Get It Off Your Desk

William Stafford's Resilient Example

In June I attended a writing conference celebrating and drawing inspiration from the work of William Stafford. It was held at Lewis and Clark College, where the Stafford Archive is housed. I got to spend two afternoons soaking in this lovely campus and poking around in the archive reading Stafford’s daily writing pages.

It was astounding to me how many times Stafford sent a poem out. Over years and years, the same poems make the rounds and return with rejections.

Some of the archive can be seen online. Here are the drafts for “At the Bomb Testing Site.” Within a month the poem quickly goes through multiple drafts. But at the bottom of the Documentary Copy you can see that it takes over four years for it to be published.

Even after he had won the National Book Award for Traveling Through the Dark, his editor at Harper and Row sent back his new manuscript with the note,

There is a kernel here of a good rich book, and we feel there may be ways of strengthening it.

But there is more work that must be done.

This is the very first draft of the poem “Ask Me” from December 1974 when I was 5 months old.

I returned from the conference resolved to send more work out. In the intervening month, I’ve already gotten a rejection:

Unfortunately, we are not accepting any of the work here, though we would love to see more from you.

I don’t know that I have it in me to keep sending the same poems out for years on end. But I am slowly building resilience every time I send out a packet.