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Time Passages: The Music Of Al Stewart

Posted on January 16, 2010
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“Two broken tigers on fire in the night
Flicker their souls to the wind”

Two of the most beautiful lines that I’ve heard in all of my musical journeys. Can you believe a song, a rock song at that, that grabs you like a thriller from the first lines and doesn’t let go till the end, almost eight minutes later. And the song has a beautiful, sad ending like a great epic. And the song is the chronicle of the Third Reich’s disastrous invasion of Russia, the beginning of its end, told from the perspective of a Russian foot soldier.

Or how about this song, “The Running Man”, that chronicles the life of a hunted man (a Nazi ?), running from the hunted, that starts with:

Before the phone hits the receiver
You’re halfway to the door
The voice said ‘get out while you can,
There’s just ten minutes, nothing more’

Or a song about the French Revolution called “Palace of Versailles” that starts with:

The wands of smoke are rising
From the walls of the Bastille
And through the streets of Paris
Runs a sense of the unreal
The kings have all departed
There servants are nowhere
We burned out all their mansions
In the name of Robespierre

Probably no other rock artist has set history to such beautiful music and woven such compelling historical tales as Al Stewart.

I was introduced to his music in Paris. When I went to meet a friend in one of the company apartments, I heard this beautiful music coming from one of the rooms. I asked what the music was and who lived in that room. I was told that the guy who lived there was a snob who had the most expensive and gorgeous sounding music system in all the company. Snob or not, I wanted to know what the music was. I knocked on the door and entered his den. A guy sat on the floor, sprouting a moustache and an attitude. I introduced myself and asked him what was playing. He said, “Al Stewart”, disdainfully. The song that I heard was “Roads to Moscow”, the song whose lines I quoted at the start of this post. The album was “The Best of Al Stewart“.

I remained in the room listening to the rest of the music and a few months later, the snob and I were good friends. We’d spend hours listening to music. I was coming to Paris from my years spent in small towns of Southern India where western music was hard to come by. And what did come by was the mainstream stuff, stuff that I had grown tired of, stuff that was unmemorable a week or a month later. I was in search of something less ephemeral, more soul grabbing. Deepak introduced me to a lot of new music, music that went under the genre of progressive rock, of groups such as Yes, ELP, Rush and King Crimson. Of all of them, the only two that remained are Al Stewart and Camel.

Al Stewart has a pleasing and distinctive voice to accompany his distinctive musical stories. Hear it once and you can recognize it again quite easily, just like Mark Knopfler’s guitaring. His musical journey began with a guitar and this voice, singing folk rock songs of intimate portraits gleaned from his life. Stories of girl friends – won, lost and love still searching – of friends and their lives, of street life and characters like history teachers. Here are some lines from one of his early songs, In Brooklyn:

‘Oh I come from Pittsburgh to study astrology,’
She said as she stepped on my instep,
‘I could show you New York with a walk between Fourth Street and Nine.’
Then out of her coat taking seven harmonicas
She sat down to play on a doorstep sayin
‘Come back to my place I will show you the stars and the signs’
So I followed her into the black lands
Where the window frames peel and flake
And the old Jewish face behind the lace
Even now trying to get to see what’s cooking
Just John the Baptist in the park getting laid thinking there’s no-one looking
And its eighty degrees and I’m down on my knees in Brooklyn

Interestingly, his first single, in 1967, included guitaring by the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist, Jimmy Page. His albums also featured good instrumentals such as “A Small Fruit Song” from his third album, Zero She Flies. At one of his concerts, he joked that jazz is what happens when a musician continues to play even after they don’t know what they’re playing, this despite his third album containing an 18 minute track that chronicled his love life. The song reads like a rock version of Raj Kapoor’s “Jaane Kahan Gaye Woh Din”. Wikipedia credits the song as being the first mainstream record release to include the “f” word. I like how the song ends:

Of all the girls I ever knew
some loved and some denied me
And all the words I ever said
have been no use to hide me
And all the songs I ever sung
each one of them untied me
And all the girls I ever loved
have left themselves inside me

Wikipedia has this to say about this stage of his career: “Stewart was a key figure in a fertile era in British music and he appears throughout the musical folklore of the age. He played at the first ever Glastonbury Festival in 1970, knew Yoko Ono pre-Lennon, shared a London apartment with a young Paul Simon, and hosted at the legendary Les Cousins folk club in London in the 1960s.”

