William Stafford’s Daily Writing: The Aphorism

“I want to start…by considering what my father’s daily writing pages contained, and how they worked for him — and how something like his approach might work for any of us who choose to give such daily writing practice a try.”

There will sometimes be an “aphorism” –a freestanding sentence, an idea, a question, a note about a pattern he perceived, a puzzle.

William Stafford would write a sentence that “lifted off” from daily experience.

This provisional understanding from daily life begins to raise the writer’s attention out of the mundane into the gently miraculous realm of poetry.

–Kim Stafford in “Writing as Ritual”

Click here to see all the Listening to My Life :: Homeschooling an MFA in Poetry posts.