Tuesday

17 January 2017

— Fresh footprints in the snow to the birdfeeders and back. 

Good Morning All,

Nearly every year in my grade ten class, I’d start one spring lesson by printing on the board  the poem in today’s Day Book, Traveling Through the Dark. It’s about a motorist who comes upon a dead deer in the middle of a winding road. It seems obvious some other motorist ran it over. But what to do? The road is windy and dangerous. Another motorist might have an accident. He stops the car to push the carcass over the edge into the river, but discovers the deer is pregnant.

“So,” I’d ask, innocently, “whaddaya think?” 

My students, of course, immediately wanted to take sides with their heads or their hearts. (Just by way of incidentally, they did not usually divide by gender.) “He must save the baby deer!” “Yeah, right, he must call the fawn ambulance!"

After a while, we’d get around to how the poem works. In my broken-record voice, I’d remind them that the best poets don’t tell you anything; they show. They do not report; they make it happen. 

So, we’d get into how the poet was using sounds and figures of speech and such to put us in the car.

(Just by way of one example, read the first stanza aloud—once you’ve checked to make sure no one is around--and you’ll likely notice  the first two lines zip along like a speeding car, as compared to the next two lines which move ponderously slow, like someone who’s been forced to stop and think.)

In later years, when students came back for a visit a decade or two later, and I’d ask if they remembered any of the poems we’d done, Traveling Through the Dark often got a mention.

William Stafford, by the way, was a Kansas lad and a pacifist who in 1970 became Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which is what they called the poet laureate before they switched to Poet Laureate. He won a National Book Award. At the age of 79, he dropped dead of a heart attack after that morning writing a poem containing these lines: 

“You don’t have to prove anything,” my mother said.

“Just be ready for what God sends.”

Talk about dying with your boots—and/or—quills on!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron