Kim Stafford, Oregon’s Ninth Poet Laureate
Some say he followed in footsteps,
wore hand-me-down boots or learned
to pull up his bootstraps at breakfast.
When you let him teach you to sew up
tiny notebooks to carry in a pocket
so you never forget one good word,
when he searches for the power words
in a student’s just-birthed poem, or
you’ve heard him recite his poems by heart
through tears that he says don’t
make sense to him that day,
or you’ve heard his family stories
as words never said, tales that take
a fourth or fifth telling to make sense
even to him. And you’ve followed
his accounts of camping in the rain
or pitching a tent where ghosts
wander out of the coast fog.
You’ve witnessed grace a foot,
kindness in slippers,
humility in a leather sole,
you know the rightness
of following this man
on his singular and ambling
walk of love.
Tricia Knoll is a Vermont poet, formerly of Oregon. She considers Kim Stafford one of her greatest teachers. Her poetry appears widely in journals and anthologies. Two of her poetry collections focus on poetry of place in the Pacific Northwest: Broadfork Farm about a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington and Ocean’s Laughter about change over time in Manzanita, Oregon. Website: triciaknoll.com