We Few Dreamers

On a January afternoon, the kind in California when it is equally pleasurable to sit in shade or sit in sun, forty Santa Barbara locals lounge at attention on picnic tables along the Santa Ynez River. One by one, we stand and read a favorite poem by William Stafford.

Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947

William Stafford (Author), Fred Marchant (Editor)

Graywolf Press

128 pages

$16.12

We are here because he was here. Surrounding us in our oak-strewn meadow are the old stone foundations of the Los Prietos Civilian Public Service Camp, where Stafford served as a conscientious objector during World War II. Here, doing work for the U.S. Forest Service, he laid the foundations of himself. And here we have gathered annually, just over the ridge from town, to remember this man and his understated poetry.

Just now a local student rises to read “At the Un-National Monument Along the Canadian Border,” a poem that he has heard in class:

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

As he ends the stanza, I reflect that Stafford might as well be writing about the field we are in, this natural flat in a bend of the river—now a picnic area, once a work camp, and before that the site of a small Chumash village.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed—or were killed—on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

People nod as the student sits down. This is iconic Stafford—mature, assured, and quietly subversive. Most of us know this one by heart. But next up is one of several Forest Service personnel with a new green book in hand. She reads a poem called “Devotion.” It begins:

Along my river frogs like thought
plop into depths before my foot.

We listen up. This one is new to us. And yet it was written right here, along this riverbank, on March 21, 1944. It says so, right in the book. This poem does not have the unsettling power of that un-national monument. But it is a piece of Stafford’s work heretofore unknown to us, part of what came of the crucible of this mountain place tucked into the chaparral. And to Fred Marchant, the editor of this splendid selection of William Stafford’s apprentice poems, we are grateful.

Marchant’s introduction alone is worth the modest price of the book. For those unfamiliar with Stafford, he reviews the basic details: born in Kansas in 1914 to a hardworking and rather itinerant mainline Protestant family, a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation at the University of Kansas in the 1930s, a conscientious objector in the civilian public service camps during the war, and then a longtime English teacher at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, where he died in 1993. Though Stafford began to write poems in his early twenties, he did not publish his first book until age 46, in 1960. Three years later, a subsequent volume, Traveling Through the Dark, won the National Book Award. He was thereafter named Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, a forerunner to our current laureate position, and for the last thirty years of his life was much in demand throughout the country. His unassuming manner and presence made him welcome everywhere; amidst the strident voices of the 1960s and 1970s, his was not so much a poetry of protest as a poetry of encouragement.

In choosing to feature Stafford’s earliest poems, and in particular those written in the camps, Marchant seeks to understand the most basic parts of the man and his work: “What does it mean to be a conscientious objector during a war that nearly all one’s fellow citizens favor? What does it mean to take such a stance at the same time that one is getting started as a poet? How does such an experience shape the poetry, and how does the poetry articulate the inner life of a person in such a situation?”

In exploring these questions, Marchant first provides some historical context. The Civilian Public Service program was created by Congress in 1940 at the urging of the historic peace churches—the Friends, the Mennonites, and the Church of the Brethren among them. It was to be under civilian control, but was in fact administered by the Selective Service. Of the 34 million Americans who registered for the draft during World War II, 72,000 applied for CO status. A third of these failed their physicals; another third served within the military as noncombatants, often as medics; of the final third, 6,000 did not cooperate at all and were sent to jail—but about 12,000 men, Stafford among them, were willing to serve in the cps camps.

There were 150 such camps scattered about the country, many run by the Forest Service. Stafford spent two of his war years, from spring 1942 to spring 1944, at the Los Prietos Camp behind Santa Barbara, in Los Padres National Forest, and that is where a third of the 176 poems in this volume are placed and dated. Though some of the COs at Los Prietos did office work, most of them cleared roads and trails and fought fires. These were thoughtful and literate men, wanting to have a life of the mind. But they found that they were too tired in the evenings to concentrate, so most of them rose at 4:30 am to read, to write, and to teach each other classes. These early mornings with pen in hand became Stafford’s lifelong ritual.

In 1947, Stafford published a series of elliptical essays on his CO experience, Down in My Heart. It is well worth the reading. And for readers new to Stafford’s poems, I recommend those selected by Robert Bly in The Darkness Around Us Is Deep (1993). But in Marchant’s book we have the poems, heretofore uncollected, from Stafford’s first and perhaps most challenging decade as a writer.

Marchant draws special attention to the poem “CO’s Work on a Mountain Road”:

Like bay trees on the edge of La Cumbre Peak,
liking with wistful scent the swooping world below,
we few dreamers
on the edge of new savage years, jagged beyond sight,
audaciously lean, suspiring a few old messages from
the old earth still under our trustful feet.

Stafford likens the COs to the small but pungent bay trees leaning over a cliff above a troubled world. But he wonders about their efficacy. Is their presence meaningful? Do they have a witness?

Who cares in a big country for a few egret trees,
on one cliff, on an edge, leaning far out,
on a scent like a memory?

Though the poem questions their lonely egret stand, it also proposes that the COs do breathe a needed sweetness into the air, however faint. They are keeping faith in a world at war, and that is their real work, quite apart from the building of roads.

And yet, how hard it was to keep that pacifist faith. The men at Los Prietos were paid all of $2.50 a month, with funds raised by the Church of the Brethren. A number of their supervisors derided them as traitors. They were in the camps for the duration of the war, and no one knew how long that would be. In “Los Prietos [II],” Stafford expresses both yearning and resentment:

Doves in the dust of our pacifist camp—
and the sky and the deer and the quail
and the wind in the weeds and a baby bat lost
and the darkening west—and here with love is our jail.

There are things to be done, and words said,
and others—but we never have time;
and some we never could say,
so we follow new paths and seek out new names
and hope we can find out a way:
Wrong and Right and Oh Truth!
and Heavy and Light and Dark and then Bright—
and a valley beyond somewhere in the night
and Christ and be good and no harm.

So yes, here we live now like suddenly grass,
beautifully, endlessly frail,
or rocks and old iron—and so don’t worry about me:—
always in love with our jail.

There are some young histrionics here that the elder Stafford would never approve of, but as a record of an aspiring conscience hard-hit with reality, the poem has great value. As Marchant points out, the characteristic dashes become points of indeterminacy—interruptions and delays that show the poet thinking hard, much like Emily Dickinson before him.

The camp was not all grimness. Stafford met his wife there, Dorothy Frantz, the daughter of a visiting minister. Some of the verses are rhymed love poems, first published, of all places, in the Ladies Home Journal. And other poems show the influence of his beloved Wordsworth, celebrating the natural world in beautiful and particular ways that seem to lay the war aside. When we gather again on the banks of the Santa Ynez next January, I want to read “Los Prietos [I]”:

Dear friends, the swarthy earth shoulders into the stars here.
The slopes are possessed of many trees.
The gracious sun visits daily the open parks,
and a chaperone mountain serves all the canyon west.
Deer timid through shadows. Birds fly across from cliffs.
Mostly silence rises and moves up the slopes
past enchanted white spikes of yucca.
This is the land we are exiled to from a world fighting.
We look at each other and sing all the songs we have heard.

With this book, Fred Marchant adds to all the songs we have heard from William Stafford. And that’s worth singing about.

Paul J. Willis is professor of English at Westmont College. His most recent books of poetry are Rosing from the Dead (Word Farm) and Visiting Home (Pecan Grove Press).