Maria Gillan Blogging for the Poetry Center About William Stafford

Maria Gillan has been occasionally blogging on the Poetry Center at PCCC website in addition to here. Those posts focus more on the activities of the Center but we are reposting here an example of one that is of more general interest. 

As older videos are added to the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel, we get a chance to look back at poets who have read there, particularly in the Distinguished Poet Series, some of whom are no longer with us. One of those videos is of the late William Stafford recorded in 1986. This is what Maria said about watching that reading from 37 years ago.

As I watched and listened to it I remembered his reading very clearly but most of all because when I picked him up at the airport he was so upset that a critic had called him “simple.”

When he began his presentation, he talked about poetry and language and why he uses language as he does. It was amazing to listen to him talk about language in poetry and hear him read his beautifully spare and moving poems and listen to his comments about poetry and about what he was trying to do in his poems.

When I drove him back to the airport he was worried that he would be late, though we were two hours early. He was so worried he wanted to jump out of the car and run across three lanes of traffic to get to the door at the airport. I said to him, “No, please don’t because I don’t want to be known as the woman who killed William Stafford!”

When I introduced him at that reading, I was 46 years old. Watching the video, we had digitized to add to our growing collection, I realize how I didn’t know at the time how young I was and how much more I would have to learn.

Please look at the Poetry Center’s YouTube channel to see and hear many wonderful poets reading their work.

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.