Things began to change with his fifth album, “Past, Present and Future“, released in 1973. Six of the eight songs from that album had historical roots from melodies about the second World War to a portrait of the American president, Warren Harding, to one about the prophecies of Nostradamus. This was the first album to be properly released in the US, though it didn’t receive much airplay on commercial radio stations due to the length of its best songs.

Two albums later came the meteoric “Year Of The Cat”. Al Stewart is mostly known to everybody for this album. He says that this was attempt to construct a chart-busting album. “If this didn’t work, I don’t know how to create one”, he said. It had fewer historical songs than say “Past, Present and Future”, but the three that it did were gems: Lord Grenville, On The Border and Flying Sorcery. The title track is among my all time favorites, along with Roads to Moscow. His description of the woman in the title track is brilliant and unique:

She comes out of the sun in a silk dress running
Like a water colour in the rain

as is the the starting of the song:

On a morning from a Bogart movie
In a country where they turn back time
You go strolling through the crowd like Peter Lorre
Contemplating a crime

It is a song that speaks to the senses with lines of incense and patchouli, blue tiled walls, drum beats and rhythms.

The rest of his albums never quite achieved the popularity of Year of the Cat though they possessed gems such as Merlin’s Time, Running Man, Song On The Radio and Palace of Versailles. He mostly disappeared from the mainstream radio scene. But that hasn’t stopped him from continuing to put out albums. His last album “Sparks of Ancient Light” was released in 2008. The highlight of the album was the song “Shah of Shahs” about the last days of Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran. He sings:

After these processions comes the sweeping up
The rag and bone possessions, an old tin cup
The army trucks have hauled away the newly slain
The angry crowd retreats, but they’ll be back again

And the prisoner in the palace does not understand
The ingratitude around him after all he’s done and planned
But if this the way that it must be then he’ll be damned
If he will let them take away his perfect dream

….

He cried inside the limousine and at the airport too
Where the soldier knelt before him and kissed his shoe
He flew across the desert and the open sea
While they tore down all his statues and his legacy

And the victor greets the newsmen with a strange and stoic style
They take a hundred thousand pictures and in none of them a smile
But this is just the way that it must be now for a while
he’s only come to bring another perfect dream

Luckily for me, he still tours, performing at small, off beat but popular stages. He is back to being a folk artist again, singing his popular and not-so-popular tunes with a just a guitar. He’d sometimes be accompanied by his then collaborator, guitarist Laurence Juber. Almost twenty years after I first heard his song, I saw him perform live. He came to the Bay Area twice within a year and we saw him both times, driving nearly two hours each way the second time. His concert was charming despite the lack of orchestration because he also spoke well, with understated, wry British humor.

In the music shops of Paris at that time I lived there, only a handful of his albums were available, all very expensive. So Deepak and I purchased an album each, Year of The Cat, and its followup, Time Passages. I had to wait till I came to the US to buy some of his other albums. After collecting seven of his albums, I thought I had enough. For a while, he vanished from my music scene as jazz and Mark Knopfler supplanted just about everything else.

Then Maya was born. A child can begin a journey of rediscovery. One afternoon, looking for some music with an afternoon mood, I played Lord Grenville and Year of the Cat to Maya. She was hooked to both songs and for over two months now, they continue to be the songs she takes to her afternoon nap. I’ve introduced other songs such as Time Passages, Almost Lucy and Palace of Versailles, all of which she likes. Roads to Moscow is one of her favorite bedtime tracks. Last night, she evan began humming the chorus of the track. As I listened to Roads to Moscow, to her humming and watched the joy in her face as she listened to the song, my thoughts harked back to my history with Al Stewart and I drifted into those Time Passages.

It was late in December, the sky turned to snow
All round the day was going down slow
Night like a river beginning to flow
I felt the beat of my mind go
Drifting into time passages
Years go falling in the fading light
Time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Well I’m not the kind to live in the past
The years run too short and the days too fast
The things you lean on are the things that don’t last
Well it’s just now and then my line gets cast into these
Time passages
There’s something back here that you left behind
Oh time passages
Buy me a ticket on the last train home tonight

Al Stewart picture from flickr, courtesy of ac4lt.

