Seeing 2020

by Kim Stafford

SEEING 2020: Poems from a Hard Year gathers selections from my writing practice as we moved through pandemic, protest for justice, fires in the West, and the fall election. The book closes with poems of relation to our precious Earth.

96 pages, Paperback

Published January 2, 2021

About the author

Kim Robert Stafford is an American poet and essayist who lives in Portland, Oregon. Stafford received a B.A. in 1971, an M.A. in English in 1973 and a Ph.D. in medieval literature in 1979 from the University of Oregon. Since 1979, he has taught writing at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. He has also taught courses at Willamette University in Salem, at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, at the Fishtrap Writers Gathering, and private workshops in Oregon and Italy. He is the founding director and artist-in-residence at the Northwest Writing Institute. He is the son of poet William Stafford.

Reviews

[Susan Lampe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poet Kim Stafford embraces the difficult topics of 2020 with an intent toward healing his readers. His poems in this book focus on the Flu Pandemic, the 2020 Election, the Oregon Fires of September 2020, Riots in Portland, summer 2020. He shifted from what he wanted to write to what he believed readers needed to hear. He speaks in the introduction of moving sorrow into story in a poem called "Schooling Sorrow." He tells us he shifted his poetry from art to medicine. Some of my favorites in this book are: "Pandemic Post Office," "Nurse's Note," "What's Your Name," "Radical," "Smoke in Oregon," "Sweet Air," "Accountability," "The Fauci-Trump Scale of Accountability," "Draft for the Third Inaugural," and "Deep State." Unlike other Stafford books of poetry that take us to the heights of language and vision through description of beaches and forests on the Oregon coast, this one takes us to a place of experience we all shared and helps us make sense of events that shaped the year of 2020.