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INTERVIEWER
In his essay on James Wright, Richard Hugo wrote, “The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was the obscurity I wrote in for many years.” Do you feel similarly about your own late-blooming career as a poet?
STAFFORD
I think I understand what Hugo was getting at: that you are ambitious when you start and if you have a whiff of success you try to rush things; for publication's sake you try to rush it all the more; then the ordinary slumps in popularity and intervals when you're not publishing become overwhelming simply because you haven't gotten used to doing what you have to do as a writer: write day in and day out no matter what happens.
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