Richter 1

Clara Richter

ENG 570

Dr. Armstrong

20 October, 2015

The Woman at Banff in Staffords Universe

The poem I chose to analyze is The Woman at Banff1 which was published in

Staffords collection Traveling Through the Dark in 1962. The poem was originally drafted on

the 23 of July, 1960. There are two drafts of the poem and one documentary copy, which

Stafford sent out to magazines. The poem was published on its own in the Saturday Review in

1960 and was read at several locations including Pullman and La Grande (April 1966), PSC

(January 1968), and Ashland (August 1967). Though the poem is fairly short and seemingly

unassuming, there is, like many of William Staffords poems, more to its message than may be

assumed upon a single reading of the work.

Due to the nature of the changes that they go through, Staffords various drafts offer us a

good amount of insight into Staffords writing process. Nothing that is in the final, published

version of the poem is not in the first draft, with one exception: the word winterward the

significance of which will be discussed later at the end of the second stanza of the final draft.

Everything else that he uses is there in the initial draft, it is just embedded in a lot of other

images. The first draft of the poem is 21 lines long and has no stanza breaks, whereas the final

version of the poem only consists of nine lines; two quatrain stanzas, and then a final stanza

consisting of only one line. The second draft of the poem bears more of a resemblance to the

final version of the poem. It is the same amount of lines and stanzas, and the only changes that

1
Any quotations from the poem are from the copy found on the William Stafford Archive, which is attached as
Appendix E.
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Stafford makes between this version and the final draft are the changing of words; no lines or

images are added. It is in this draft when we see what will become the final draft of The Woman

at Banff really starting to develop.

It is between the first and the second drafts that the poem is transformed into a form that

is relatively close to the published version. The 21 lines of the original draft are pared down to

the nine lines of the final, and though some wording is changed, most of the lines that appear in

the second draft appear in relatively the same form in the first draft. Based on his notes written

on the manuscript, mostly he has changed words; tore becomes ripped, came becomes

happened, and that deep water becomes the river. Some of the changes he made are crossed

out and he reverts back to the original. This is the case with signalled at the end of the first line

of the second stanza. Stafford has written talked above it, then crossed it out and written in

signalled again. Next to this change he has written, signalled back of make more rhyme.

Because signalled makes a better rhyme with cold than talked does, Stafford decided to go with

the original phrasing, thus sticking with a rhyme. It is in this draft that the title of the poem is

established The Woman from Vassar and then changed, but it appears as though Stafford

changed his mind relatively quickly, as Vassar is scribbled out and it says Banff above it.

In the manuscript of the poem, it appears almost as if there is a second half of the poem

that Stafford decided to cut from the final draft. At this point, it is speculation whether Stafford

actually was experimenting with these two poems becoming one larger poem, or whether they

were simply type-copied on the same piece of paper. It seems fairly unlikely that the poems were

at any point actually combined and intended to be one poem, since the images do not seem

entirely cohesive, and there is no indication in any of the earlier drafts that Stafford considered

marrying the two. And yet, despite the unlikeliness, the archivists made no attempt to distinguish
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a difference between these two poems in the draft in which they appear together, nor did they try

to make it clear that they were not to be read as one poem.

The inception of Interlude and how it became married to what would become The

Woman at Banff is perhaps made a bit more clear by looking at the manuscripts on the William

Stafford Archive. Stafford first mulled over the ideas in Interlude on July 8, 1960, several

weeks before he wrote the first draft of The Woman at Banff. The poem went through several

revisions, and much like The Woman at Banff, the first draft of the poem is very long and

about half of it seems to consist of thoughts which, more-or-less, lack any clear cohesiveness

the first draft ends More on this later. There are three more drafts dated July 9, 1960; July 22,

1960; and July 23, 1960 in which the ideas of the poem are more fully fleshed out. The fifth

draft of the poem is the same as the second draft of The Woman at Banff. Perhaps, at one

point, Stafford decided that perhaps they should be one poem, and then reconsidered his

decision, and broke them apart again. Either that, or, it is not a second half at all, and he was

simply running out of paper and decided to draft them on the same page. This may have been

likely, since on the draft that they share both poems have copied written next to them, as if

they were copied separately and not as one complete poem.

