Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford

As in his poem about the Eskimos — their disdain for "People who talk about God" — William Stafford practiced oblique affection. In his world, a fact as pervasive as love never need be named.

William Stafford wrote a poem every day, most often before dawn. He was a prolific, highly acclaimed poet, a famous pacifist, and an extraordinary friend to many. To his son Kim he gave the great gift and challenge — to sift through the mysteries of his writing life as literary executor.

Through the landscape of his father's thousands of poems, Kim follows a thread of illuminations matched only by his father's resonant silences. Kim accompanies his father's life as writer and seeker, someone unafraid to stare into the dark, and from that place touch countless lives with a poem, a tough but affectionate philosophic sculpture.

William Stafford was born in Kansas in 1914, and published over fifty books of poetry and prose. Kim Stafford is a writer and director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College in Oregon.