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Holes In The Mind

Posted on November 22, 2009
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Imagine you’re a twelve year old girl who has lost her mother. How do you cope with the loss of your mother ? If you’re poor, there are no grief counselors you can go to, no real support system to help you deal with the loss. How do you howl your anger, your hurt and your grief ? She died of a drug overdose, but that’s not how you remember her, not how you want to remember her. Can words help you get past this horror ? Can a constellation of words, arranged just so allow you to heal ? Do you stand a chance to grow up to be a normal, healthy, adult ?

Liberty City is a poor, mostly black, drug ridden neighborhood in Miami, Florida, the scene of one of America’s worst racial riots after five white officers were acquitted for having beaten a black man to death. In the early morning hours of the final days of 1979, a black man, Arthur McDuffie, was involved in a high speed chase with the police. He fell off his motorcycle on a highway ramp. The officers who reached him, removed his helmet, beat his head with batons till he died, replaced his helmet and filed a report that he died in a motorcycle accident following a high speed chase. One of the cops even admitted to this on trial. Despite that, an all white jury acquitted all five officers.

In the movie, American Violet, a single black mother fights an arrest for drug use that she is not guilty of. The movie is based on a true story though the names are fictionalized. I learnt that 90-95% of people arrested for a crime agree to a plea bargain, not because they’re guilty, but because they’re scared into believing that if they don’t accept the plea bargain, they’ll be put away for eternity. As a single parent, your children are homeless if you’re incarcerated. Accepting a plea bargain of guilty with a suspended sentence means you can be out the same day. In the movie, the mother is told that she can go home in an hour and be with her kids if she pleads guilty. Neither the public defendant nor the prosecutor inform her that if she pleads guilty, she and her kids will no longer eligible for food stamps or Medicare, will be kicked out of the government housing project they live in, and her prospects of employment will be close to zero. The kick in the gut is that she’s arrested because her name is on the list of drug pushers for a personal reason, not because she sold drugs. In places like Texas in 2000, all you needed to be put away was one informant, no matter how compromised the informant. In such an environment, staying out of jail and making ends meet can be an impossible challenge, a challenge most of us maybe incapable of surmounting.

Back to the little twelve year old girl. How can she make sense of what happened ? She lives in a neighborhood where death is a constant visitor, where all her friends have seen someone close to them die. Patricia Smith, an African American poet, did a stint at Lillie. C. Evans school in Liberty City. The sixth graders wanted to know how poetry would help them in the real world. One of them, Nicole, wants Smith to help her remember her mother not as a drug addict, but as someone who sang to her as she braided her hair. Patricia Smith wrote a poem, Building Nicole’s Mama, for that little girl. Here is an excerpt:

I love you, Nicole says, Nicole wearing my face,
pimples peppering her nose, and she is as black
as angels are. Nicole’s braids clipped, their ends
kissed with match flame to seal them,
and can you teach me to write a poem about my mother?
I mean, you write about your daddy and he dead,
can you teach me to remember my mama?

A teacher tells me this is the first time Nicole
has admitted that her mother is gone,
murdered by slim silver needles and a stranger
rifling through her blood, the virus pushing
her skeleton through for Nicole to see.
And now this child with rusty knees
and mismatched shoes sees poetry as her scream
and asks me for the words to build her mother again.
Replacing the voice.
Stitching on the lost flesh.

One Sunday evening this past September, I heard this on the radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge”. I was mesmerized by Patricia Smith’s reading of the poem, especially after explaining the story behind it. Since that day, they have refused to be dislodged from my mind.

My first encounter with poems was in school where they took a special place of hatred. In the provincial schools in middling towns of India that I studied in, the power, the beauty, the magic of the words was not taught. Poems were one more thing to memorize, though the memorization was harder because we had to reproduce the exact sequence of words. Poems were vomit, something you regurgitated, undigested, on papers in exam halls.