The poems are published over fifty pages apart in Traveling Through the Dark The

Woman at Banff on page 23 and Interlude on page 90 which may suggest little similarity

between the two. Indeed, if Stafford had originally conceived of them as one poem, his reason

for separating them could very well have been that there is very little cohesion between the two

poems, one being grounded in more concrete things, seeming to tell a story of something that

happened at Banff although if we know anything about Stafford we know it is probably about

more than that , and the other being more conceptual, starting with the line: Think of a river
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beyond your thought / avoiding your thought by being so pure (Stafford). It seems fairly

unlikely that Stafford intended the two poems go actually go together, and more likely that they

were simply drafted within several weeks of one another and simply ended up on the same page

of Staffords manuscripts, both being relatively short poems. However, one indication that the

poems may have been originally conceived of as one longer poem can be seen in the opening

line of the initial draft One of the rivers The Saskatchewan rinsed / so much rock its water

cringed, which echoes the image of the river beyond your thought in Interlude. However,

the image of a river is somewhat common in Staffords poetry, and so this similarity does not

give a definitive answer to the question of whether or not these two poems were once one.

Whether Stafford wrote the two poems separately, stitched them together, and then

decided he did not like the way it sounded, or whether he just drafted them on the same page is

fairly unclear. However, by the time The Woman at Banff became a Documentary Copy it

had no second half, or it had a page all to itself. There is only one change that he makes between

this copy and the final draft as it was published in Traveling Through the Dark; the word

heading in the final line Heading toward the Saskatchewan becomes up, meaning that the

final line became up toward the Saskatchewan. Other than that there are no other changes

made in this copy.

It is interesting to watch this poem go from a twenty-one line rambler that trails off at the

end with into all that timber, heading, etc. as if Stafford was not even sure where he was

going with the poem, or how he wanted it to end to a nine line poem that ends concisely with,

up toward Saskatchewan. The most compelling thing is, as previously mentioned, that

everything that is in the final draft can be found in the first draft of the poem, it is just embedded

in a lot of other images, or has been modified slightly. When this is considered along with what
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Stafford says in his reading and in Writing the Australian Crawl about how he wrote the poem, it

becomes clear that the writing process for this poem was a little more complex. Or, if not more

complex, certainly different. The original draft of the poem is really more like Stafford trying to

understand just what it was he was trying to get at in the poem. It is clear that Stafford had some

sort of image which he was attempting to get to the core of, but he doesnt start with While she

was talking, he starts with One of the rivers The Saskatchewan rinsed / so much rock its

water cringed and this eventually leads him to the image of the woman from Vassar, and the

moose, and the bear and finally to the while she was talking. Eventually, several of the most

important images find their way into the final draft, but Stafford has to comb them out of all of

the other images that are, perhaps, not as relevant to the poem.

In trying to think of a good metaphor for the way in which I view Stafford writing this

poem, perhaps pick-up sticks would work. In the initial draft of the poem, Stafford tossed

everything down on the page without thinking of what really might make sense in the final draft.

He was easing himself into the poem because, as he writes in Writing the Australian Crawl,

starting to write a poem is like starting a car on ice, you have to go slowly, revving the engine

will not help you (Stafford 67). It was during the process of revision that he picked up and

rearranged the lines and images of the poem that he thought would be most useful to him. He

then continued to rearrange and cut lines until he came up with his final product. Although the

initial drafting may have been as effortless as Stafford describes although it did not happen in

the same way as he describes it the revision process is certainly more complex and more

involved, as images are decided upon, arranged, and re-arranged. We know from reading

Staffords own thoughts on writing that revision was very important to him just look at the title
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of one of his books: You Must Revise Your Life and clearly if he is writing poetry in such a

manner then it was not only important, but also necessary.

There are two recordings of the poem on the William Stafford Online Archive. One is an

audio recording, and the other is a video. The video is of Stafford doing a reading of several

poems, during which he says he is going to sacrifice, some poems meaning that he is going to

reveal the process that went into writing the poems. It is interesting to hear what he has to say

about how he wrote the poem because it almost seems to contradict what is in the initial draft of

the poem. Stafford says that all he had in his head was the line While she was talking in and

that he had nothing to write after it, so he wrote a bear happened along and then he finished

that stanza, and did not know what else to write, so he repeated the line, following it with the

trees signaling few and the rocks cold. The way he describes it, it seems like the actual

creation of the poem was fairly straightforward.

