Getting to know Indiana’s poet laureate
Indiana Poet Laureate Norbert Krapf, a Jasper native, returned to Indiana from New York in 2004, after nearly 35 years as professor of English at Long Island University.
Krapf, who now lives in Indianapolis, is a frequent collaborator with Indiana University faculty. He and IU Professor Monika Herzig, a jazz pianist and composer, released a CD together, Imagine: Indiana in Music and Poetry,in 2007. Krapf, Herzig and singer Tom Roznowski presented "A Call for Peace" program during IU's Artsweek 2008 with IU Professor and author Scott Russell Sanders.
Krapf says he was tremendously moved by the foreword that Sanders wrote for his collaboration with photographer Darryl Jones, Invisible Presence: A Walk through Indiana in Photographs and Poems.
"He associated me with some of my favorite writers, Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Dickinson, Sandburg and Roethke, and also Blake, Lawrence and Rilke," he said. "It's no accident that one of the four epigraphs -- all by Indiana authors -- for (Krapf's latest published poetry book) Bloodroot: Indiana Poems is a passage from Scott's book Staying Put, which continues to influence me."
Krapf's many honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an honorary doctorate of letters from St. Joseph's College, the David Newton Award for Excellence in Teaching from Long Island University and a Trustees Award for Scholarly Achievement from Long Island University. He has served as Fulbright Professor of American Poetry in Germany at the University of Freiburg and also the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.
In addition to his above mentioned collaboration with Jones, his poetry collections include Somewhere in Southern Indiana, The Country I Come From, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Looking for God's Country. His poem "Back Home" was selected by British sculptural glass artist Martin Donlin to become part of a stained-glass panel he created for installation at the new Indianapolis International Airport.
Krapf's new work, Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, a collaboration with prize-winning photographer David Pierini who worked for The Herald in Jasper for 10 years, was published in 2008 by IU Press.
"This was a different kind of collaboration in that David Pierini took the photographs to go with the poems, the opposite of the way the Invisible Presence collaboration worked," he said.
Here, Krapf describes his process, his passions, and his greatest inspirations.
Live at IU: When did you realize you were meant to be a writer?
Norbert Krapf: I started writing poetry in January of 1971, about half a year after my wife and I moved to the New York area from Notre Dame, where we met and married in June of 1970. We began to teach on Long Island. We moved there in August, and in the fall, I drafted some sketches for what I thought would be a short story cycle about the growing up experience of a young man in the Midwest, modeled on some of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories in the collection In Our Time, with perhaps some influence by Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. I put that autobiographical project aside and started some poems in January, between semesters. As I recall, I had been reading an anthology of contemporary poetry edited by Richard Kostelanetz titled Possibilities of Poetry. I remember saying, "I think I can do this." That's the same kind of reaction I had as an undergraduate at St. Joseph's College in Rensselaer when I read Walt Whitman for an American Lit Survey class.
Also, I remembered a book I'd received, a review copy, as editor of the Notre Dame English Journal -- the Lucien Stryk anthology Heartland: Poets of the Midwest. I put that aside, thinking I was somehow above that, too sophisticated to be interested in anything that originated in the Midwest, my homeland. On Long Island, I reached for this book and read its pages until the dust jacket disintegrated. This Midwestern anthology helped me see I had worlds of material to write poems about.
I was 27 when I began to write those first poems and knew quickly that I was hooked, in it for the long haul. I had told an English major friend in college that "I bet I could write poetry if I moved to the East Coast." And I was right, I did start to write poetry not long after we moved East, but what I wrote about was my Midwestern origins, often childhood and adolescent experiences. I had decided that it wasn't in the cards for me to become a poet so I chose to become the best literature teacher I could make myself into. And then after the move East it happened. The poems came quickly, they were good, and many were accepted for publication soon, in good journals.
