Prowizor 1

Alexis Prowizor

Seminar: William Stafford

Dr. Armstrong

Thursday, May 3rd 2018

A Look at William Stafford and Grant Wood

William Stafford and Grant Wood both grew up in the Midwest, and their lives in those

Midwest towns influenced their art. They both took inspiration from the landscape, from the land’s

heritage, and from the people who were important to them.

William Stafford used Kansas as inspiration for many of his poems. He wrote about

Kansas when he lived in Kansas, and he wrote about Oregon when he lived in Oregon. In

“Willingly Local: A Conversation with William Stafford about Regionalism and Northwest

Poetry,” Stafford said that artists are “sustained by the things of this world, and the things that

are near loom larger, impinge, and they are important because they are near. But they are not

important because they are any certain part of the world” (41). Stafford did not resent the

regionalist label, though he had his own ideas about regionalism. Stafford wrote about the things

he was close to, the people and places that he knew, because their proximity to him made them

important to him, and worth writing about. Kansas is not important because it is Kansas, but

because Stafford spent a lot of his time there. Stafford recognized the negative connotations to

the term regionalism. He understood why “some writers get jumpy about it” because sometimes

with the label comes the “feeling that these people are quaint, they are limited, uninteresting,”

but he also recognized that “everyone is regional, place is everywhere” (42). Stafford’s

regionalism was using his surroundings, his everyday importance’s, as inspiration, writing about

what was near and important to his world.

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Grant Wood had similar thoughts in regards to regionalism. Professor Norman Foerster

and his students attempted a definition of regionalism, which they submitted to Grant Wood.

Wood shortened and fine-tuned their definition to this: “Regionalism seeks to direct

preponderating attention to the natural landscape, human geography, and cultural life of

particular areas of the county, in the belief that writers who draw their materials from their own

experience and the life they know best are more likely to attain universal values than those who

do not” (3). The original definition submitted to Grant asserted that regionalism “revolted

against domination by the city (especially New York).” Grant cut this line, making his definition

more about the meaning created by working with what one knows, rather than a stance. He notes

that regionalism does revolt against the “tendency of metropolitan cliques to lay more emphasis

on artificial precepts than on more vital human experience” (3). So while regionalism is a revolt,

it revolts against the value placed on artificial things rather than on human experience, and not

against a particular place.

Stafford communicates directly with Wood in his poem “American Gothic”:

American Gothic

If we see better through tiny,

grim glass, we like to wear
tiny grim glasses.
Our parents willed us this
view. It’s tundra? We love it.

We travel our kind of

renaissance: barnfuls of hay,
whole voyages of corn, and
a book that flickers its halo in the parlor.

Poverty plus confidence equals

pioneers. We never doubted.
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William Stafford wrote “American Gothic” based on Grant Wood’s 1930 painting of the same

name. The poem is both satirical and loving. In Kansas Poems of William Stafford, Denis Low

says that Stafford “satirizes his heritage” and that the “tiny, grim glasses” are “artificial” and

“suggest limitation, stricture, and distortion” (201-202). Stafford pokes fun at the sometimes

strict and narrow Kansas, but makes it clear through the poem that while Kansas can be grim, he,

and those that live there, are happy with it. “One Home” is another poem in which Stafford

comments on his heritage.

One Home

Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.

Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.
We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.

The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light,
but we could read by it the names of preserves—
outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night.

A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July

when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,
before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky.

To anyone who looked at us we said, “My friend”;

liking the cut of a thought, we could say “Hello.”
(But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.)

The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.

Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.
Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.

The poem is a “bleak indictment of the social realm,” and Low points out that the “plain black

hats” that “rode the thoughts that made our code,” like the “tiny, grim glasses,” are artificial and

distorted (201-202). Stafford’s was a “Midwest home” and while “plain black hats rode the

thoughts that made our code,” they sang and were friendly and the “land would hold us up.”
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Stafford sees the influence the stern pioneers have over the land, but he sees the joy and beauty

in it too. His poem makes fun of, and celebrates, the Kansas he knew.

American Gothic 1930

Wood was inspired to paint American Gothic when he saw a house built in the 1880s in

the Carpenter Gothic style. Wood admired its “compactness,” “emphatic design” and “Gothic

window” (Corn 129). Wood imagined a “long-faced and lean couple” which he called

“American Gothic people” (Corn 129). Wood based his original sketch of the couple on tintype

portraits from family albums. He intended the figures to be father and daughter, though they also
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look as though they could be a couple. Both the man and the woman look stern, hard. The man

wears overalls juxtaposed by a nice jacket on top. The woman wears neat, clean clothes and a

Victorian style broach. Seen over the woman’s shoulder on the porch sits a snake plant, a

notoriously hardy plant. As Corn notes, the bitter Midwest winters are not ideal for growing

plants year round, but keeping them alive was a “recognized female achievement” (130). The

man peers sternly at the viewer through his “tiny, grim glasses.” The figures are undoubtedly

stern, but they do not look unhappy. As in the Stafford’s poem, they like looking through tiny,

grim glasses, they like where they live, and their pioneer heritage. Like Stafford, Wood

affectionately pokes fun at Iowa, an “affectionate, albeit humorous, portrayal of the kind of

insular Victorian relations he had grown up with,” (Corn 132).

Both Grant Woods and William Stafford used their mothers as inspiration for their art.

