DREAMS OF EARTH AND SKY: INTERVIEWS WITH NINE KANSAS POETS By Copyright 2010 Kirsten Ann Meenen Bosnak M.S., University of Kansas, 1993 Submitted to the graduate degree program in English and the Graduate Faculty of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. Committee members: _____________________________________________ Chairperson, Michael L. Johnson _____________________________________________ Joseph Harrington _____________________________________________ Denise Low Date defended _________________________________ ii The Thesis Committee for Kirsten Ann Meenen Bosnak certifies that this is the approved version of the following thesis: DREAMS OF EARTH AND SKY: INTERVIEWS WITH NINE KANSAS POETS Committee members: ____________________________________________ Chairperson, Michael L. Johnson ____________________________________________ Joseph Harrington ____________________________________________ Denise Low Date approved ________________________________ ii i Abstract This thesis comprises interviews with nine poets who have a Kansas background and whose work exhibits a strong sense of place. The interviews took place during the period running from April 2008 through May 2009. The conversations explore the practice and process of writing; the poets’ influences; the shift in consciousness, from adolescence through maturity, about various aspects of writing; ideas about the purpose and value of poetry; and the intersection of the poets’ personal experiences with their writing. Each of the poets interviewed has some connection to the poet William Stafford, who grew up in Kansas, attended the University of Kansas, and in 1970 was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970, the position that later became U.S. Poet Laureate. Stafford’s influence on several of these poets is strong. His influence is explored in several interviews and is an important subject of the collection as a whole. The last interview is with his son, the writer Kim Stafford. The collection is not intended to be a representation of the work of all Kansas poets, but rather as a presentation of one poetic aesthetic that occurs in this region. The collection is intended to be an enjoyable, encouraging, and useful tool to aspiring poets and other writers, teachers, and readers who are interested in writing that has a sense of place. i v For my mother Laura Lee Morey Bosnak who taught me to love words and to love the earth and sky v Acknowledgements A version of the interview with Kim Stafford was published in Flint Hills Review, Emporia State University, Issue Fourteen, 2009. Versions of the interviews with B.H. Fairchild and Donald Levering were published in New Mexico Poetry Review, Santa Fe, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 2010. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, Laura and John Bosnak, who, like me, can’t stay away from college and who have always supported my belief that learning has intrinsic value. I also want to express appreciation to the following: my friend, former colleague, and fellow writer Anna Kraxner, who read my first serious poems seven years ago, gave thoughtful criticism, and encouraged me; KU Endowment, my former employer, which provided me with partial tuition support each semester; Kathleen Johnson, Nedra Rogers, and Travis Weller, fellow poets who travelled through poetry workshops with me; Michael Johnson, whose intuition, incisive questions, calm pragmatism, and focus were exactly what I needed as I worked through the MFA program; and Denise Low, for giving me the push to interview Kim Stafford when the opportunity arose and without whose urging this book would not have been written. I thank all the poets interviewed here for making time to talk with me about their lives, their process, and their poetry. vi Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………..1 Denise Low: The Midwestern Voice………………………………………………9 B.H. Fairchild: The Braid of Memory and Experience Steven Hind: Alone, the Mind Makes Medicine …………………………………33 Nedra Rogers: Writing the World Within…………………………………………68 Amy Fleury: The Landscape of Possibility………………………………………..81 Donald Levering: The Thread of the Past, the Life of the Present………………..103 Kathleen Johnson: Searching for a Spark…………………………………………126 Harley Elliott: Earth, Sky, and Stone……………………………………………..137 Kim Stafford: The Poet Father, the Poet Son……………………………………..162 Selected works by the poets interviewed…………………………………………..175 1 Introduction About a year ago, on a visit to my parent’s house in southern Johnson County, Kansas, my mother handed me a little black binder. I recognized it right away: my first book of poetry. Like all the poets interviewed for this collection, I fiddled around with writing as a kid. My mother had read to me from before the time I learned to speak. I heard music in language, I loved to play outdoors and watch plants and animals, and I wanted to