Indiana University Press blog:

Before making a timely escape from Indiana winter to sunny Florida, poet Norbert Krapf took part in an interview with me about his poetry, his tenure as Indiana Poet Laureate, and his upcoming events in 2009.

Bloodroot is a collection of poems about Indiana. Why has Indiana been so inspirational for your poetry?

The short answer is that I have a deep spiritual connection with the Indiana landscape and its people, especially the southern part of the state, the hill country, where my family has lived since the 1840s. For 34 years I lived on Long Island, near New York City, but all that time I was writing about my Indiana ties, which I brought along with me. I started to write poetry after I moved away from Indiana, but in a sense, I never left it behind. I brought Indiana with me. Indiana spoke through me. This is not exactly a matter of choice, I would say. Maybe being the firstborn in the family had something to do with it. As Scott Sanders says so well in Staying Put, one of my favorite books, we don’t choose where we’re born, but we’re affected by the fact of where we were born, even if we turn away from it, reject it, try to escape it, hate it. The poetry, essays, and fiction of Wendell Berry, a friend of Scott, is a great example of the kind of geographical and human depth a writer can discover while staying at home. I’ve always loved Thoreau’s remark about his hometown, “I have travelled much in Concord.”

Another factor is that for all those years my family and I came back often to Indiana, which is quite different from the metropolitan New York area. Until my mother died in December, 1997, we in effect had a second home in Jasper, where I still have many relatives. Contrast and juxtaposition can be good for one’s writing. Sometimes you can see something better from a distance. I’m not the first person to say this, of course. There’s been a tradition of Midwestern writers moving East and then writing about the life they left behind—or brought with them, internally. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway are good examples, as is the Hoosier Theodore Dreiser.

In both Bloodroot and Invisible Presence (your previous book with IU Press), poetry is combined with photographs. Can you describe how poetry inspires (and how you are inspired by) the visual arts, and how each art form complements the other in your works?

Again, spiritual connection has a lot to do with this. I wouldn’t be able to collaborate with a photographer with whom I did not feel a significant spiritual kinship, just as I would not have been able to collaborate with the IU composer and pianist Monika Herzig if I did not feel such a kinship with her. Also, it’s often been mentioned that I have quite a visual imagination. The two collaborations with photographers you mention are in effect the reverse of one another: [For Invisible Presence], I was asked to write poems to accompany Polaroid manipulations and transfers of Indiana scenes in full color by Darryl Jones, who had given me permission to use a southern Indiana landscape photo for the cover of The Country I Come From, a 2002 collection of poems set in Indiana; [For Bloodroot], I recommended David Pierini as the photographer who would be asked to take some 60 b/w photographs of southern Indiana scenes to go with some of my poems, and I took Dave around to sites that inspired poems. Now Darryl clearly loves southern Indiana and so does Dave, who left Indiana for Chicago not long before Bloodroot came out—and he, a native of Michigan, misses Dubois County terribly now that he no longer lives there. In the case of Darryl’s Polaroids, it was as though he had distilled the scene down to its essence for me, as I say in an autobiographical essay, and I hit the ground running, so to speak. The poems in Invisible Presence have, in many cases, a meditative quality and a haiku-like compression. Darryl and I were moving in the same direction, of seeing the spiritual within the landscape and the people, when we came to work together after I moved back to Indiana. The process is making connections and going deeper and deeper, not only into the landscape, but into the self! Photos can trigger poems and poems can trigger photos. The same can be said of the relationship between music and poetry. This is what Monika calls “joining forces.”

In 2008, you were named Indiana’s Poet Laureate. How did it feel to be given this honor? What are your duties as the state’s poet laureate?

The first e-mail notice I got that the Indiana Arts Commission was soliciting nominations for the Indiana Poet Laureate [IPL] position came from a documentary filmmaker, Nancy Carlson, who had heard me read at some concerts. The next three requests came from musicians, my collaborator Monika Herzig; Jason Wilber, the singer-songwriter and guitarist for John Prine; and singer-songwriter Greg Ziesemer. I said to myself, “Well, if four people who are not fellow poets want to nominate me, want me to do this, I can’t say no!” I love poetry, have devoted a large part of my life to writing it, reading it, and teaching young people to appreciate it (mostly by example), and being Indiana Poet Laureate gives me a platform, a pulpit, and a voice to be of service. How did it feel? After I got over worrying about whether I would give too much of myself to the job (is there any other way but to give all of yourself to something or someone you love?), I was ready to go. I felt that being nominated to become IPL was a tremendous honor and an affirmation, justification, and reward for the decision to move back to Indiana. As I’ve said, I wish my Indiana-loving parents could have been alive to see this happen. So many good things have happened since we moved back here! For me, being a poet is not a job, an avocation, a hobby. It’s a calling and a mission. I have never believed in converting people, however; I always tried to teach poetry by showing how much I love it, by sharing the passion I bring to it and letting students see how much a part of me it is and how profoundly it can affect our lives.

