From BAMBOO RIDGE Issue Number 9, December 1980 – February 1981, New Moon

“On Being Local”
                               by William Stafford

          All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences — all the arts — are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life.
          It is this immediacy that distinguishes art. And paradoxically the more local the feeling in art, the more all people can share it; for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground.
          Artists, knowing this mutual enrichment that extends everywhere, can act, and praise, and criticize, as insiders — the means of art is the life of all people. And that life grows and improves by being shared. Hence, it is good to welcome any region you live in or come to, or think of, for that is where life happens to be, right where you are.

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Bio: “William Stafford and family live in Lake Oswego, Oregon, from whence he has visited Hawaii several times for readings and lectures.” Back then, “His most recent main collection of poems is Stories That Could Be True: New and Collected Poems, Harper & Row.
          Here is a link to the William Stafford Archives.