Even in such a system, the power of words found their way to immortality in my mind. To this day, I remember this fragment from Shelley’s “To A Skylark” :

Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

Why that phrase remained, I don’t remember. Had I laughed especially hard at someone’s fall that day ?  If you scan my brain, I’m confident that you can see those lines. Robert Frost said: “The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound – that he will never get over it.”

In the same radio program, the host of the show interviews Jay Parini, the author of “Why Poetry Matters”. Jay Parini says that great poems burn a hole in the page and a hole in the mind. Many poems have burned holes in my mind since Shelley’s first did.

But still, poetry was highbrow, for cultured, well educated, middle class people, I thought. What possible effect could it have on the lives of people like Nicole ? Patricia Smith changed my mind. Smith concludes the poem, Building Nicole’s Mama with:

So poets,
as we pick up our pens,
as we flirt and sin and rejoice behind microphones–
remember Nicole.
She knows that we are here now,
and she is an empty vessel waiting to be filled.

And she is waiting.
And she
is
waiting.
And she waits.

Listen to the whole show. It’s an hour well spent.

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Get Lucky: A Review

Posted on October 19, 2009
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September doesn’t just herald the coming change of season. For me and several others around the world, every two years, it heralds the release of a new Mark Knopfler album. Get Lucky, his seventh solo album (including his duet with Emmylou Harris) was released a few weeks back, with just about as much fanfare as his previous releases; that is, almost none. An email about pre-concert ticket sales for a concert next April was how I came to know of this album.

Though the album was to be released only on September 14th (15th in the US), I got lucky and found out that my Rhapsody music subscription service allowed me to listen to the entire album a full week before the release. That alone justified the monthly subscription that I pay for Rhapsody. Coupled with Roku Soundbridge 1001, I listened to the entire album on my hi-fi system.

Compared to his previous album, Kill To Get Crimson, Get Lucky is a more modest effort, a notch or two below his best, especially in song writing, which has become his primary focus.

Across eleven tracks and 52 minutes, Knopfler uses flute, whistle, accordion and strings to produce a sound that is a throwback to the soundtracks of Local Hero and Cal. It is a september record: a few upbeat sunny songs but mostly quiet, midtempo tracks, tracks composed with a knowledge of the coming cold, austere times.

Three tracks stood out immediately. Hard Shoulder, the second song in the album, is a heartbreaking song about an unexpected loss. In a style that he employed on Hill Farmer Blues from The Ragpicker’s Dream, he starts with a workman listing out the things he has, the tools of his trade and then quietly slips in the real subject.

I’ve got latches for windows, handles for doors,
Grinders and scrapers and sanders for floors,
Rake for the gravel, chains for the snow,
Always got the shovel – you never know
I never thought you’d go

A workman, has stopped on the shoulder of a road, trying to recover from the loss. And with beautiful wordplay, he mixes the shoulder of the road with the need for a shoulder to cry on.

A few years back, we were having some repairs done on the house. The workman called to say the morning of the repairs that he had had a family emergency and that he couldn’t make it that day. I’ll call later and reschedule, he said. I was a little miffed (I had to shuffle my schedules so that I could be home when he showed up), but didn’t think much more. He called back a few days later and we rescheduled for him to come a week later.

He was an immigrant, like me, but eking out his existence in a much harder way than I ever had to. As he was doing his work, I remembered his family emergency and asked him if everything was alright. I remember how he looked at me, his clear blue eyes shattering as he said, “My daughter died last week. She was six years old. She had a fever that led to complications she never recovered from. That morning I was to come to your house, we had to rush her to the hospital”. I held him as he cried a little. I thought about my getting a little ruffled over his rescheduling. How little we know of the lives we call upon to care for our needs. Listening to Hard Shoulder reminded me of that man.

In true Knopfler fashion, the loss is never spelled out. A first reading made me think that it was about a lover leaving. But subsequent readings made me revise that opinion: this could be about any loss.