I see the IPL as an ambassadorial position. I am the poetry ambassador. My duties are to promote poetry in the schools, to give readings and talks in the community, at libraries, senior citizen homes, at house concerts, galleries, cafes, on the radio, on TV. I feel a special sense of mission to demonstrate that poetry and music (song in particular), which some, mainly in the academy, have tried to separate, always have been one. I love working with musicians. By invitation, I created a series titled “Together Again: Music & Poetry” at the American Cabaret Theatre, located in the historic Athenaeum, two blocks from our house.

When I was young, my grandmother called me the “barefoot girl with cheek of tan” every time I walked around the house without shoes on. She slightly modified this line from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem “The Barefoot Boy,” which is one of many poems that she had to memorize when she was in grade school (and could still recite 70+ years later). Unlike my grandmother, I rarely had to memorize poems when I was in school. Do you think more children should memorize poetry? Does memorization help one to internalize the meaning of a poem?

Yes, absolutely, memorization does help one get into the details and depths of a poem. I would recommend that the first step, though, is to read poems out loud. There is a program that poet Dana Gioia started with the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Out Loud, that will outlive his tenure as the director. High school students across the country memorize and recite poems in a competition that begins at their schools, proceeds to the state level, and then goes to the national level. If we read a poem out loud, even if people think we must be crazy to do it, we will enter into it more deeply and pleasurably than if we imagined hearing a voice, perhaps ours, reading it. There is something about the physical sensation of saying the poem, of entering into its rhythms, its unique combination of sounds, its music, that carries us along and into the poem and helps us settle into its emotional, spiritual, and even intellectual depths. If we read it with our heads only, we get only part of it. Do we listen to music with only our heads?

Your grandmother sounds like a very wise woman. I wish I had memorized more poems when I was younger, but I was the first on either side of my family to graduate from college and we did not have a tradition of reading books or reciting poetry in our house. But I was touched to discover that my mother was a poetry lover and had an edition of Tennyson poems that she didn’t show me until late in her life. She also loved the poetry of James Whitcomb Riley. In the poem “A Hoosier Poetry Reading,” which is in both Invisible Presence and Bloodroot, I tell the story of her hiding in a tree while reading Riley’s dialect poems, as her older sister ran around trying to find her so that she could get her young sis in trouble. You weren’t supposed to waste time reading on a farm! My mother was careful to explain to me that she had finished her chores before she climbed that tree!

I’ve always admired Native American and African American poets for the ease with which they recite their poems by memory. The oral tradition is a great tradition that makes it clear that poetry is (or was) an important (and spiritual!) part of communal life. I’m primarily a narrative poet and so have always believed in the importance of telling the people a story. The Modernists would have it that the story is or was “dead,” but the story lives as long as people are alive. You cannot kill the need to hear a story told or suppress the urge to tell stories. It’s true, though, that there are many ways to get the storytelling done. Having the story committed to memory helps the teller tell his/her tale more effectively.

I read in one of your previous interviews that you wrote poetry at a Taco Bell, fueled by lots of Diet Coke. What is your writing process (and does Diet Coke help)?

Yeah, I certainly set myself up for that one, didn’t I? I wanted to make a point. Many people have this stereotypical notion that poets write their poems in an ivory tower, or only when they’re wild with inspiration, or way out in the woods, or only when they are given or take some kind of artificial stimulation. Frankly, I’ll settle for plain old water. I don’t care for Taco Bell food, which does not settle well in my stomach, and Diet Coke does not exactly give me visions. I wanted to point out that I can write my poems almost anywhere. At the time, my son was taking an after-school German class in Franklin Square, Long Island, on the edge of Queens, New York City. While he took the class, I went into the Taco Bell that was right across the street from the school building and worked on poems. Eventually, I discovered that there was a teachers’ lounge in the school building with big tables that parents could sit at during the Friday afternoon and evening classes. It was more congenial to write poems on those tables, of course. I write most of my poems at my upstairs corner desk, which gives me a view from two windows, here in downtown Indy, but I also do writing, mainly in my journal, at the nearby City Market, on the balcony level, next to a window giving me a view of City Market Plaza and the street. I’ve also written in downtown cafes.

