You and Art
Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.
Year after year fits over your face—
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;
and you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.
—William Stafford
Also see William Stafford—A Course in Creative Writing
Listen to You and Art performed by Daniel Sperry from his CD: William Stafford: Cutting Loose ~ A Tribute To William Stafford.
I later included the last stanza of this Stafford poem in response to The Poetry Society’s tweet of the last half of Wallace Stevens’s poem, The Snow Man, which they liked. The imagery is similar, and the GIF they used of snow falling also fits perfectly with both poems.
My poem, Poetry—The Art of the Voice, communicates that silent music from nature to poet to audience, where it “begins before it makes any sound” as Stafford wrote at the end of You and Art.
And my poem, Telling the Story of Silence by Ken Chawkin, allows that silence to tell its own story, the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” as Stevens wrote in The Snow Man.
Later found and added: Henry Lyman interviewed William Stafford for NPR’s series, Poems to a Listener, later posted on YouTube. Stafford reads several poems, including You and Art.
I found this quote by James Joyce (Ulysses): “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery.” It seems to reiterate this notion that mistakes lead to discovering something new and unexpected, i.e., thinking out of the box.
Tags: aging, art, creativity, discovery, finding your way, Music, originality, redemption, silence, stillness
The Uncarved Blog 
February 18, 2013 at 4:17 pm |
This poem is hot yo.
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March 10, 2013 at 6:50 pm |
mos def
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December 5, 2014 at 11:43 pm |
[…] go,” reminds me of the creative silence and the mature poet in this William Stafford poem, You and Art, “and you discover where music begins before it makes any sound, far in the mountains where […]
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December 1, 2015 at 7:57 am |
[…] William Stafford—The Way It Is, also recorded by Daniel Sperry, as well as William Stafford—You and Art. Enjoy other Stafford poems I love posted on The Uncarved […]
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December 21, 2015 at 10:40 pm |
[…] poems posted on The Uncarved Blog, some of which have also been recorded by Daniel Sperry like, William Stafford—You and Art, and the last poem he wrote the morning of the day he died: “Are you Mr. William […]
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July 30, 2016 at 12:30 am |
[…] a new way of painting. Another poet, William Stafford, wrote about youth and the mature artist in You and Art. The poem describes, in his own unique way, this spiritual transformation that takes place later in […]
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May 1, 2018 at 1:13 pm |
[…] reading the poem, Ask Me. It’s one of my favorite Stafford poems along with The Way It Is, You and Art, When I Met My Muse, and many more posted on my […]
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April 13, 2019 at 4:30 pm |
[…] process for themselves, to find their own voice (A Course in Creative Writing), to let the writing take them where it will (You and […]
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November 30, 2020 at 1:06 pm |
[…] writing poetry to be very relevant. Here are a few that caught my attention: When I Met My Muse, You and Art, Ask Me, and A Course in Creative […]
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January 25, 2021 at 10:42 am |
[…] writing on The Uncarved Blog. A few of those poems that stand out for me are: When I Met My Muse, You and Art, Ask Me, The Way It Is, A Course in Creative Writing, and Rx Creative Writing: […]
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