The writing of poetry became a calling, a vocation, and a mission, something for which I'd been looking and waiting. Teaching on the university level was something I loved to do, and it also paid me, in part, with time to write. I don't, however, want to give the impression that once I started to write poems, good poems, book publication came easily. I went for 17 years of submitting full-length manuscripts before one was accepted and actually published. Early on, during the third or fourth year of that period, when we were living in England, a Scottish publisher accepted a book manuscript, but that press liquidated before bringing out my book, so I was back to square one.
LIU: How has your writing changed or evolved over the years?
NK: I don't think my style has changed so much as it has evolved into a more and more pared-down idiom that is a refinement of spoken American English. The hardest thing for a poet to do is be simple in the use of language yet at the same time lead the reader into sub-surface depth, into emotional, spiritual and even intellectual complexity. On the other hand, I have learned, in stages, and through personal growth, to deal with darker and more complicated materials, such as the Holocaust, in the last section of Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany (1997); racism, such as in the poem "Fire and Ice" which won the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and some poems about the Miami people of Indiana; and mortality, of those I love and also my own.
Since I took early retirement and moved back to Indiana, I've done collaborations with Indiana photographer Darryl Jones, in Invisible Presence, a coffee-table book (IU Press); Jasper photographer David Pierini, in Bloodroot: Indiana Poems, (IU Press); and IU jazz pianist and composer Monika Herzig, in our live performances and our CD Imagine -- Indiana in Music and Words. In my view, collaboration will work only if the two collaborators have a spiritual kinship -- which could come from a mutual love of a place and its culture or a similar love or passion. I believe that applies in these three cases. It requires patience to do a collaboration, because two distinct artistic sensibilities, arts and genres are involved and engaged with one another, and compromises are essential. But they lead to new creation that you probably would not have been able to bring about if you were working solely on your own. If you aren't patient and can't compromise, it is not wise to collaborate! If you have the requisite qualities, however, collaboration can be stimulating, productive and immensely joyful. A good collaboration can give you the sense that you have discovered powers, some supplied by your collaborator, that you never knew you might find!
Not long after we arrived in Indy in 2004, we met singer-songwriters Greg Ziesemer and Kriss Luckett, who were as interested in my poetry as I was in their music. We collaborated to put together songs and poems in the first Indiana Poetry Festival in 2005. In the spring of 2006, I took Monika Herzig's IUPUI adult ed class, Jazz History and the Indy Jazz Scene. Midway through the course, she invited me to collaborate on a poetry and jazz CD and we started to perform together soon.
I've already had two book collaborations with Indiana photographers since moving back to Indiana. This says something very good about Indiana to me. It's much easier to meet people here, including people in the arts, get together with them and work together. Recently I was part of a collaborative production designed and directed by actor and theatre professor Diane Timmerman of Butler University, "Empowered by Poetry: Whirl of the Divine," a Spirit and Place event that combined poetry, dance, theatre and music. What a great experience! Admittedly, having the time that early retirement gives puts me in a good position to enter into these collaborations and give them my full energy.
LIU: When did you find out you had been named Indiana Poet Laureate? What did that mean for you?
NK: I found out on June 17, 2008 that I was "it," as Indiana Arts Commission Lewis Ricci told me on the phone, when he explained that I could use the title from that day on, but my official contract did not begin until July 1. On June 18 I gave a noon-hour reading from my new The Ripest Moments childhood memoir at the Indiana History Center, and that night Monika and I performed jazz and poetry in the lobby before rapper Ice-T recited Langston Hughes' poem cycle "Ask Your Mama" with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Ron McCurdy Jazz Quartet. Doors opened, such as to the lovely reception that followed the performance. It was wonderful to see such a mix of people together at a musical and poetry performance and experience the communal uplift and energy that such a special evening gave us all! That was a great send-off as IPL!
The title Indiana Poet Laureate gives me much more visibility, for both my poetry and the attention I can bring to poetry and the work of other poets. I've always loved giving poetry readings, but I find myself now in the position of having more than 70 appearances in less than a year, and I've tried to keep January and February relatively clear because of weather concerns and some health issues. The IPL title, however, came to me at just the right time in my life. I took early retirement in 2004, and around the time I became The Other IPL (Indianapolis Power and Light is what most people think of when they see those letters!), I had a CD, a prose book, and a large retrospective poetry collection published in the period of nine months. Several good developments came together. I had new publications to share with the public, creative energy, and time to give to poetry and the world of the arts. I have plenty reasons to go forth into the public and share the wealth, so to speak.
