The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life (Poets on Poetry) | 
| Author: William Stafford
Creators: Paul Merchant, Vincent Wixon
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 614186
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.7 x 0.6
ISBN: 0472068547
Dewey Decimal Number: 811.54
EAN: 9780472068548
ASIN: 0472068547
Publication Date: November 25, 2003
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Product Description
A gathering of poems, articles, aphorisms, writing exercises, and interviews from this prolific and venerable author
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| Customer Reviews:
Picking up out of the current as it goes by . . . December 22, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
The most important American poet of the second half of the Twentieth Century--Stafford is my top candidate, anyway. You may have somebody else in mind.
Stafford is so many things. For one, a poet of great spontaneity--of accepting what comes, of luck, and of writing it down:
"If you write . . . the activity of writing will make things occur to you in your mind. You write the documentary that you think, rather than the documentary that you live. When you write, it doesn't make so very much difference what you have done or intend to do, but it makes quite a bit of difference what occurs to you at the moment you're writing. . . . it's just as if you have a readiness to respond to what occurs to you at the moment."
Stafford is so humble that we may have yet to grasp how vast he is--how expansive his vision.
For Bill Stafford, writing is not about being a great writer, or getting published in the best publications--it's about being a good person--a whole way of life, of which the written poem on the page is an evidence, a record, a door that opens to us, his readers.
"In everyone's life there's all this torrent of things happening and a writer . . . maybe one way to say it would be someone who pays attention at least at intervals, to that torrent. Or a writer is not someone who has to dream of things to write, but has to figure out what to pick up out of the current as it goes by."
Lucky us, whether we write, or read or just live, that Paul Merchant and Vince Wixon put together this collection of Stafford's statements on his writing and teaching.
We're lucky indeed to have three other books in the same vein: You Must Revise Your Life (Poets on Poetry),Writing the Australian Crawl (Poets on Poetry), and Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation (Poets on Poetry).
There's a line in American poetry running straight from ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson through Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Stafford, like Dickinson, is humble. He's proximite to nature, sees into the depth of the world, speaks directly to to his reader like a friend and with greatest facility in everyday language--all of which place him right in that line.
Who's next?
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