William Stafford

From “Making a Poem / Starting a Car on Ice” in Writing the Australian Crawl, (Univ Michigan Press, 1979):

There are worthy human experiences that become possible only if you accept successive, limited human commitments, and one such is the sustained life of writing. It is far from an austere, competitive, fastidious engagement with the best, as outsiders might think. A writer must write bad poems, as they come, among the better, and not scorn the “bad” ones. Finicky ways can dry up the sources. And a poem may be indictable for weaknesses, without thereby yielding itself to “correction”: there may be flaws necessary for even the faltering accomplishment embodied in the poem. To avoid the flaws might lead to one big flaw — the denying of leads that carry the writer on. [p. 67]

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