I'm on a mission to reunite poetry and music, so becoming IPL gives more visibility to a new series that American Cabaret Theatre CEO Mark Kesling invited me to create, "Together Again: Music and Poetry." Also, Sharon Gamble, one of the hosts of "The Art of the Matter" on WFYI, our NPR station in Indianapolis, invited me to begin a new series about Indiana poetry that I'd like to call "The Indiana Poetry Corner."
Poetry belongs in the classroom, should be taught at all levels -- children love poetry -- but it should not be kept in the classroom. I love bringing poetry to radio and TV and house concerts, nursing homes, county museums, weddings, churches and even bars, though the atmosphere is not always so conducive there. Poetry belongs out in the world, wherever there are people going about their daily lives. This is true of all the arts! Art of any kind enriches our lives. We suffer if we do not experience it often. Why make ourselves poor as a people?
LIU: If possible, describe your creative process.
NK: I write most of my poems in my study, overlooking New York Street, and more often than not, I do it early in the morning, when I'm the only one awake in the house. Everything is quiet, the subconscious has had overnight to do its turning, and I don't usually have to dangle the cane pole very long before I get a bite. Not every day, but pretty many days. One of my mentors, William Stafford, got up early every morning, even before leaving the house to teach at Lewis and Clark College in Lake Oswego, Ore., and he tried to write something. Every day he wrote. When somebody asked him what he did if the poem was not very good, he said, "Well, I lower my standards!"
He meant that the process of writing, of continuing to write, is what matters most, not whether you come up with a "publishable poem." Maybe we need to write our "bad poems" before we can write our good ones, he seemed to suggest. Our daughter has lived in Portland since 2005, and the first time we visited her and her husband, we went to Lewis and Clark College and then to the private home in which the Stafford Archives were kept. I got to see all his manuscripts, how he wrote, built and put together books, how he organized the poems into book manuscripts. I started to re-read his works and, without making a conscious decision to do so, wrote a poem early every morning when we got back to Indy, did so 90 days in a row. Forty of those poems are in the last section of Bloodroot, in the section titled "Local News."
When our two children were young, for 11 years I took them to Saturday morning Suzuki violin classes, private lessons and orchestra rehearsal. I wrote many poems those Saturday mornings. Also, I wrote a lot of poems when they were taking German classes in a special program on Long Island. I regularly make entries in my journal at the nearby City Market here in downtown Indy. I often write in my journal, sometimes drafts of poems, when I'm in airports and on planes. I can write just about anywhere, in cafes -- I once wrote a poem in the back seat of a car when five of us were driving to the New Orleans Jazz Festival from Hammond, La., where we were staying with dear friends -- and I've also drafted poems in classrooms when my students were writing essay exams.
I certainly do revise, always have poems at various stages of completion, and like to give them time to finish themselves, so to speak, so that I know what they need when I come back to look at them later. Sometimes it takes years to finish a poem. I learn to listen to what they tell me they need to have done to them. Writing poems requires intense looking and listening, to what is around us, on a daily basis. The act of writing a poem for me often comes from seeing something simple, ordinary, and everyday, but as if with new eyes. Often an awakening, no matter how small, may lead to a poem. Some poems I carry around with me for a good while before I write them down. Those come out rather quickly, because they've had a good amount of time to gestate.
I've been primarily a narrative poet, and a narrative poem is not usually a short poem. But in the last eight to 10 years, I've been writing more and more meditative poems, and they are short and often come out nearly finished. I often compose them in my mind before I write them down. After I've written some narrative poems, I long to write some short, haiku-like poems; after I've written a bunch of them, I long to write some longer, wind-up narratives.