The second stand out track was the gentle waltz, Monteleone. The song is about John Monteleone, who Knopfler calls the world’s greatest living builder of the arch top guitar. The song is about his working of the wood to produce a beautiful musical instrument. I love the line “the chisels are calling”:

The chisels are calling
Its time to make sawdust
Steely reminders of things left to do
Monteleone, a mandolin’s waiting for you

The final standout track is also, in my opinion, the finest on the record, So Far From the Clyde. The song is about a ship taken to a breaker yard, some desolate beach in some impoverished part of India. I felt my insides rip as he sings about the ship as it is first shattered by riding it hard into the ground and then hacked and sawed off “’til there’s only a stain in the sand”. The ship comes alive, becomes a living thing. In one beautiful stanza, he sings:

As if to a wave
from her bows to her rudder
bravely she rises
to meet with the land
Under their feet
they all feel her keel shudder
A shallow sea washes their hands

I love the way he mixes in the metaphor of Pilate’s washing off his hands at the judgement of Jesus to the actions of the people involved in the tearing down of the ship.

Again, the song at one level, can be treated as merely the story of a ship, or it can be treated as an elegy to the end of a way of life. The song reminded me of an article that I had just read on NYT, about the lonely, wretched existence of many elderly immigrants in this country. The lead anecdote was about a Sikh father, living in the not far-off East Bay town of Fremont. Many of these immigrants had been cast aside by their children after being brought to this country. Now far from their social network, their ways of knowing and being, a stranger in a strange land, they seek solace in the company of fellow immigrants in similar positions and return to their rented places to die lonely deaths. Not unlike a ship that sailed proud and free for many years but taken at its end to a strange place. From the article:

Mr. Singh, the widower, grew up in a boisterous Indian household with 14 family members. In Fremont, he moved in with his son’s family and devoted himself to his grandchildren, picking them up from school and ferrying them to soccer practice. Then his son and daughter-in-law decided “they wanted their privacy,” said Mr. Singh, an undertone of sadness in his voice. He reluctantly concluded he should move out.

So when he leaves the Hub, dead leaves swirling around its fake cobblestones, Mr. Singh drives to the rented room in a house he found on Craigslist. His could be a dorm room, except for the arthritis heat wraps packed neatly in plastic bins.

The album is unusual in that it comes with some liner notes by Knopfler, a man known for his understated, taciturn persona. Knopfler writes that this album was a personal one more than usual. His uncle, dead at the age of 20 in WWII, is the piper in “Piper to the End”, his father makes an cameo on “Before Gas and TV” and his own childhood and adolescent life is the fabric from which songs such as Border Reiver and Get Lucky are sown. But I found his songwriting on most of the songs not upto his usual exemplary standard.

Maya likes the three songs that I mentioned as well as the title track and Border Reiver. Especially, Monteleone which is one of her staple goodnight songs now.

There’s so little new music that soothes me. Don’t get me wrong. I continue to find new music that I enjoy, new styles and new artists. But novelty isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. Homecoming is not about novelty, but it is among the most emotionally complex and satisfying experiences. Listening to Knopfler is like a homecoming to me. Not all homecomings are as good and satisfying. But we go home anyways. And so, I’ll listen to this album.

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And Then There Are Days…

Posted on July 26, 2009
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And then there are days like this past Friday. I had a miserable night, Shanthala was at work, we were back home from staying with our friends and the house felt so large and lonely. Maya woke up an hour before her usual time which meant that I got even less sleep than usual and I had a full day at work ahead of me. I had asked the nanny, Ginez, to come by after 9 thinking that my meeting wasn’t till 10, but I had completely forgotten about a meeting from 9-10. So I had to send email to the folks hosting the 10 o’clock meeting that I’d be 15-20 minutes late. And I have to borrow my friend’s car to make up the time.

My stomach disagrees with the quality/quantity of something I ate the night before and I feel crummy. My joints feel stiff. My upper back complains about my carrying Maya so much and my neck laments about having spent the night at an odd angle. I look outside to a gray, cloudy and cold world, like some late fall or winter morning. But we’re in the middle of summer. Where is that California sunshine ?

Crabby, sleepless, sore, lonely, I start getting ready for work. I put Maya down and sit down on the potty. The only book around is William Stafford’s collection of poems, “The Way It Is”. I open a page at random and read:

It’s a balance, the taking and passing along,
the composting of where you’ve been and how
people and weather treated you. It’s a country where
you already are, bringing where you have been.
Time offers this gift in its millions of ways,
turning the world, moving the air, calling,
every morning, “Here, take it, its yours”

I turn another page and read:

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,
and the meaning has to go find an author again.
But when we read, it’s just print – deciphering,
like frost on a window: we learn the meaning
but lose what the frost is, and all that world
pressed so desperately behind.

