William Stafford:

We live in an occupied country, misunderstood. Justice will take us millions of intricate moves.

William Stafford:

Technique used for itself will rot your soul.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 78

William Stafford:

To curry favor by saying what you do not mean, or what you do not feel, is as damaging in poetry as it is in politics or business or other parts of life.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 78

William Stafford:

You accept leads that take you to unrecognized results. In the arts you must stand fast, accept the chances that the moment brings.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 78

William Stafford:

The exhilaration of discovery, the variety that comes as a result of being yourself -- these benefits are so important and so effective that they bring results that are truly original, more exploratory and satisfactory by far than the "competing-with-models" formula.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 78

William Stafford:

The only real poems are found poems -- found when we stumble on things around us.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 67-68

William Stafford:

But to live your writing life by assuming that certain "norms" have been established and thereby made operative for any writer -- such a stance reverses the actual: writers recognize opportunities...Norms are for talking about art; opportunities are for artists.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 53-54

William Stafford:

A writer coasts into action with willing involvement, always ready for something to happen that may be a first time, not a repetition of something already accomplished.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 52

William Stafford:

The action of writing, for instance, is the successive discovery of cumulative epiphanies in the self's encounter with the world.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 51

William Stafford:

In art, one at a time, experiences contribute their immediate, felt existence: one reads a house, a scene, a room, a space, a sequence, etc. In writing, for instance, the quality of the work and its effects on the feelings are welcomed at once. One does the documentary of what is happening -- the whole orchestration including the personal reaction -- while the activity is happening. The feel of our lives, instead of being disregarded or slighted, is accepted as important.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 49

William Stafford:

...what people say -- the people around us -- floods our attention and then passes; it alerts us, now and then jiggles our feelings or provides a sigh or a laugh, or a combination...The everyday talk around us throbs waxing and waning interest and possibility.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 35

William Stafford:

Poetry is the kind of thing you have to see from the corner of your eye. You can be too well prepared for poetry...It's like a very faint star. If you look straight at it you can't see it, but if you look a little to one side it is there...If you analyze it away, it's gone. It would be like boiling a watch to find out what makes it tick.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 3

William Stafford:

Many remarks from writers give this kind of glimpse into how they actually feel when entering the activity; frequently they say something like, "It was only recently that I was able to write this poem." The implication is that writing is something other than just an intention and the craft to carry it out. Writing is a reckless encounter with whatever comes along.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 67

William Stafford:

Writers have many things to be careful not to know -- and strangely one of the things not to know is how to write. Sometimes writers who have wandered into good poems have become too adept. Auden was one. Someplace he said he feared repeating himself as the years went by, and this fear shocked me, for it undercut a view I have long cherished -- that a writer is not trying for a product, but accepting sequential signals and adjustments toward an always-arriving present.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 66

William Stafford:

One who composes in language confronts opportunity too varied for fixed rules, or for violation of rules: from the emergency of the encounter emerges the new realization, the now poem.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 55

William Stafford:

This attitude toward the immediate experience of the world may indicate why in planning to consider writing I reminded myself to be alert, to be aware of the nowness of things -- the feel of the day, the temperature, the kind of room, the people, what they said.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 47

William Stafford:

A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.

Writing the Australian Crawl, p. 17