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.
The Uncarved Blog 