Live Encounters Poetry & Writing March 2025
Traveling Through the Light, guest editorial by Tim Hunt.
With time, memory fades…and sharpens. Or perhaps it’s more that the things we hold onto, as we rehearse them to ourselves, open over time, and we come to understand more of how, or why, they have mattered to us. 1987. The centennial of the birth of the poet Robinson Jeffers is being celebrated by a series of notable poets, each reading a poem or two from Jeffers’ rich canon. I’ve forgotten some of the people who read that night. I do, though, remember Czeslaw Milosz ascending to the stage cloaked in the aura of his Nobel Prize, but not which poem he read. And William Everson, his fringed buckskin shirt, an eagle claw dangling from wrist, the waist-length white hair, acknowledging his debt to his poetic mentor, but not which poem he read. And Gary Snyder’s easy command as he looked out at the lecture hall as if we were, as we were, part of his community.
Here, again, I don’t remember which poem Snyder selected. It might have been “Salmon Fishing” or perhaps “Fire on the Hills.” If this were fiction, I would tell you it was “Oh, Lovely Rock,” because that would blend with what I do remember: the seemingly off hand anecdote he shared of camping in the Sierras with the too-little remembered poet Lew Welch. And Lew looking up from the campfire to ask, Gary, what do the rocks think of the trees? And Snyder in his memory, I don’t know, Lew. What do the rocks think of the trees? And Welch, Well, you know, they’re just passing through, as we all shared a bemused laugh.
That night, I was charmed by how Snyder took a moment to talk as if to, or with, those of us gazing up at him. Now, nearly forty years later, what strikes me are the implications of Welch’s answer to his question—how it erases the divide between animate and inanimate, nature and human, by imagining them as different scales of time. From the geological time of the rocks, the Douglas Firs looking down on the campfire are a brief, transitory instant. For the trees, the two poets, sipping their camp coffee, are even more fleeting—a flickering presence as their flickering campfire dies to reddened coals. The rest of Snyder’s moment on the stage that evening has faded away (or perhaps I’ve let it fade away) but not Snyder recalling Welch musing about the rocks and trees and how recognizing the temporality we share with the trees and rocks—even though their temporalities differ from our own—draws us outward from our own moment of being to an awareness of being within the world’s more comprehensive being.
And William Stafford read that night. And I do remember what he read: “Vulture,” a late Jeffers poem. And I remember how he read it as if he, white-haired and craggy featured, were the poem’s elderly speaker, resting on the hilltop, eyeing the circling bird as it inspected him. And as if he, too, were bemused in realizing that the bird might think he was already carrion and willing “To be eaten by that beak and become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes” and sensing too that this would be a “sublime end of one’s body,” a soaring “enskyment” in death, through death, beyond death.
Even then I sensed that Stafford was not simply acknowledging another poet by sharing one of his poems but celebrating Jeffers by becoming the poem.
A few years later I moved to the Portland area and Stafford invited me to come see him. In his campus office that afternoon, I asked about Jeffers, and he told me that he had, as a young man in the 1930s, hitchhiked from Kansas all the way to Carmel, California hoping to meet Jeffers. He told me that he found his way to Tor House and stood at the gate looking across the garden at the house and the stone tower Jeffers had built, and how he started to reach for the gate’s latch, then, instead, turned and hitchhiked back to Kansas. He ended the story there. I think I remember a wry but not rueful smile, and too, understanding that I wasn’t being invited to ask him to explain. And didn’t. I do remember the trees outside his window filtering the afternoon sun and believing that he was sharing something with me that mattered to him—and that he was choosing to share this because he thought it should, or maybe only could, matter to me.
