Historical Note

The documentaries produced from this collection of video footage focus on two of the most significant Oregon poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

Lawson Fusao Inada was born in Fresno, CA in 1938, the grandchild of Japanese immigrants. He spent the war years with his family in concentration camps in Arkansas and Colorado, among the ten thousand Japanese Americans to be interned. At Fresno State University he was encouraged to write poetry by Philip Levine. He has been strongly influenced by his great passion, jazz, which informs his preference for poetry in performance. His collections of poetry include Before the War: Poems As They Happened (1971), Legends from Camp (1992), which won the American Book Award, and Drawing the Line (1997), winner of the Oregon Book Award. Among his other publications is Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese-American Internment Experience (2000). He taught at Southern Oregon University until his recent retirement. He is currently poet laureate of Oregon.

William Stafford was born in 1914 in Hutchinson, Kansas, and worked during the Depression years at a variety of jobs (in sugar beet fields, in construction, and in an oil refinery). He received his bachelor’s degree shortly before the war from the University of Kansas, and returned there to complete his master’s in 1947. A committed pacifist, he was interned between 1942 and 1946 interned in Civilian Public Service camps in California and Arkansas. After the war he was employed at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon till his retirement. He spent 1950 to 1952 at the University of Iowa, where he received his doctorate in 1954. He is the author of almost seventy volumes, including the poetry collections Traveling through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award in 1963, and the two volumes of selected poems Stories that Could Be True (Harper & Row, 1977) and The Way It Is (Graywolf Press, 1993). He is also the author of four books of prose essays in the Michigan University Press Poets on Poetry series and of the prose memoir Down in My Heart (1947), the account of his experiences in CPS camp. Between 1970 and 1971 he was Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, and was appointed poet laureate of Oregon in 1975. He died in August 1993.