1. Once I finished writing in my blog this morning, I watched the half hour documentary featuring William Stafford, Every War Has Two Losers. It's one of two documentaries on poets by Haydn Reiss that Bill Davie and Diane Schulstad sent me as gifts, knowing my love of documentaries and of poets. The second dvd features Robert Bly.
Stafford dedicated his life to pacifism in a variety of ways as a poet, teacher, family man, and a conscientious objector to World War II. He performed alternative service in Civilian Public Service camps from 1942-46 in Illinois, Arkansas, and California, working in forests, building roads, and laboring in other ways.
The film examines the connection between William Stafford's quiet pacifism and his poetry and features readings by Robert Bly, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Naomi Shihab Nye, Coleman Barks, and others. I particularly enjoyed Coleman Barks, not only his reading, but the way he spoke of Stafford as writing in the tradition of Zen poetry, as a mystery poet. Over the years, I've admired the spareness and simplicity of William Stafford's poems, but had never thought of his work in the way Coleman Barks described. Over the years, I've enjoyed Coleman Barks talking about mystery poems, especially the work of Rumi.
I no longer own any of Stafford's books of poetry. It's time to order some from the library and enjoy his poetry again with this fine film in mind, to read Stafford anew, and think about him as a spiritual descendant of worldwide mystic traditions.
2. I pondered Every War Has Two Losers for a while and then gave over to many hours reading All the President's Men and am close to finished. Maybe it's because I'm 66 years old and don't have the oomph I used to, but again and again, as I read this book, I'm impressed with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's dogged pursuit of learning as much as they can about the Nixon Administration and the Committee to Re-Elect. They worked long hours. They knocked on doors. They worked the phones. They faced rejection, anger, scalding public criticism (especially from Ron Ziegler), and experienced long periods of stalemate, of being stuck, of running into dead ends. Yes, each reporter took an occasional vacation, but, most of their days were occupied with slogging. They didn't give up, even though they experienced regular discouragement and powerful push back.
In the course of reading All the President's Men, my admiration for the movie's screenplay and its production has grown. I'm particularly impressed with how the screenwriters compressed several events into single ones and translated other events from the book into more cinematic scenes by changing their location or improvising on what the book says happened. Inevitably, the book's story and movie's story overlap, but I love how the screenwriters adapted this book into an independent work of art with pacing, superb cinematography, narrative structure, and devotion to the visual details of Washington, D.C. and the D.C. suburbs that is an intelligent, captivating, and authentic work of historical fiction. I might have to watch the movie again for the 400th time soon after I finish this book.
3. It might seem, because I don't write political or social commentary in this blog, that I am living with my head in the sand as our country contends with the pandemic and as chaos erupts in cities across the U.S.A. I'm paying attention. I'm reading. I'm listening. I tend toward taking small bites of these stories. I come to understand events much better looking back on them rather than while they are happening, so I am wary of much of what I read or see reported as it happens.
Mostly, I'm quiet.
I find that I'm so uncertain about what's happening with the pandemic and in the streets of places I love -- Eugene, Portland, Spokane, New York, Washington D.C., Seattle, and others -- that were I to say more than I do, I wouldn't really know what I was talking about.
Here at home, I'm more willing to sort things out by talking a bit.
Debbie and I discuss things. I listen. I wrestle within myself. I feel what I feel.
Before going to bed tonight, Debbie and I talked until about midnight.
It helped me sleep.
To commemorate the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, Stu gives us this limerick:
An album this day first appears.
Released in “this” country to cheers.
First came to U K,
And after that day.
The world knew the name “Billy Shears”!
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