Over the decades I’ve remembered that story and the telling of it and wondered why Stafford, having hitchhiked all that way, didn’t knock on the door of Tor House. The most obvious is that he thought the reclusive Jeffers would see his earnest homage as an unwelcome intrusion. Perhaps, at that moment, Jeffers was too intimidating a figure to approach. But I’ve continued to think that Stafford was sharing this moment as something other than a glimpse of the naiveté of his youthful pilgrimage, and over the decades I’ve come to believe that he sensed, as he looked across the garden at the door of that stone cottage, that the person who would answer his knock was simply a person who wrote poems—a person who could, through the writing of poems, enact (and for moments be) a self beyond the self. And in recognizing this, Stafford, I’ve come believe, sensed that the Jeffers he wanted to meet, to know, to acknowledge, could only be known in and through the poems. And I’ve come to believe that this was why Stafford shared that story—as a text for me to study, a lesson I might come to understand and thus better understand how Jeffers’ work might matter for my own attempts to write poems that might matter—both for myself and others.
In the 1970s, it was the fashion to understand the relationship of younger poets to those who influenced them through the lens of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence. Bloom argued that the poet son was inevitably competing with the poet father (yes, a patriarchal model and, if I remember right, explicitly Freudian). To accept the influence of the father doomed the son to writing weak poetry. To kill off the already dead poet father through a willful misreading of the elder was the only way to achieve strong poetry. In Bloom, influence is the result of resisting influence. And perhaps this was the case, as he proposed, for Wallace Stevens. But Stafford’s pilgrimage to Tor House and his reading of “Vulture” that evening some fifty years later suggest a different possibility—that influence, if that’s the right term for it, can also happen through accepting the imaginative world of another poet as a possibility to be explored and drawn upon—a resource that enriches, and in some small way even enables, one’s own work. Instead of the yes, but of Bloom’s agon of influence, the ah, yes, and oh, this also of dialogue.
By the time Stafford was recognized as a poet of significance, Jeffers was no longer seen as a major poet—was indeed nearly forgotten. And Stafford’s plain speaking seems unrelated to Jeffers’ voice, but the young Stafford’s pilgrimage to Carmel and the way he gave himself to Jeffers’ “Vulture” that evening in 1987 show that Jeffers mattered for him. And his early, often anthologized “Traveling Through the Dark” shows that Jeffers was not, for Stafford, a figure to be resisted, as Bloom would have it, but a presence to engage, an informing possibility that was much deeper than matters of technique and deeper, too, than the mystery we refer to as voice. In the poem, the speaker is driving a mountain road and comes around a blind curve where a deer has been hit, killed, and left in the roadway. He stops to push the carcass, a hazard for other drivers, over the cliff side, then realizes the dead doe is pregnant with a still living fawn. The poem ends:
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
One key to the poem is the fifth of these lines. If we read the poem as treating the wilderness as simply a scene or setting for the speaker’s dilemma (treating the world of nature as one thing and the human world as another), the listening is necessarily figural (“I could hear the wilderness as if it were listening). But if the wilderness has being or is a being, then the speaker is not imagining the “wilderness” as if it is listening but is instead, in a heightened moment of awareness, actually hearing the wilderness as it listens, and the “us” in “for us all” in the next line includes the wilderness. In “Traveling Through the Dark,” the wilderness is an aspect of Nature, and Nature is the being within which the speaker, the doe and fawn, the rocks and trees cloaked in the darkness beyond the red glare of the brake lights, and the river below all have their subsidiary being. Although the tone is entirely different, this is also Lew Welch’s sense of nature when he wonders what the rocks think of the trees. And, too, it is Jeffers’ sense of nature. And this helps explain the impact—the resonance and implications—of “my only swerving.” In hesitating, the speaker is holding back from what must be done. He is momentarily allowing his very human empathy for the fawn that will not be born to obscure his vision of nature’s more fundamental terms and his obligations to and within nature. In the human frame, the scene is tragic. In Nature’s frame, the scene is. And the speaker momentarily swerves, then comes to accept this and acts as he must. This dilemma, the drama, of human consciousness both within and at odds with nature’s being is also at the center of Jeffers’ “Hurt Hawks,” where the speaker hesitates to put a severely injured hawk out of its misery. In Jeffers’ poem the speaker, caught between his recognition of Nature’s indifference to the hawk’s pain and his human, humane, pity at its stoic suffering, delays giving the hawk the “lead gift” of death. In Stafford’s poem, the speaker recognizes and quietly acknowledges his “swerving.” In Jeffers’ poem the too-often misunderstood outburst “I’d sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk, but…” registers his similar, but not identical, “swerving.”