bring my experience and words together. There are sixteen poems in that binder, each on its own page with a gold number stuck in the corner. Here’s one, “When the Ducks Sit With Us,” written when I was ten: When the ducks, sit with us, and we watch them, and they watch us, and we feed them bread crust, they want more. When the ducks, eat the crust, and we watch them, and they watch us, they still want more. They are not to adore. Deciding what to write about was a very conscious question for me as a child — typical, I think, for young people who aspire to be poets. In my interview with Harley Elliott, of Salina, he said of his first poems, written in junior high, “I had this conception that poetry had to do with large issues, like Armageddon … the crucifixion, unrequited love, the Bomb, you know! … I wrote my second unrequited love poem, and I had not been in love yet. … I was just thinking, well, it has to be a theme that’s ‘worth a poem.’ I would have never dreamt about putting a parking meter in a poem. So anyway, saddled 2 with these kinds of things, I bravely set out and did these little poems, and they were pretty bad, and I think they’ve all been destroyed now.” I admit I didn’t have Elliott’s early sense of responsibility to the content of poetry, and neither would I ever destroy my ditties. They were my starting point as much as the Robert Frost poems my mother read to me. What I can say for “When the Ducks … ” is that its content is just a little more original the others in the binder, which mostly were about violets or butterflies or “America,” and sound like a cross between the language of 1970s greeting cards and the twisted-corset sentence structure of nineteenth-century rhyming verse. (Steven Hind, ever the teacher of poetry, whose interview is part of this collection, graciously pointed out in an email that the duck poem “rejects the Disneyesque insinuation that animals are cute and anthromorphic, not ‘to adore,’ just to feed and for the exchange of mutual observation, other to other.”) What Harley Elliott says — because it has to do with the early urge to create with words — gets at the burning question that led to these interviews: How does a person, particularly a person who grew up in rural Kansas, become a poet? What drives the poet? That is the question I kept before me throughout the process of asking questions and editing the words of these conversations with nine poets whose writing I love. And so the interviews are not about poetic technique or theory or form, or schools of poetry. They are about the experience of the poet across time and in the act of writing a poem. These interviews are many things, first of all the result of my exploration of, or nosiness about, the lives of poets from this place, Kansas. I was curious about their daily activities, how they support themselves financially, when the writing takes place, how the 3 poems come, how place finds its way into their work. I wanted to know how their experience becomes poetry. I wanted to know about the type of bread labor the different poets do. If they don’t work in academia, are they outside of a network that could give them so-called advantages? How do those working at colleges or universities, whose time is necessarily fragmented, ever find the quiet blocks of time they need to make poetry? What is the connection between writing at a regular time of day and the content and quantity of poetry produced? Talking with these poets not only helped me begin to form answers to those kinds of questions, it also helped me get away from writing alone in my study. Writing can be meditative, cathartic, an altered state. It also can be isolating. These conversations allowed me to make visiting part of my work. As I’ve already suggested, this collection is, to some degree, a study of the connection between poetry and place. These poets all spent at least part of their growing- up years in Kansas. Most of them speak of how the openness of the land itself, the expanse of sky, and the time available to them in rural places or small towns contributed to their sense of the free and open space of the imagination. In several conversations, the subject of the regional voice also comes up. Some interviewed here seemed to suggest that every writer is somewhere on a continuum of being a regional writer. Some spoke of how the experience of open space, literal and figurative, not only creates space for the imagination but also influences the very subject matter, language, and style of their poetry. The interview with Denise Low, a fifth-generation Kansan and poet laureate of Kansas from 2007 to 2009, addresses idea of the regional voice most directly. 4 In bringing up the connection between poetry and place, as well as the regional voice, I do not mean to promote the idea that these poets are representative of Kansas poets, whether in style or subject matter or personal background.