Millions of Intricate Moves: William Stafford and the Craft of Nonviolence

by James Long

One of the big questions for any boy where I grew up in West Virginia was this: Are you going to be a fist-fighter at school? I received free lunch and wore jeans with colorful patches my mother had sewn over the holes. Plus, I was mouthy and childlike a little longer than most, in other words, an easy target. But my parents, especially my father, made it clear from early on: I was not to raise my hands against anyone. They’d shaped that narrative with me since my earliest memories, John Lennon tunes like “Imagine” and “Give Peace a Chance” spinning off the record player on what seemed an endless loop, always in the background, whether I was washing the dinner dishes or racing my Hot Wheels cars on the oriental rug. My parents are passionate people, and money was often tight in the early days when only my father worked outside the home. Even though sometimes tempers flared, what mostly sticks with me is how gentle he was as I was growing up, how the songs I heard were presented as gospel, that I was raised to believe love actually is the answer. On the playground, the school bus, in the hall between classes, that upbringing guided my choices.

When I reflect on being raised to reject violence, I sometimes think of William Stafford and the choices he made, both in his life and in his poetry, to be a pacifist. Born in 1914, on the cusp of World War I, Stafford entered a century that was to be defined by global conflict. Perhaps at least partly for this reason, in addition to being known as a prolific, well-decorated poet, he also became known for his stance against violence and war. In Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford (Graywolf Press, 2002), Stafford’s son, Kim, describes his father’s decision to become a conscientious objector in World War II. This choice sent him to work camps stateside, in Arkansas and California, doing manual labor for the U.S. Forest Service and other government agencies while most of his generation who got drafted were shipped off to Europe or the South Pacific, to kill and be killed. In these camps, Stafford cultivated his well-known habit of rising each morning before dawn to write, a habit he kept the rest of his life. However, as Kim Stafford reveals, his father felt he could never again live in Kansas, the place where he grew up and, as his poems show, a place he continued to revere, due to the hate that festered over his decision not to fight. Stafford, married to Dorothy Frantz from 1944 until his death in 1993, lived most of his adult life further west, most notably in Oregon, where he taught at Portland’s Lewis & Clark College for more than thirty years. The stakes were real for him, greater certainly than mine, although not necessarily greater than my father’s when I think of him watching the Vietnam draft lottery on TV, waiting to hear his number (he was never called to fight).

For Stafford, nonviolence is about more than just laying down arms. For him, it also becomes an active form of resistance, manifested in language. Declarative sentences are one way he achieves this, and they convey his urgency as a peacemaker. In “A Message from the Wanderer,” collected in The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1998), and from his book Stories That Could Be True (1977), he writes, “Prisoners, listen; / you have relatives outside. And there are / thousands of ways to escape.” This is from the poem’s second line—he wastes no time wrestling with questions of morality around what the prisoners are accused of. He moves straight to empathy, to the side of the supposed offender rather than that of the system. Sometimes he’s more earnest and lays out an argument, as in “A Ritual to Read to Each Other,” from West of Your City (1960), which begins,

If you don’t know the kind of person I am

and I don’t know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

Although some may interpret differently, the idea of a ritual between two people seems an intimate way to cast this, causes me to imagine lovers, or a married couple even, reading each other poems or stories they believe in. I like imagining the poem reflects Stafford’s personality as I see it throughout his work, that of a man who is earnest and not ashamed to envision something that might be thought childlike, such as adults reading to each other. Considered broadly, the idea of two people taking the time to do this, then gaining the level of understanding described, the poem functions as a kind of model for the open communication that is foundational in a civil society, the kind of civil communication, frankly, that I crave in conversations today.

Stafford also chooses peace with his diction. A favorite word of his is “we.” While he uses it in the spirit of inclusion, the suggestion often is that the collective “human we” shares certain imperatives. In “Watching the Jet Planes Dive,” again from West of Your City, he begins, “We must go back and find a trail on the ground,” and ends, “The jet planes dive; we must travel on our knees.” He pits humanity against the military-industrial complex, but his tone is not fearful. Instead, he’s pointing the way, suggesting reverence, living more simply, and being closer to the earth as our best chances for survival. I like how he sometimes pairs “we” with “us,” as in “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid,” collected in The Way It Is. He’s using the word “country” in the abstract, a metaphoric region where we grow strong by facing fear:

That country is there, for us,

carried as it is crossed. What you fear

will not go away: it will take you into

yourself and bless you and keep you.

That’s the world, and we all live there.

Perhaps ironically, Stafford practices nonviolence by creating tension through words, through unexpected usage, a sort of poetic “good trouble.” One of my favorite poems that does this is “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border” from Stories that Could Be True. Stafford boldly negates “National,” and that negation moves the rest of the poem: “the battle did not happen,” “the unknown soldier did not die,” “No people killed—or were killed—on this ground,” and “people celebrate it by forgetting its name.” 

I find it interesting how often Stafford, known for his celebration of the natural world, chooses to focus on people and relationships, how certain characters or aspects of getting along in society provide a launching point for his peacemaker stance. The subject of “Thinking for Berky” in Travelling Through the Dark (1962) grows up in a home decidedly unlike my own, one where neglect and cruelty prevail, and even years later the speaker can’t get her out of his mind: “In the late night listening from bed,” he writes, “I have joined the ambulance or the patrol.” In portrayals like this, Stafford shows us what it’s like to allow oneself to feel the pull toward others, to feel empathy. But he also loves challenging those he sees aligned with the status quo, those he jibes in “At the Chairman’s Housewarming” from The Rescued Year (1966). Of the evening’s conversation, he writes, “Talk like a jellyfish can ruin a party.” He fantasizes about interjecting that he eats whole wheat bread, ends by musing an admonishment to the crowd, “Go back wishy-washy to your sheltered bay, / but let me live definite, shock by shock.” Nonviolence, which almost always requires resisting the status quo, also requires the courage of individuality, the courage to be true to oneself. 

Stafford lived as his poems taught. In the biography, his son recalls a story about the poet as a child witnessing two Black children getting harassed on the playground: “‘And what did you do, Billy?’ his mother asked. ‘I went and stood by them.’” While that’s also the sort of compassionate action my father encouraged, I couldn’t always do it. The last time I was egged on enough to fight as a child, it was on the bus, that big yellow war zone that carted us to and from school. A certain boy, Ricky was his name, called me a sissy or something worse for toting a band instrument, and I raised that bedraggled clarinet case (it had been passed down from my uncle) as if to strike him with it. The driver intervened, calling me out on the intercom, so no one had to find out what I really would have done. That was a choice I made, if you consider I didn’t say “no” to letting my anger build, literally, over years and years. However, I remember another time on the bus when I chose as I believe my father or Stafford would have. It was in defense of a quiet, friendless boy who got on after my stop. All the kids—I admit I was among them—would scoot to the edges of their seats until the driver forced someone to let him sit. I don’t remember the words exactly, but something my father said caused me to change, and I started voluntarily sliding over, right when we got to his house. When I reflect on this now, I come again to “Thinking for Berky,” how in the last stanza Stafford writes, “justice will take us millions of intricate moves.” That doesn’t seem intimidating or out of reach to me. It just sounds like the work of peace, work that is still hard for me at times, the work that needs to be done.

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James Long’s poems have appeared in Appalachian Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, Gulf Stream Magazine, I-70 Review, and other literary journals. He has attended the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman and holds an MFA in poetry from Spalding University’s Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing. Apart from his day job in the business world, Long is an adjunct English instructor at BridgeValley Community & Technical College in South Charleston, West Virginia.