Stafford wrote quite a few poems about his mother, one of which was “My Mother Was a

Soldier.”
My Mother Was a Soldier

If no one moved on order, she would kill—

that’s what the gun meant, soldier. No one
told you? Her eye went down the barrel; her hand
held still; gunpowder paid all that is owed
at once. No need to count the dead.

Hunting, she dragged the bait till nightfall, then

hung it in a tree and waited. Time
was working for her, and the quiet. What a world
it is, for thinkers! Contact would come, and
the wildest foe fall fastest, Mother said.

Tapping on my wrist, she talked: “Patience

is the doctor; it says try; it says
they think we’re nice, we quiet ones, we die
so well: that’s how we win, imagining things
before they happen.” “No harm in being quiet,”
My mother said: “that’s the sound that finally wins.”
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Stafford’s mother, in the poem, is a skilled soldier. She would kill whoever did not listen to her

orders. This is not a traditional depiction of a mother, but it does seem to fit within the Midwest

landscape of Stafford’s poems, with the depictions of pioneers, black hats making code. In You

Must Revise Your Life, Stafford writes “my mother loved gossip and spite. From her I learned the

slant remark, the slight shift of expression that signaled a drop into several layers of speculation

while someone pontificated. But she had the sentiment that fueled such readiness to read into talk

and events” (6). Stafford recognizes his mother’s faults, but also recognizes that her attention to

detail, her precision, helped Stafford to become good at reading into and observing things,

essential qualities for poets. In “A Memorial for My Mother,” Stafford says that while “for a

long time my life left hers” it has come back.

A Memorial for My Mother

For long my life left hers. It went

among strangers; it weakened and followed
foreign ways, even honesty, and courage. It found
those most corrupting of all temptations,
friends—their grace, their faithfulness.

But now my life has come back. In our bleak

little town I taste salt and smoke again.
I turn into our alley and lean
where I hid from work or from anything
deserving of praise. Mother, you and I—

We knew if they knew our hearts they would blame.

We knew we deserved nothing. I go along
now being no one, and remembering this—
how alien we were from others, how hard we chewed
our town’s tough rind. How we loved its flavor.

The poet joins him and his mother into one at the end of the second stanza and the third stanza

uses “we.” Stafford recognizes the “divergence of their lives, and recognizes that some part of

her is contained within him” (Kitchen 81).

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Grant Wood’s relationship with his mother is a bit more familiar. Grant Wood was

extremely close to his mother, and her death affected him greatly. He, like Stafford, used his

mother as inspiration for his art in Woman with Plants.

Woman with Plants 1929

Wood used Renaissance portraits as a model for his composition, “a half-length seated

figure against a hilly Midwestern landscape” (70). Renaissance portraits often feature symbols,

and Wood painted his mother with a snake plant, homage to the hearty Midwesterners, and to his
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mother’s strength. Wood wrote that he could see a “bleak, far-away, timeless” look in his

parent’s eyes, “the severe but generous vision of the Midwest pioneer,” and the woman has this

look (Martin 74). Wood painted the woman staring off to the side, in an empty but strong gaze.

Wood’s painting is both a portrait of his mother, and an archetype of Midwesterners.

Stafford and Grant both used themselves as subjects for their work. Stafford’s “Remarks

on My Character” is a poem in which the author reveals his inner thoughts and feelings.

Remarks on My Character

Waving a flag I retreat a long way beyond

any denial, all the way over the scorched earth,
and come into an arching grove of evasions,
onto those easy paths, one leading to another
and covered ever deeper with shade: I’ll never
dare the sun again, that I can promise.

It is time to practice the shrug: “Don’t count on

me.” Or practice the question that drags its broken
wing over the ground and leads into the swamp
where vines trip anyone in a hurry, and a final
dark pool waits for you to stare at yourself
while shadows move closer over your shoulder.

That’s my natural place; I can live where the blurred

faces peer back at me. I like the way
they blend, and no one is ever sure of itself
or likely to settle in unless you scare off
the others. Afraid but so deep on one can follow,
I steal away there, holding my arms like a tree.

Stafford asserts that he likes isolation, he finds it easier in the shade where he can hide, where no

one can count on him. It is his “natural place” where he can hide whenever he wants to, where

“no one can follow.” That is where he will stand strong “like a tree,” open for himself in his

solitude.
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Grant Wood also used himself as the subject. As Corn notes, the portrait is “unabashedly

direct, a surprising piece of painting form someone who, in his early years, had been shy and

indecisive” (126).

Self-Portrait 1932-41
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Wood stares at the viewer, a confrontation, allowing the viewer to examine his face. Like

Stafford in “Remarks on My Character,” Wood candidly presents himself, amidst Iowa imagery,

just the way he is. Both artists present themselves as they see themselves.

William Stafford and Grant Wood were both regionalist, Midwestern artists. They used

their homes and the people who were important to them as inspiration for their work. They are

candid and steadfast in their ideas and their own representations of those ideas.
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Works Cited

Corn, Wanda M. Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision. Yale University Press, 1983.

Lars Nordstrom. “Willingly Local: A Conversation with William Stafford about Regionalism

and Northwest Poetry.” Taylor & Francis.

Low, Denise, editor. Kansas Poems of William Stafford. Woodley Memorial Press, 2010.

Wood, Grant. “A Definition of Regionalism.” 1937, pp. 3–4., doi:10.17077/0006-7474.1018.

Stafford, William. The Way It Is: New & Selected Poems. Graywolf, 2006.

Stafford, William. You Must Revise Your Life. University of Michigan Press, 1993.