Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems by William Stafford, and: Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation by William Stafford

Abstract

Reviews 377 statement is not new, the way he arrived at it is interesting, exciting and convincing. MARY ELLEN ACKERMAN International Falls, Minnesota Climbing Ice. By Yvon Chouinard. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books and the American Alpine Club, 1978. 192 pages, $15.00 cloth, $9.95 paper.) Chouinard is a master climber and a major figure in the “ice revolu­ tion,” a current renovation of ice-climbing technique and equipment. He has put together a complete description of the sport as it stands today, covering all equipment and techniques needed for everything from snow slopes to overhanging frozen waterfalls. Largely because steel is harder than ice, ice climbing lends itself to overkill by technology. The latest equipment allows a climber to pull himself up almost anything, with little concern for subtle technique or sensi­ tivity to terrain and conditions. Chouinard himself is a leading innovator in equipment design, but his view is that “The technological imperative of industrial man has always been that if it can be done, it should be done. . . . Declining a possible technology is the first step toward freedom from this bondage.” He speaks of keeping his ice hammer holstered for whole climbs, of “applying fewer tools with increasing delicacy,” thus “seeing more sharply what was around me, and feeling more deeply what comes boiling up from within.” In the end, what is most rewarding is to move with a “sense of balance and adhesion,” and with “technique, judgment, and boldness.” This book can help one learn to do so. MAX LYON, Carleton College Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems. By William Stafford. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 267 pages, $10.95.) Writing the Australian Crawl: Views on the Writer’s Vocation. By William Stafford. (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1978. 161 pages, $4.95.) While he is not a programmatic regionalist, Oregon’s William Stafford has to be counted among the finest of Western poets, especially if we allow the Great Plains of his memory poems to be considered West. He is not only a poet of place but of travel, and a taste for wandering seems 378 Western American Literature archetypally Western. It’s regrettable that the brief paperback entitled Going Places (“Dedicated to the Feet”) was not included in Stories That Could Be True, but the five major collections are here, along with 41 new poems. The title and dedication of the new book reveal important things about Stafford’s work. Stories that could be true: modest, non-coercive, this poet’s familiar tone. And at the same time an ambitious title, if we remember Aristotle’s claim that it is the function of the ¡wet to relate not what has happened but what may happen: “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” And we might think of the Indian stories that Stafford likes to imitate — oral cultures rely on stories to transmit an amazingly rich heritage of practical and spiritual teachings. The title also reminds us that these poems are stories that need not be literally true even when told (as they so often are) through a first person narrator. As for the dedication, Stafford dedicates his book to “My Party the Rain,” that most non-partisan of natural forces. The just and the unjust both get attention in the poems, though, to switch metaphors, Stafford usually follows Whitman in judging, “not as the judge judges, but as the sun” — hence he can write poems against war and social ills without becoming strident. The poet is sometimes easy on himself, and that is a different matter. Stafford’s volume has many efforts with too slight a theme or too little technique. The ideas about composition revealed in Writing the Australian Crawl help explain this often noted unevenness. Stafford distrusts tradition, norms, high standards, analytical attitudes, competitiveness and strain. He fears blocking the sources of creativity. Readiness and attention to daily experience are his touchstones. “We must accustom ourselves to talking without orating, and to writing without achieving ‘Paradise Lost.’” Not very encouraging for those who wish to set themselves against the highest standards. Stafford...