Whether or not Stafford had “Hurt Hawks” explicitly in mind as he wrote “Traveling Through the Dark” (and I doubt he did), Jeffers’ poetry, and perhaps particularly “Hurt Hawks,” offered him elements that he could draw from, extend, and reshape as he confronted his moment on that mountain road (which I choose to believe was an actual moment). And however Stafford’s mapping of the dialectic of our human being within nature’s greater being might differ from Jeffers, his relationship to Jeffers through Jeffers’ poetry was not the agon of anxiety where the younger poet contests the elder, but the and also of dialogue. And if so, this offers a glimpse of a different kind of tradition than the one T.S. Eliot sketched in “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where each poem is an element in a set mapped on an atemporal chart and the game, the competition, is to have a piece added to this collection called “tradition.” Stafford’s connection to Jeffers (and Snyder’s as well?) suggests an alternate tradition where each poem—its mode of being—enables further poems, further explorations of being. Perhaps this alternative tradition might be thought of as tradition and the communal talent, or perhaps tradition and the dialogic talent.
And in the spirit of that, perhaps I can be forgiven by closing with this piece occasioned by that afternoon in Stafford’s office years ago, and too his sharing of “Vulture” that evening even more years ago and offered in what I hope is the spirit of dialogue—of and this also.
Traveling Through the Light
Recalling William Stafford recalling hitchhiking
from Kansas to California hoping to meet Robinson Jeffers
In time you would come to know that the poem
is everywhere and all things:
Emily at her kitchen window
glimpsing the cochineal blur
of a hummingbird—
the morning mail riding on to Tunis;
the workers loading and unloading their wagons
as Walt, at ease with the late summer sun,
imagines he is one with their manly joy, the rowdy
camaraderie and glistening sheen of broad shoulders.
But I was too young to know these things
when you were telling me of your pilgrimage
—hitchhiking from somewhere in Kansas
all the way west to Carmel hoping to meet the poet.
You were what, nineteen, as you made your way,
ride after ride: the clattering of the Model Ts
and jouncing farm wagons and maybe
a salesman or two with a shiny sedan—
the lull of the thrumming tires and motor’s hum
deepening
your first glimpse of the western mountains.
And, too, the desert, then again
the mountains, the Sierras, and at last,
as you walked down the hill through the village,
the ocean—sun-glittered through the trees,
then opening vast and endless.
Or maybe it was still morning and the waves
sighing out
from beneath the retreating fog
as you turned south, walking on,
the hillside pines on your left, sand
spits and granite on your right
until you came to the poet’s gate
and stood there
looking across the patch of garden
at the sea-worn stones,
the tower and cottage framed by the Eucalyptus.
Then turned and hitchhiked all the way back
to Kansas: the clattering Model Ts,
the farm wagons and maybe a salesman’s car,
the desert stars
and mountain stars those nights,
then again the Kansas prairie—
as if this were the pilgrimage
and that moment of almost
reaching for the gate’s latch
your only swerving.
© Tim Hunt
Tim Hunt is the author of six collections of poetry, including Western Where and Voice to Voice in the Dark (both Broadstone Books) and Ticket Stubs and Liner Notes, winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. Recognitions include six Pushcart Prize Nominations, and the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Award for “Lake County Diamond” from his first collection Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press). He has been a finalist for various book prizes, including, The Sexton Prize for Poetry, The Richard Snyder Publication Prize, The May Swenson Poetry Award, The Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, The Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, Off the Grid Prize, The Saint Lawrence Book Award, and The Holland Prize.
His critical work includes two studies of Jack Kerouac (Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction and The Textuality of Soulwork: Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose) and The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Originally from the hill country of northern California, he was educated at Cornell University and concluded his teaching career at Illinois State University where he was University Professor of English. He and his wife, Susan, live in Normal, Illinois.
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