William Stafford on TV

How does poetry make its way in the world?

At a party recently I learned from a friend that the pilot for the TV show "The Riches" ended with the main character reciting a poem by William Stafford. She sent me the link, I checked it out on www.hulu.com, and sure enough, at about minute 55:30 of the first episode, at a party in Louisiana one character recites some lines to another that are the close to "A Story that Could Be True," the title poem of my father's 1978 book by that name. Then the credits roll and we hear Bob Dylan singing "Shelter from the Storm."

With the message from my friend came a copy of the poem she found on the internet:

A Story That Could Be True

If you were exchanged in the cradle and

your real mother died

without ever telling the story

then no one knows your name,


and somewhere in the world


your father is lost and needs you

but you are far away.

He can never find

how true you are, how ready.


When the great wind comes

and the robberies of the rain


you stand on the corner shivering.

The people who go by--


you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs


any day in your mind,

"Who are you really, wanderer?"--


and the answer you have to give

no matter how dark and cold

the world around you is:


"Maybe I'm a king.”

But this copy includes a new last line for the poem, added by someone to make the poem gender-neutral: “Maybe I’m a queen.”

So we have a poem from an old book, with part of the poem recited in a TV show without any mention of the author, and then the poem appears on the web in an “improved” form…and then I find a website where people who heard these lines on TV tracked down the poem, and then found my father’s more recent book The Way It Is, where this poem appears, and where they witness about how important this book is to them.

What if your writing were exchanged in the digital world, and no one knew your name? Maybe yours is the voice to save a stranger’s life, a little at a time.

—Kim Stafford

Remembering an Old Story

I was about to go to bed, but I remembered an old story--one written in about 1000 AD, and one I read in the winter of 1973--in Old Norse, for a graduate linguistics class. I was supposed to get a Ph.D. and become a medievalist, and my teacher was supposed to get tenure. But I left scholarship behind, and the last I heard she is teacher in Hungary.

But the story! It had a grip on my mind. And I started writing it as I remembered--one loving detail after another. Authun is a young man in Iceland, and he goes to Greenland, spends all he has to buy a polar bear (nothing mentioned, as I recall, about the bear's behavior)...took the bear to Norway, told King Harald he intended to give the bear to Harald's enemy, King Svein of Denmark, which leads to this great line: King Harald, in a rage, says to Authun, "You must be a very lucky man to say you will honor my enemy, and yet live!"

At least that's what I think he said. I was in thrall to old recollection, and spent the better part of the night writing the story from memory, as a gift for my friends. Maybe someday it will be a book. Who knows? But the story! The way the story takes hold and won't let go. Twenty-five years in memory, and here it comes to mind in the winter of another century.

This makes me want to write what is in me. Who knows who may receive this gift?

Kim Stafford