My face begins to relax. Some of the tenseness goes out of my body. I begin to breathe slowly again, deeply. I turn another page.

Air crowds into my cell so considerately
that the jailer forgets this kind of gift
and thinks I’m alone. Such unnoticed largesse
smuggled by day floods over me,
or here come grass, turns in the road,
a branch or stone significantly strewn
where it wouldn’t need to be.

I hear the soulful call of the mourning dove outside the window, the high notes of asolitary crow somewhere, the twitter of some birds that had no name. And I turn another page:

No leader is free; no follower is free -
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.

And the re-enchantment with the world begins again.

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William Stafford

Posted on September 9, 2008
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I have a new hero, William Stafford, a poet closely identified with the Pacific Northwest. I was researching some quotes and poems for an article when I ran into a few by him. The first one that hit me was called “Just Thinking”:

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot—peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

I loved the language, the simplicity and the directness of it, the unusualness of phrasing, the writing of the being in the now. “Been on probation most of my life”. Those words achingly echoed how I’ve always felt about my life. Trying to be better than I am, knowing how immature I am about so many things, knowing the growing up that I have to do. Reading the paragraph of letting the bucket of memory into the well brought waves of memories rushing back, memories from childhood, from adolescence, from my time in the US. Not specific images, but just a flood of impressions that seemed to capture the wonder and bewilderment of being here. I was hooked to this man. I had to find out more, read more. And the more I read, the more I became hooked.

Since I was a child, I’ve been partial to wordpeckers, people who play with language in unusual ways to convey something profound. My first encounter with this pleasure was in listening to Hindi film music. The poetry of some of the lines would enchant me, the words ringing in my ears, instantly memorized. With many lyrics, I’d be able to guess how the song would go, what words would come. But with some, it was like being sucked into a vortex, inexorable, taking my breath away. For example, the song “Kabhi Kabhie” has beauty, yet is so simple, no complicated Urdu words and has such a poignant ending.

The poetry that I encountered in school mostly left me cold, maybe partly because I was too immature to appreciate them, maybe partly because the teachers who taught them, couldn’t fully understand, appreciate or communicate them. The first poem that touched me was “Ode to a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first line “Hail to thee, blithe spirit”, stuck with me as did the lines: “Our sincerest laughter With some pain is fraught; Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”. I felt instantly that the man was onto something.

As I grew older, I ran into others that moved me such as Lord Byron and Robert Frost. Having studied outside my home state of Karnataka for most of my schooling years, and moving like a vagabond between states, learning different languages every three years or so, left me with little appreciation for the regional languages including my mother tongue, Kannada. English and Hindi were the two constants and so my appreciation for the beauty of language was manifest mostly with them.

William Stafford was born in the first years of the last century, when the world was entering the first of the wars that ravaged the world. Coming of age during the second world war, he protested the draft as a conscientious objector and performed alternate civilian services. He became a teacher, married, had four children and hardly had any publication till he turned forty-six. And then the poems came pouring out. He wrote every single day for fifty years, has apparently composed over 22,000 poems of which about 3,000 have been published. He died in 1993, in Oregon, where he spent the latter part of his life. The day of his death, August 28, was a couple of days after Kitty’s death day, the 26th. For a while he also taught at San Jose State, a college nearby here. How the mind seeks a narrative where there maybe none, a pattern that is only discernible to the maker of it. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, said Joan Didion.

Stafford’s most famous work, the one for which he won the National Book Award is called “Traveling Through The Dark”. It tells of his coming upon a dead deer on his way home, on a narrow, mountain road. As he tries to roll it out of the road, to make it safe for other drivers, he makes a discovery.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

Coming across the passage in the middle of the poem, left me gasping. For some reason, I’ve carried the lines from the Hindi song “Zindagi Ka Safar”: “Aise jeevan bhi hain, jo jiye hi nahin, jinko jeene se pehle hi maut aa gayi”. I originally thought of them as meaning the road not taken, of lives not having lived because of the choices we make, of fear and suspicion. I now see that even literally interpreted in a context like this, the words possess an enormous power. Just being born is a miracle, a blessing.

