Poet Laureate Poem Prompts

Kim Stafford was born and grew up in Oregon. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, and editor of half a dozen others. He holds a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Oregon. Stafford has received creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Governor’s Arts Award, and the Stewart Holbrook Award from Literary Arts for his contributions to Oregon’s literary culture. His work has been featured on NPR.

Stafford has worked as a printer, photographer, oral historian, editor and visiting writer at a host of colleges and schools, and has also offered writing workshops in Italy, Scotland and Bhutan. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and children.

Stafford’s most recent book, 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do, is an account of his brother’s suicide, and the struggle of his family to live beyond. It is a book where “the story reaches back through the difficult end to grasp the beautiful beginning, like pulling a venomous serpent inside out.”

“Poetry is our native language,” says Stafford. “We begin with imaginative experiments as children, . . . lyric language can be a realm of discovery and delight throughout life. For adults and communities, poetry can help us be more open to new ideas, emotionally informed, and buoyant in responding to challenges. . . ”

This is an edited version of Kim Stafford’s biography from the Oregon Cultural Trust.

Say it: Klamath… Klamath Marsh.
Can you feel the ooze, the muddy ease,
the seep and soft welcome and antiquity
of water? Can you follow the canoe trail

through grasses that part along a seam
your prow divides? Can you feel the tingle
of a thousand geese lifting off, beating
their wind-drum staccato hum of yearning?

Can you see how the sun layers color
up from the ripple skin into strata of the sky?
Can you apprehend through time’s mist how
the people heaped wocus root, dyed yellow

baskets with seed, lined pits with tule
to store a season of ripe survival? Can
you still hear the smoky story of children
leaving their spirit voices but burrowing

down through the fire to get away? Can
you stand by the water with a friend,
who tells what the tribe was, and will be?
Can you name the wocus, the cuicui,

lamprey, dace, the snubnose chub,
willow, cattail, tule, beaked sedge, spikerush,
diatomaceous earth, hemic, sapric, limnic,
the algae, the eagle tree, pelicans skimming

flat reflections stern as glass? So say it,
Klamath… Klamath Marsh, and sag
into muck, loyal to old ways, deep beliefs,
sturdy honor in concentric ooze, each

thud of your steps on hollow ground
learning from the wocus root how
to be home here, how to be woven in,
to be rooted deep in sacred mud.

 

This poem was previously published in Terrain.org (March 2019) and was published in the author’s little book, Reunion of the Rare: Oregon Poems, by Kim Stafford (Little Infinities, 2018).

Kim Stafford’s poem sent me deep into the woods of my childhood from which I wrote a much longer piece, but I will share a couple of excerpts to give you the flavor:

Within the 25 wooded acres reserved for faculty housing and known as The Woods lay a handful of distinct regions which had nothing to do with property lines and everything to do with the daily explorations and imaginations of the hoard of children, seventeen of us by one count, who peopled the wild around us. Though we took our green canopy for granted, it was a singular exception to the endless fields of corn which leveled and laid open the landscape of Jasper County.

Our house was near the “little woods” with the ladder tree whose horizontal branches made it easy to hang by your knees and the swinging maple that would send you sailing when you climbed up high. Within this narrow band of undeveloped green space, we gnawed on green sticks of sassafras, the shaft lined with “Indian gum” which I never chewed, though I sucked on the smooth green skin, my tongue relishing the tang, the saplings’ three-fingered mitts greening the understory.

We called it the little woods because it was small and the littler ones were safe there; light broke through from the meadow and cemetery beyond. It marked the edge of our world, though forays into the cemetery, and later, to the sledding hill butting into the cemetery, would become commonplace. We just never went there alone. But into the little woods we freely roamed with or without companions.

***

The “big woods” required a mob of us, siblings and friends, as it was denser, darker, and deeper than the little woods which ran along the opposite side of our universe. The big woods had its regional identifications, too. There was “New Mexico” which had few to no trees and lush grasses which lay down in cushy hummocks at our feet. We named it in response to the relative excess of sun which set it apart. We didn’t linger there for long, except in morel season, as it bordered the road on two sides and exposed us to view.

Not far from the grasses was a wild orchard of crab apple trees with their gnarly limbs, and in spring the snow of cast-off petals. My older sisters tied Chinese wind chimes–the kind made of glass “slides” painted with little flowers or calligraphy and attached to the ascending rings of its armature with red thread—to the limbs of the trees so that a breeze sent up a thrilling tinkling of chime as if of fairies passing through.

When the boys were leading or we were feeling particularly courageous, we would go to Devils’ Den which was a large basin maybe eight or ten feet deep and 20-30 feet wide, possibly from some felled old growth giant. There was a felled tree in the basin with its roots standing tall and perpendicular to the ground. We scrambled over or under the trunk as the length of our legs would allow. We imagined pirates and outlaws in such a place as it was very dark and wild—to our young minds it felt dangerous. We did not go there often….