Keep your Religion off my Bod... er... Canyon!

[kellychaos]

Being grammar and spelling challenged, Vinth would probably consider THIS blasphemy as well.

In the summer of 1994, just a year after his death, William Stafford's Methow River Poems were "published" on road-side plaques along the river that runs from the heart of the Cascade Mountains to the Columbia River. The seven poems were selected from seventeen that Stafford wrote to fulfill an unusual commission. Two Forest Service rangers, Curtis Edwards and Sheela McLean, had written the poet in 1992 asking him to provide the words for the 'interpretive' signs that appear throughout our national and state park lands. Stafford quickly and enthusiastically agreed, writing what were to be some of his last poems, which were published by Confluence Press in 1995 as The Methow River Poems and again in 1996 by his son, Kim Stafford, in the volume Even in Quiet Places. Kim wrote in the afterward: ".. I believe the Methow poems display in the extreme a habit of mind that ... characterizes ... my father's life work." Work that reflected his "customary prolific generosity," somewhat random, with "nuggets of insight" that were universal despite an easy-going, particular, relaxed style.1 It was these words about the river poems that became the thread of a journey for us in the summer of 1998 to the Pacific Northwest.