Stafford said that he is a butterfly, not a butterfly collector, that he wants the experience of a butterfly. He addressed the here and now in his poems, drawing inspiration from the things that surrounded him, finding in them for us, awe and beauty of the kind most of us find by staring at a naked sky, full of stars. For example, in a poem titled “Ground Zero”:

While we slept —
rain found us last night, easing in
from the coast, a few leaves at first,
then ponds. The quietest person in the state
heard the mild invasion. Before it was over
every field knew that benediction

I felt god touch me, the hair on my back stand up, when I read that last line. How life affirming rain is and how beautifully he says it. That word benediction seems so apt, no other word could have taken its place. He can take the same scene, say rain, and turn it in many different ways, each beautiful, each wondrous. Here’s an excerpt from the poem “Waiting For God”:

This morning I breathed in. It had rained
early and the sycamore leaves tapped
a few drops that remained, while waving
the air’s memory back and forth
over the lawn and into our open
window. Then I breathed out.

Stafford was also admired as a teacher. He has written two books on the writer’s craft, Writing The Australian Crawl and Crossing Unmarked Snow. He travelled far and wide, encouraging poets and writers in countries as far away as India and Nepal, in countries as diverse as Iran and Singapore. His teaching style was called “no praise, no blame”. He said: “.. in the process of writing and in the process of teaching writing, assessment is in a decidedly secondary position”. He said that his function as a teacher was to enable a student achieve what (s)he wanted, not critique. If a student, for example, said that he was not happy with the ending, Stafford was willing to help the student with that, but not critique the ending himself.

He was the Poet Laureate of the US, when it was still called “Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress”.

He said that he woke up every morning at 4 am, ran three miles three times a week, and then sat writing till his wife woke up at 7 am. In his poem, “The Way I Write”, he writes:

My head lolls to one side as thoughts
pour onto the page, important
additions but immediately obsolete, like waves.
The ocean and I have many pebbles
to find and wash off and roll into shape.

His love of language is clear in his many sayings. Writing that he grew up during the days of Vietnam war and Watergate he says that he is seeking not just freedom of speech, but freedom in speech, of writing that does not tolerate duplicity, of language that feels “uncomfortable if it distorts the proportions of discourse”. I’ve always held that music can go where words cannot, but reading Stafford makes me wonder that just as reading Byron or Nazim Hikmet or Frost or Emily Dickinson makes me wonder that. Stafford seems to address that directly when he writes: “Language can do what it can’t say”.

As a poet, using the briefest of expressions to convey a mountain of meaning seems critical. In his poem on Emily Dickinson, he distills the essence so well in so short a piece:

On that page where the whole world moved
and other people ran
frantic in their lives to stay the same,
she was the stillest one –

Eye in the night to lag or surge,
ready to catch the shine
of the newest star or the old sky in the brain
where the right word again begins time.

His belief in the power of language is clear in that last line: “where the right word again begins time”.

He was a pacifist, which is another great quality in a person. His latest book culled from his collection is called “Every war has two losers”. His son, famous in his own right, Kim Stafford, writes that his father wrote on behalf of the unknown good in our enemies. He wrote in 1955 that “Armies are a result of obsolete ways–just as gibbets are, and as thumbscrews are, and leper windows.”

In his book of poems called Passwords, he ends with:

World, please note -
a life went by, just
a life, no claims,

A stutter in the millions
of stars that pass,
a voice that lulled -

A glance
and a world
and a hand.

I remembered the song “Main pal do pal ka shayar hoon” in which similar sentiments were echoed. I remembered Kitty when I read the lines “a life went by, just a life, no claims”. I constantly measure myself against that and the urge for leaving a mark behind, of doing something of some consequence. During the course of my forty years, I’ve chipped away at that desire and managed to convert it to one of living well and dying well. And one central element in that journey has been to come across and savor works such as those by William Stafford.


References:
1. More Than Has Ever Been Found: 17 poems by William Stafford
2. Selected Poems of William Stafford
3. Sleep of Grass: A Tribute In Poetry to William Stafford

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