Video Taping William Stafford: El Dorado, Kansas, November 1986 by Vincent Wixon

At 8:00 A.M. we stumbled out of our motel room and into a cold fog, then across the parking lot to the restaurant where William Stafford was already in a booth drinking coffee. "Where've you fellas been?" he smiled, knowing we had taken the red-eye from Portland to Wichita then had driven the half-hour to El Dorado. "The best part of the day's already over."

That afternoon in his reading at Butler County Community College, he introduced one poem with, "When my lazy friends out there behind the cameras were sleeping, I wrote this poem."

You will walk toward the mirror,
closer and closer, then flow
into the glass. You will disappear
some day like that, being
more real, more true, at the last.

You learn what you are, but slowly,
a baby, a boy, a man,
a self often shattered, and pieces
put together again till the end:
you halt, the glass opens—

A surface, an image, a past.

When he read "Your Life" that afternoon, I pictured him in a motel room like ours, lying on the bed, curtain open to gray light, head propped on pillows, gazing at the mirror, accepting, as usual, the materials at hand. Then he would begin writing with a pen on a spiral notebook, "You will walk toward the mirror, closer and closer." Then what? "And flow into the glass." What could be simpler? He didn't need to be in Kansas to write those lines. Any mirror would do for William Stafford's imagination. But being in Kansas, in one of his hometowns less than a hundred miles from his birthplace, had something to do with what he saw in the mirror that morning. Kansas was where he grew up. That's the charge I felt. We were beginning an adventure of making a video on William Stafford; we had to be real and true. It was our lives he was writing about.

Vincent Wixon teaches in Ashland, Oregon, and (with Mike Markee) has made two videos on William Stafford.

An Archival Print

God snaps your picture—don't look away—
this room right now, your face tilted
exactly as it is before you can think
or control it. Go ahead, let it betray
all the secret emergencies and still hold
that partial disguise you call your character.

Even your lip, they say, the way it curves
or doesn't, or can't decide, will deliver
bales of evidence. The camera, wide open,
stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years
or so—after that you have become
whatever the veneer is, all the way through.

Now you want to explain. Your mother
was a certain—how to express it? —influence.
Yes. And your father, whatever he was,
you couldn't change that. No. And your town
of course had its limits. Go on, keep talking—
Hold it. Don't move. That's you forever.

Copyright 1991, 1998 by the Estate of William Stafford. All rights reserved.