The manuscript of the poem reveals a different writing process than the one Stafford

discusses. Though the initial drafting of the poem is perhaps just as effortless as the method he

describes in his reading, it is definitely not as straightforward, and it definitely requires a

rigorous revision process. In the initial draft of the poem it is actually thirteen lines before he

gets to anything that resembles the while she was talking of the final draft, and in the initial

draft the line is while you were talking and he has crossed it out and written in she was over

you were. He also says that he followed the line with a bear happened along, but in the first

draft of the poem the line about the bear appears in line ten, three lines before while you were

[she was] talking. Granted, he starts the line about the bear with Past what you she said, but

that is not the same thing as starting with While she was talking. In fact, the line Past what

she said survived through the second draft, and was only removed in the third draft. So, it seems
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as though he did not even have while she was talking in his head when he started writing this

poem, since he seemed to like the image of past what she said enough to keep it through two

drafts. When the first and second drafts of the poem are closely examined in comparison with the

final product, it becomes clear that the writing process for The Woman at Banff was not as

straightforward as Stafford would like his reader to believe, or as he remembers it to be (the

memory is, after all, a fickle friend). Though creating the initial draft of the poem may have been

like starting a car on ice (Stafford 67) or easing into the poem, getting to the final version

requires more revision than Stafford accounts for in his recollection. And it is in the revisions

that the writing process becomes truly labor-intensive.

In Writing the Australian Crawl, Stafford says almost the exact same thing. He writes,

Doodling around one morning, I found myself with the aimless clause While she was talking.

This set of words let me to add to it [...] a closure for the construction; I wanted to have

something be happening just anything. I put down a bear happened along. I remembered the

bears we had seen at Banff (Stafford 23-4) and so on. What he says here further complicates

things, because he says that he remembered bears he had seen at Banff, but initially, the poem

had nothing to do with Banff, and in fact, the first title of the poem was The Woman from

Vassar. Now, this is not to say that he could not have drawn inspiration from events that he

remembered from when he was at Banff. Nor is this to say that he did not have Banff as the

location in mind when he started writing this poem. It does, however, suggest that at the

beginning of the writing process there may have been less certainty about the specifics of the

poem.

The title of the poem goes through one major change. Though initially Stafford did not

give the poem a title he does have a line in the initial draft reading The Woman from Vassar,
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which he has set apart from the rest of the lines of the poem, and has used an arrow to indicate

that it belongs somewhere at the beginning of the second half of the poem. This is the half that

later becomes the first half and, eventually, the part that becomes the published version. This

line, The woman from Vassar, becomes the title of the poem when it reaches its second draft.

Apparently, Stafford realized that he didnt like that title only shortly afterward, and the second

draft has, scribbled above from Vassar, at Banff. This change in title is significant in several

ways. First of all and perhaps most obvious , it places the reader in a specific area. It tells the

reader where the poem is taking place, which allows them to better understand why what is

happening in the poem is happening. It becomes less about where the woman is from and more

about where she is. The second way in which the title is significant is that it takes the focus off of

the woman. There is a sense, in every version of the poem, that the woman is kind of annoying,

but if Stafford takes the focus off of where she is from Vassar the reader is less likely to have

the idea that she is annoying and perhaps a bit elitist before the poem even starts. They form that

idea as they are reading the poem. In making a slight change to the title of the poem, Stafford

makes himself less directly responsible for any negative feelings we might have towards the

woman from Vassar, who is at Banff.

Based on form alone, this poem is quite simple in structure. It consists of two stanzas of

four lines each, and one hanging line at the end. There does not appear to be any significant

meter. Though there is not a distinct rhyme scheme, Stafford does play with subtle rhyming; lets

call them quiet rhymes. The first stanza has an ABAB rhyme pattern. Violating rhymes subtly

with ate and Churchillian with sign. The second stanza has less of a distinct pattern,

though there is a rhyme between signalled and cold. The third-to-last and second-to-last

lines do not rhyme, ending as they do with black and winterward. The anaphora of the first
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phrase of each stanza not only lead the reader to think that this woman is quite a chatty lady, but

also create an internal rhythm, so even while the poem lacks meter, there is still a heartbeat,

created by the repetition of While she was talking.