My writing habits changed when our children came. When I started to write poetry in 1971, we had no children and I did a lot of my writing at night, sometimes after teaching all day. When the children came some ten years later, I started to do more writing in the morning. I’ve never been one who felt the need to go away to writers’ retreats in order to write, though I understand why some writers do. I like writing out of the middle of my life, in more ways than one. When our children were young, I was what my wife called “the primary caregiver,” because my university position gave me more flexibility in my teaching schedule than she had in her middle school teaching schedule. My collection Bittersweet along the Expressway: Poems of Long Island has many poems about the coming of our children from Bogotá, Colombia (we adopted them as infants) and their growing up. For eleven years, one or both of them was involved in a Suzuki violin program at Long Island University and I spent every Saturday morning with them in their group classes, private lessons, and orchestra rehearsals. I got lots of poems written on Saturday mornings. It’s no wonder that a number of them have to do with music!

Last December, the former Indiana Poet Laureate Joyce Brinkman helped arrange a poetry reading at the Library of Congress with you and some other Indiana poets. Had you ever given a poetry reading there before? What was your experience like? And as poet laureate, will you get to select the next Indiana poets who read at the Library of Congress?

No, I’d never read at the Library of Congress. The reading was by four of us who had poems selected to become part of stained-glass panels at the new Indy airport by English artist Martin Donlin, whose proposal was accepted as part of a public competition. We had been working as a group since June, 2007, meeting monthly at the Indiana Writers’ Center and writing poems on the theme of travel, which is what brought us together. In the early summer, San Francisco Bay Press published our anthology Rivers, Rails, and Runways. We’ve been doing a number of readings since the book came out. It was enjoyable to be staying in the same hotel just a block away from the Library of Congress. Two of the poets brought their children along and we had fun taking over the breakfast room and had one of our monthly poetry discussion sessions. The Airpoets, as we call ourselves, and their families go to the Library of Congress—should we have made a movie of the experience? Having given so many solo readings, I very much enjoy this kind of ensemble reading. It was an honor to read in the Thomas Jefferson Building which houses the Library of Congress, and the reading was filmed, the first time any in the noon-hour series was filmed. The video should be available for viewing online soon, if it isn’t already. I’m not sure if I’ll be asked to arrange another reading by Indiana poets, but if asked, I can certainly do it. For eighteen years, I directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center of Long Island University, a reading series that started in the late 1960s. Usually I scheduled some seven or eight readings a year. As IPL, I have scheduled eight poets to read at the Indianapolis Artsgarden on four Mondays in April, which is both National Poetry and Jazz Appreciation Month, a busy month for me!

In addition to the poetry reading at the Library of Congress, you had a busy schedule of events in 2008. What are some of the highlights in store for 2009?

Well, I always enjoy performing the jazz and poetry combination with Monika Herzig. In late September, we’ll give a “German roots” presentation at Butler, as part of a “Mahler project,” that will include some early Rainer Maria Rilke poems in the original German and my American English translations. We’re also combining with singer-songwriter and Hometown NPR narrator Tom Roznowski and his “Americana/roots music” band to present a tribute to Indiana songwriters at the American Cabaret Theatre [ACT]. Our two teams combined to present a program titled A Call for Peace as part of IU’s ArtsWeek and also as part of my poetry and music series at ACT. It’s always stimulating to extend what you do and move into new territory.

Also, I’ve loved being part of the Hoosier Dylan Show organized by folksinger-actor Tim Grimm, the composer at the Indiana Repertory Theatre. We gave performances in old theatres in Columbus and Danville, Indiana in November and recently did a January performance in Greenfield. We hope to bring the show into other vintage Indiana theaters. It’s great fun to be part of the troupe of six singer-songwriters and/or bands as they perform great songs by Bob Dylan, whose work I have followed closely for some forty-five years. If you’re moved to combine poetry and music, you can’t not pay attention to what Dylan does. At the first two shows, I simply read Dylan-related poems as part of the sets; but I came to see that wasn’t enough. The poetry must join forces with the music, I realized. So in Greenville, bluesman Gordon Bonham backed me on two blues poems, one a tribute to the late Yank Rachell, in whose band Gordon played for some ten years. Then Tim Grimm accompanied me on guitar on two poems that respond to particular Dylan songs that he segued into after I finished reading those poems. It looks like soulful singer Jennie DeVoe will join Gordon and me at future shows to deepen the presentation of a breakup (“kiss-off”) poem, “Baby Blue,” that echoes one by Bob played and sung by Gordon.

