The Answers Are Inside the Mountains: Meditations on the Writing Life (Poets On Poetry)

A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. In this fourth collection of reflections on writing and the writing life, the late William Stafford’s lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly — “What a person is shows up in what a person does” — rings clear. The Answers Are Inside the Mountains collects unpublished interviews, poems, articles, aphorisms, and writing exercises from this great American man of letters and hugely prolific author, who kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems — a staggering output by any standard. The book begins with the words “To overwhelm by rightness,” a phrase evoking the two demands Stafford made on himself: to write daily, and to live uprightly. The Answers Are Inside the Mountains lives up to those deceptively simple ethics, and confirms William Stafford’s enduringly important voice for our uncertain age. William Stafford (1914-93) authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl, You Must Revise Your Life, Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer’s Vocation, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.