There is slight alliteration, but like everything else in this poem, it is quiet. There is

nothing jarring about it. There is a slight repetition of the V sound in the first stanza with

violating and V for victory. In the second line of the second stanza, there is a repetition of

the hard C sound with words like rock, back, and Cold. The word talking in the first

and third line of that stanza also echoes that sound, as well as black, at the end of the third line.

The W sound is repeated throughout the last line of the second stanza and in the last line of the

poem with words like swam, winterward, toward, and Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan

also picks up on the hard C sound of the second and third lines of the second stanza.

Stafford also uses personification in this poem. The bear, the trees, and the rocks are all

personified; the bear is shaking his V for victory suit and the trees are conversing with the

rocks. According to Kitchen, personification is one of the ways in which Stafford attempted to

get it right (Kitchen 13) by looking at the world a little slant. She writes, Personification, too,

allows the poems to try out new modes of perception [...] He deliberately slants meaning in order

to get it right (13). For Stafford, language is not infallible, and sometimes in order to tell

something accurately he must look at it differently. Therefore, as the trees grow more and more

sparse as they march up the sides of the mountain, they speak what they are doing; Stafford does

not speak for them.

The quietness of the alliteration, as well as that of the rhyme, makes this poem a fairly

typical Stafford one. Robert Creeley writes, The poems of William Stafford are [...] much

quieter in tone (12). Even though the woman in the poem is talking, and the bear is tearing up a
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sign and eating it, the poem is not loud. It does not startle the reader. Whatever its message is, it

is subtle and unassuming. This could be because, as Stafford writes in Writing the Australian

Crawl Intention endangers creating. True, intention seems to work well in some kinds of

projects, where we want to prevail in a hurry [...] But I want to raise the question of whether

creating isnt something other than putting together materials into the service of a preselected

goal (33). Like John Keats, it seems as though Stafford dislikes poetry that has a palpable

design upon us. For this reason, the message of the poem is subtle and quiet, paralleling the soft

rhymes and alliterations throughout the poem. This may also help to explain why the first draft

of the poem is so meandering. Stafford himself is discovering the meaning while he is writing,

rather than writing to create meaning.

What exactly does the poem mean? A close reading of the text can tell us a fairly simple

story. It is a poem about a woman, who is at Banff National Park, who will not stop talking.

And, because she cannot seem to stop talking she is failing to notice all of the things that are

going on around her. A bear violates garbage cans and eats a sign and she does not notice. The

density of the trees recedes as they march up the side of the mountains and she does not notice. A

moose crosses a river and heads toward Saskatchewan and she does not notice. The quietness of

the rhyme and alliteration leads us to notice, perhaps, join the speaker in his or her quiet

observation of the scene. The tone is fairly conversational and, despite Staffords penchant to

switch his noun and verb-phrases, there is nothing like that in this poem. However, despite all

this, it is dangerous to assume that the meaning of the poem is only skin-deep. In regards to

Staffords style of writing, Kitchen states, The quietly conversational tone pulls the reader in,

the subject matter is fairly straightforward, the poems appear to be accessible. But under the
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surface, the current is often dangerously deep, and the undertow makes them richly complex

(39). The Woman at Banff is, then, deceptively simple.

This is a poem where considering the larger context of the Stafford universe might be

useful in helping us understand the piece. While discussing the volume Traveling Through the

Dark in Writing the World, Judith Kitchen states that, for Stafford, Writing begins to take more

and more the form of listening. Listen is used often and is a key word in Staffords poems as

though the act of listening can get it right in a way the act of writing can only approximate (45).

The woman in the poem seems to embody the opposite of a Staffordian to coin a phrase

world view in that she never stops to listen. Not only does she not stop to listen, but she never

stops to see or notice anything either. According to Kitchen, listening, for Stafford, is equated

with understanding (15). Therefore, if the woman is unable to listen, she is also unable to

understand the signals or the beauty of the world around her.