How long I write depends on what I'm writing and how much time I have to give to it. I can say that I most often write poems in clusters, cycles or sequences, so not very often do I just write one separate poem. When I really get into a project, like the 132 (125 were used) poems I wrote to go with Darryl Jones' Polaroid manipulations and transfers in Invisible Presence, I almost can't stop, but writing those poems was more like writing 125 short sections of an ongoing poem. Sometimes I would write all day and then wake up in the middle of the night and write down poems as if they were dictation, one after the other. I don't like to write this way very often because it's so exhausting, but I sure do hate to say no to the Muse. When she comes, I'm hers!
As I said before, more and more I write early in the morning. Some days I have two or three poems drafted before breakfast. If that's the case, I like to do something else later. You have to let the tank fill back up, or you'll exhaust yourself in more ways than one. An early afternoon nap helps, but if you're teaching that's not easy to arrange! I should point out that my habits have changed some since I retired from teaching. If I had a stack of papers to grade, I usually wouldn't allow myself to write a poem until the papers were graded and returned. There can be exceptions, of course.
LIU: Do you have a favorite poem that you have written?
NK: Oh, what a naughty question! Do you have favorites among your children? If so, I bet you won't admit it! I don't think I do have a favorite poem, but some that are favorites were what I might call "breakthrough" poems. "Skinning a Rabbit," an early poem, would fit in that category. It's a poem that understandably upset some readers, because of its violence and honesty.
I read it in the early '90s to some high school and junior high school students in Cincinnati and one of them asked, rather angrily, "Why did you write that poem?" "To tell the truth," was my honest answer.
Another breakthrough poem was "When the Call Came," which is about the phone call from a social worker in a Bogotá, Colombia, agency indicating that they had a baby girl for us to adopt and wanted to know if we would "accept" her. The last word of that poem is "yes." It's not easy to write an affirmative poem in the times we live in, but that one sure is an affirmation of life, in every sense of the word.
The group of poems I wrote about a Jewish woman named Klara Krapf from my Catholic ancestral region who died in the Holocaust was also a breakthrough group. It was extremely painful to write those poems, but I knew from the start that I was entering new and difficult territory and growing as both human being and poet in writing those challenging, searing poems. Also, I would put in this category the poems about my mother's battle with lymphoma and her death in the section titled "The Country I Come From" in Bloodroot -- of those poems, "Hugging the Spirit" is my favorite because of how difficult it was to write and how much I grew spiritually as a result of having written the poem.
I would also include as a favorite the "Fire and Ice" poem I mentioned above, from the same section of Bloodroot. It's a brutally honest poem about a racial incident from my freshman year of college, and it was rejected by over 20 editors before it won a national prize. I think it was rejected because it was so honest and told an unpopular truth about me and the culture in which I lived. I never gave up on that poem. Now when I read it to audiences, they tell me it really speaks to them. I'm proud that I suggested to Monika that we pair it with the great Billie Holiday's (based on a poem that she didn't write) "Strange Fruit," inspired by an Indiana lynching. The combination is extremely powerful, as readers will find if they listen to it from links provided on my Web site (www.krapfpoetry.com), or hear the CD. When Monika and I perform that pairing, the audience grows quiet and reflective.
LIU: Describe Bloodroot and why this work is important to you.
NK: Bloodroot is a selection of 175 of my Indiana poems written 1971-2007, including 40 new ones. It brings together those Indiana poems that I find most important. These are poems, a body of work that I am proud to leave behind.
It's no accident that the last section of new poems is titled "Local News." I am an unabashed localist who believes that the way to get to the universal is by exploring the particular, the local, by going down deeply into it. If an artist does this well, he or she will write about all people, all places and all times, because, as I say in the preface to my prose memoir about growing up in southern Indiana, "A sense of place travels well." I love irony, as you can see! To have these Indiana poems published by the regional division of Indiana University Press, Quarry Books, feels just right and constitutes the ultimate homecoming for me. As I said on the occasion of being named Indiana Poet Laureate, I wish my Indiana-loving parents were alive to savor the honor of this IPL title and the beauty of this book. David Pierini's 61 black and white photographs are magnificent.
LIU: What about Indiana inspires your writing?