I love it when Tim introduces me by saying that for the Rolling Thunder Revue troupe of musicians that Dylan organized and took on tour in 1975-6, in a big bus, he brought along his poet friend Allen Ginsberg to be part of the show. “In the same way,” Tim concludes, “we have brought along Norbert as Indiana Poet Laureate.” As my daughter, a big Dylan fan who came to Butler University on a violin scholarship, would ask, “How cool is that?” I keep asking Tim, “When do we buy or lease a bus?”

We're almost 13 days into the new year, and I've already broken some of my resolutions (one of which was posting this blog last week). I guess that's why I usually don't make resolutions. But maybe if I publish them on the blog for the world to see, I'll hold myself more accountable. So with trepidation that I'll be taken to task by the blogosphere if I break them, I declare the following resolutions for 2009:

Post the Choice reviews to the blog at the beginning of the month. Progress report: Fail. I hope to do better next month when I'm not trying to catch up from a two-week vacation. Meanwhile, my goal is to get the reviews from January's issue up later this week.
Try to make a recipe from The Tao of Cooking. I need to expand my culinary repertoire, which currently consists of about eight rotating dishes. My palate is bored! Progress report: I have looked at the book, but am still searching for a dish that will pass the taste test of my picky husband and even pickier toddler (who would only eat yogurt if I let her). Maybe I'll find something suitable within the next 11 and a half months.
Read The Sound and The Fury. I'm not sure how I graduated with a degree in English without having to read Faulkner for any of my classes. The only story of his that I've ever read is A Rose for Emily, and that was way back in high school. So when I recently saw The Sound and The Fury at a used book store, I decided that it was time to fill the Faulkner gap in my literary education. Progress report: I'm on page 54. For several pages, I had no clue what was going on. Now that I'm further into the book, I only have slightly more of a clue of what is going on. I can see why Howard Rockey cautioned Philadelphia Inquirer readers that this book might push them "to apply for admission to the nearest insane asylum."
Do more author interviews on the blog. Ideally, I'd like to do one a month, but more realistically I'll say at least one every other month. Progress report: So far, so good. An interview with Norbert Krapf is in the works!
Learn more about writing HTML code. I rely on Dreamweaver, a WYSIWYG program, to generate the code for our email promotions. I know the basics of HTML, but want to increase my understanding of it as multiple email clients and browsers present challenges for email deliverability and the correct display of messages in a user's inbox. Progress report: Not started. I get overwhelmed just thinking about it! I might need to force myself to tackle it by signing up for an HTML class.
Go to bed earlier. Progress report: Fail. It's 11:34 p.m. and I'm blogging and watching The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

Washington Post review: Searching for Cioran

"Zarifopol-Johnston seeks to understand Cioran rather than accuse him. ...[She] points out both continuities and rifts between the thought of the 'Romanian' Cioran and the 'French' Cioran. ...Searching for Cioran offers valuable material about an important writer’s early life."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

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January Choice reviews

Following through on the resolution in my New Year's blog post, here are the reviews published in the January issue of Choice magazine:

African Art and the Colonial Encounter
"A provocative and useful addition to postcolonial analysis. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Faculty and specialists."

Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora
"Should be required reading for Africanist archaeologists and students of African American and diasporic archaeology. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All students of archaeology of the modern world."

Comrades
"...move[s] beyond the usual media stereotypes, condemnations from the Right, and romanticization on the Left...Recommended."

Elvis Costello
"Griffiths...documents Costello's rise to popularity since he emerged in the 1970s alternative pop/punk scene in London. ...Recommended."

History of Music in Russia from Antiquity to 1800, Volume 1 and Volume 2
"This is a groundbreaking, important translation, and it benefits from the expertise of its editors, all well-known musicologists whose research has focused on Russian music. ...Highly recommended."

Marcel Tabuteau
"...Storch's intriguing book will appeal to a broad audience, not just oboists. Anyone interested in music will find Tabuteau's philosophies and Storch's research beneficial and applicable."

Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
"...a valuable contribution to scholarship bridging analytic and Continental concerns. ...clear and largely jargon-free. ...Recommended."

Transforming Philosophy and Religion
"This collection is both beautiful and exciting in its scope, content, and direction. Summing Up: Essential."

Tyrannosaurus rex, the Tyrant King
"This volume is a major contribution to dinosaur research. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Academic and public libraries, all levels."

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