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Alumni profile: William Kloefkorn
Nebraska state poet recalls time at ESU
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| A Kloefkorn poem |
William Kloefkorn (BSE 1954, MS 1958), the state poet of Nebraska since 1982, says he was ignorant of higher education when he was growing up in Attica, Kan., a small town southwest of Wichita. He didn’t know what it meant to be intellectually challenged, and he sure didn’t know anything about Emporia.
A high school classmate of Kloefkorn’s had an uncle who was attending ESU, and one thing led to another. “We were sitting in my folks’ café and he said, ‘Why don’t you go there?’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ The first day I came there was the day I enrolled,” Kloefkorn said. “I learned that freedom – to move about, to think for myself – was pretty much a revelation for me. That was a refreshing feeling. It was as if I was breathing new air. To be challenged there in the classes was so new to me. I was astonished. To be on a campus that has academic freedom, I can’t imagine a more healthy environment than that.”
Kloefkorn, who taught at Nebraska Wesleyan University from 1962 to 2002, was named the Nebraska state poet 25 years ago. It’s a lifetime appointment with no strings attached, financial or otherwise. “You’re expected to do what you did when you were named – write as well as you can and serve writing as well as you can,” he said.
Kloefkorn, a 1999 ESU Distinguished Alumnus, speaks in schools frequently, to students of all ages. “I tell them to appreciate language in general, in terms of clarity and precision, and poetry can help them pay attention to language,” he said. “It can help them stay away from fuzziness.” Kloefkorn also values the very act of writing, for the honesty it demands. “You’re squaring with yourself,” he said. “You’re trying to be honest with yourself, and you do that on the page [like] you don’t do any other way. That’s a healthy thing in terms of getting the mind out of whatever rut it might be in.” In a writer’s world, every blank page is a chance to escape that rut, Kloefkorn has learned. “I’ve learned that it never gets easier,” he said. “Every story or poem you attend is a brand new challenge. There’s no comfort zone.”
As a young man, the eventual state poet never intended to write poetry. He dabbled in fiction while earning his master’s degree at ESU and while teaching at Wichita State University; at WSU, he was encouraged to pursue a doctorate so he could direct a freshman writing program. “I didn’t want to do that,” said Kloefkorn. “Administration fits me like a sliver of bone up the nostril.”
It was the writing of poet Gary Gildner that inspired Kloefkorn to pursue poetry. Kloefkorn saw for the first time that poetry could tell stories quickly and succinctly, particularly in Gildner’s “First Practice,” a poem about a high school coach who tries to toughen up his athletes. “The coach is a genuine prick, but he’s genuine,” Kloefkorn said. “I thought, ‘I know that coach. I’ve had that coach.’ It was kind of an epiphany for me. I didn’t know that contemporaries were writing this kind of stuff. The material I’d felt free to use in fiction, I’d never felt free to use in poetry.”
And thus a career was launched. Kloefkorn has since published numerous books of poetry, along with fiction and personal memoirs, and he’s still at work, finding new ways to express humanity. “To hear something freshly said can be a good thing,” he said.
“My Love for All Things Warm and Breathing.”
I have seldom loved more than one thing at a time
yet this morning I feel myself expanding, each
part of me soft and glandular, and under my skin
is room enough now for the loving of many things,
and all of them at once, these students especially,
not only the girl in the yellow sweater, whose
name, Laura Buxton, is somehow the girl herself,
Laura for the coy green mellowing eyes, Buxton
for all the rest, but also the simple girl in blue
in the back row, her mouth sad beyond all reasonable
inducements, and the boy with the weight problem,
his teeth at work even now on his lower lip, and
the grand profusion of hair and nails and hands and
legs and tongues and thighs and fingertips and
wrists and throats, yes, of throats especially,
throats through which passes the breath that joins
the air that enters through these ancient windows,
that exits, that takes with it my own breath, inside
this room just now my live for all things warm and
breathing, that lifts it high to scatter it fine and
enormous into the trees and the grass, into the heat
beneath the earth beneath the stone, into the
boundless lust of all things bound but gathering.
- William Kloefkorn
Last Updated April 17, 2008