NK: The spirit of the place. The landscape, especially the southern Indiana hill country, where I feel a spiritual connection. The people. The flora and fauna. The traditions of the Native peoples. Lately, since we moved back to Indiana, the rich musical tradition here, the jazz tradition of Indiana Avenue here in Indy and Richmond and Bloomington and The Region near Chicago, the bluegrass (and "newgrass") tradition brought up from the South, the folk tradition, the classical tradition (our daughter attended Butler on a violin scholarship). Bloodroot includes two tributes to our great African American poet of Indianapolis, Etheridge Knight. I loved being introduced to the Hampton Sisters, saw their last two performances, and was lucky to get time to speak to Aletra Hampton when she was in her nineties.
I should mention that the Indiana German tradition has inspired many of my poems, from the first poem in the new book, "The Forefather Arrives," to my tribute to Kurt Vonnegut near the end of the last section. Also, the last section of the book includes the poem that was selected to become part of a beautiful, stained-glass panel by British artist Martin Donlin, who was commissioned, through an open competition, to create some 14 panels. Maybe that short poem, or section of the poem "In Transit," answers your question: "Back home on the ground, / we discover that the gift / the great wings gave us / is new eyes to see that / this place where we live / we love more than we knew."
LIU: Can you offer some tips for would-be writers?
NK: I would recommend being patient with yourself, not getting down on yourself if a poem or story or novel or essay or memoir does not go where you think it should go, at first. Let go of it for awhile, do something else, come back to it later with new eyes. Also, keep a journal, which can be an important part of the process of becoming and being a writer. A journal can lead to discovery and self-understanding and can also serve as a kind of notebook or workshop for poems and prose projects. Every bit and kind of writing that we do is important. Nothing that we write is lost, even if we put it away. It's part of the writing process that we want to develop and nurture. I lament the loss of letter writing. E-mailing can be important, but I miss the depth and breadth of the old-fashioned letter. I thought of creating a course titled "The Letter as Literature," but I never got around to it.
Also, read, read, read, not only the kind of writing that you want to do, but other forms. Be as open and eclectic and catholic as you can be. It's good to stretch yourself. I think that for poets it's very important to listen to music, to develop and sharpen the ear, a sensitivity to the sound and music of language. Although academics like to separate songs and poems, I find that poets have a lot to learn from songwriters and musicians. We all have our favorite types of literature and authors, and we can be stimulated to write by them, but we can also learn a lot from writers who work in other traditions, genres, and styles than those we think are ours. I think it's good to read outside of literature as well. I read a lot of history, but of course much of my writing is set in the past, or explores the past as part of the present. Fran Quinn, who directed the renowned reading series at Butler for many years, told me when I read there in 1998 that he knew exactly where I was going. "Where's that?" I asked. "Back to Adam," he said. After thinking about it, I said to myself, "That's not far enough. I want to go way beyond that!"
LIU: What's next for you or what projects are in the works?
NK: In 2009 WordTech Editions will bring out my poetry collection Sweet Sister Moon, love poems and tributes to women. I'd like to put the finishing touches on a collection of autobiographical essays titled Sniffing the Region that will be a sequel, at least chronologically, to The Ripest Moments, the childhood memoir. I worked on this project back in the late '90s and recently added some more pieces to it. This book will present my process of becoming a writer as inseparable from the process of tracing family history, learning German, and developing and articulating what it means to have a sense of place. I'd also like to get back to a young adult novel that I've taken through four or five drafts but need to give more attention and energy to before I get it all right, The Bells of St. Michael's. It deals with an old German immigrant in southern Indiana who suffers from Alzheimer's or dementia, is more in touch with the distant past than the present, and whose care becomes a matter of contention among his adult children. His champion and defender is his granddaughter, who loves to hear him talk about his childhood in Germany. I also have plenty of recent poems, and some Long Island ones that I haven't collected, that could become another volume if I could ever find the time and energy to put it all together. But for now I have this other job I love, you see, of being Indiana Poet Laureate. I'm going to try to accept my own advice and be patient with myself!
