appear in bunches, as when Stafford mused over a number of days about what the wind might say, out of which he chose twelve statements to arrange for his poem “Things the Wind Says.” As befits his wide-ranging mind, Stafford’s aphorisms explore a multitude of topics, such as faith and harmony, the lives of animals , art and writing, how to behave, war and peace, loyalty, appearance and reality, history, honesty, egoism, work, fears, all expressed in a concise, witty, and provocative way. In poems, aphorisms can open doors (“A thing of beauty is a joy forever.”), take stock (“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”), or mark a terminus (“Good fences make good neighbors .”). A characteristic aspect of William Stafford’s poetry is the aphoristic line that perfectly encapsulates the thought of a whole poem: “The bitter habit of the forlorn cause / is my addiction.” “We live in an occupied country, misunderstood; / justice will take us millions of intricate moves.” “What the river says, that is what I say.” William Stafford delighted in occasionally creating whole poems from fragments of wisdom: what he thought of as “list poems.” In an interview he called such poems “just a succession of things the way the world gives you things . . . an aggregation of things to say,” as in the well-known “Things I Learned Last Week” or “The Sparkle Depends on Flaws in the Diamond,” in which even the title is an aphorism. More frequently, in other poems , such as “Butterflies in the Radiator Grill” or “Optimism,” aphorisms work with other poetic elements to achieve a meaning often surprising but conclusive. This volume collects twenty-six poems written between 1949 and 1993. viii There are a number of inspirations for the aphoristic tendency in William Stafford’s writing. We know from Stafford’s late-published essay “Sometimes, Reading” that his discovery at the University of Kansas of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy introduced him to “a changed world, deeper but full of wonder.” And in the accompanying list of his early reading we find other aphoristic authors, some mentioned in this volume: Pascal and Kierkegaard, each a lifetime mentor. But Nietzsche’s “blazes of outrageous but tantalizing discovery” take first place in his attention. He quotes three of Nietzsche’s phrases, “Every word is a prejudice,” “The best way through the mountains is from peak to peak, but it takes long legs,” “The right eye shouldn’t trust the left,” any of which, in their sharpness and surprising shape, could be a Stafford aphorism. Other sources include the sayings of Heraclitus, the essays of Montaigne, William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell,” the ghazals of Ghalib (Stafford’s most brilliant foray into translation), and the inspired voices of Augustine of Hippo, Teresa of Avila, and Gandhi . Finally, there is Carl Sandburg’s The People, Yes, published in 1936, from which Stafford quoted in a piece written during the last month of his life. In his trenchant review of Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Stafford comments that “Carl Sandburg mentions somewhere the value of having ‘a good forgettery.’” Sandburg’s book, a lively mixture of prose aphorisms and terse poems, is filled with familiar lines: “Somewhere they’ll give a war and nobody will come”; “You can fool all of the people part of the time and part of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”; “‘There ain’t no strong coffee, only weak people,’ said one heavy on the java.” These examples give some sense of the volume’s sardonic wisdom and would explain the pleasing irony that a book Stafford likely read in the early 1940s provided the phrase “a good forgettery” fifty years later. Like Pascal, Blake, Ghalib, and his fellow Midwesterner Sandburg, William Stafford knew the value of brevity and wit when communicating truths, especially inconvenient ones. His practice...