The speaker of the poem is the one who listens and notices, not only the womans

babbling, but also the natural occurrences that are going on around her. To assume that the

speaker is Stafford is tricky, since it is difficult to distinguish between Stafford and the persona

which he creates for himself. Kitchen writes, One cannot refer to the speaker in the poem as the

persona or the speaker without realizing how closely this speaker resembles Stafford the man

(73). The speaker, while not necessarily Stafford, is strikingly similar to Stafford in his

perception of the world around him. Whoever the speaker may be Stafford or not is,

however, able to listen. The speaker allows the natural world to create its own significance

through its speech whereas the woman speaking, we might assume, attempts to place

significance upon everything, whether or not it is correctly placed.

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In From Short Reviews in On William Stafford Vernon Shetly writes, Much of

Staffords effort is devoted to breaking through our modern alienation from the natural, pushing

aside the fog of concepts to arrive at a receptivity attuned to the life of things (87). The woman

in the poem and the speaker represent two ends of the spectrum of alienation from nature. The

woman is distant from the natural world, represented by her incessant prattling, which distracts

her from the things that the natural world is doing around her. The speaker of the poem, is able to

notice what is going on while the woman is talking. For the speaker, these things speak louder

than the woman. The reader does not even know what she says, they just know that she is

talking, but that takes a back seat to the things that go on while she is talking. He or she notices

the bear tearing up the sign, and is able to hear the trees speaking, and the rocks answering. The

speaker is able to listen to glean meaning from the things that they say to him or her; that the

trees are getting thin as they ascend the mountain, where the rocks are cold without the blanket

of trees to cover them. The poem seems to mean that it is more important to remain quiet and

listen to the natural world, than to be in the natural world, but not listen to what it has to say.

As previously mentioned though quite a while ago the only word that appears in the

final draft that does not appear in the first draft is winterward. Kitchen tells us that there are

certain words that hold specific meanings for Stafford. Some words, she writes, become

symbolic, or at the very least, invested with an overtone of extended meaning [...] home is

associated with self, river with change, snow with the page, wires with communication (14-5).

North, though not mentioned here by Kitchen, is another one of these words for Stafford. North

signifies death, but not in a morbid or sad way, in a meaningful and almost spiritual way. It

signifies death as a bond, a tie between all living things, you travel north to become a part of the

flow of time (Kitchen 46). It is a death that is fusion with all that is natural (Kitchen 46).
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Winterward signifies north, which signifies this type of death. Staffords choice to change faded

into all that timber into off winterward is, then, imbued with meaning. Stafford also uses the

word river, which, according to Kitchen also holds certain significance.

The moose is swimming a river, and fading off winterward, but the woman speaking does

not notice it. The speaker of the poem does, however. As previously discussed, each one has a

different attitude toward the natural world, and from this attitude might come a difference in their

understanding of what death signifies, and whether or not they notice it. For the woman, who

does not even notice the moose, there is a lack of understanding of the connection between all

living things and the land which they inhabit. One might go so far as to say that she, perhaps,

does not even fully grasp the inevitability of death, being so caught up in her own world. The

speaker, because he or she is in touch with the world around him or her, is able to understand the

significance of death and the connectedness that one experiences in death. In Staffords poetry,

rivers often signify some sort of change. Though we do not know for certain what the change my

be, we can speculate that perhaps there is a change within the speaker while he is listening to the

woman speak. Maybe the change is that he or she is, for the first time, tuning her out and tuning

the natural world in and is therefore able to correctly read the significance of the moose

heading winterward.

Though a short piece, The Woman at Banff manages to illuminate Staffords writing

process, as well as incorporate many of the themes with which Stafford concerned himself. Most

notably, the idea of listening and of connectedness. Though Stafford speaks of writing this poem

as almost an effortless endeavor that took no revision, an inspection of the manuscripts seems to

reveal that more work went into the revising process than Stafford remembers. The poem did not

occur to him as a cohesive idea, but rather flowed out of him as a rambling, prose-like piece. It
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was only upon revision that he was able to get to the final image. That image, though simple

upon first glance, suggests the importance of being quiet and listening to nature. The woman in

the poem is always talking, and therefore cannot connect with the natural world on a deep level,

but the speaker of the poem, the listener in the poem, is able to reflect on what the natural world

says to him or her, though nonverbally. In doing so, they are able to find significance in the signs

and the speech of the natural world.