Description
Book SynopsisThis volume, the first to span the forty-year career of poet William Kloefkorn, brings together the best-known and most beloved poems by one of the most important Midwestern poets of the last half century. Collecting work from limited editions and hard-to-find books, along with Kloefkorn's most anthologized poems, this is an indispensable one-volume compendium of the work of a major American poet.
Trade Review"There is always the rock; there is always Kloefkorn: generous, honest, ornery, clear-eyed. I invite you to read this very significant book, No. 2 pencil in hand, and mark your favorites."—Marge Saiser,
Lincoln Journal Star"Kloefkorn's ear for the midwestern rural vernacular is pitch-perfect, and his lines of dialogue and bits of country speech are alternately hilarious and deeply poignant."—Michael Sowder,
Western American LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: A Life Like Yours by Ted Genoways
New Poems
Eating Mulberries for Breakfast
World War Two
Waiting for the End
Living Without It
Rainbow
Fairbanks, Late July
What He Said
Babble
Confrontation
Surgery
October
Dread
Haywire
Horseshoes and Hand Grenades
Let There Be Music
Driving through the Winnebago Reservation on My Way to Sioux Falls
Schooling
South Padre Island, Early Evening
At the Pantry
Memory
Moving
Over the Years
Along Highway 14 in Southern Washington
What the Churchbells Say
An Old Story
Learning to Soar
Low Tide at Oregon’s Waikki Beach
Late Morning, Almost Noon
Weeding
Upon Planning to Break My Fast a Day Early
Now the Juniper
Arrival
Tea
Birdsong
Newborn
Silence
Red Cedar
Writer in Residence at Sheridan Elementary
With My Wife at the Super Saver
Ponderosa
Singing Just for the Music of It
Accessories
Name
Purple Iris
Dying to Get by with Everything
Bringing Up the Rear
Selected Poems from Alvin Turner as Farmer
From Uncertain the Final Run to Winter
Uncertain the Final Run to Winter
Country Boy
Cleaning Out My Dead Grandfather’s Barn
Dec. 8, 1941
Prime Moving
LTL
Town Team
The Spring House
Unloneliness Poem
Selected Poems from Loony
Selected Poems from ludi jr
From Stocker
Fairport
Elsie Martin
Mrs. Wilma Hunt
Sonny
Urie
The Rearranging
Stocker
From Cottonwood County
Beginnings
New Year’s Eve
Jubilation
Out-and-Down Pattern
My Love for All Things Warm and Breathing
If Only I Can Shake Off This Dream All the Others Should Follow
I Don’t Like Having a Grasshopper in My Hair
Daddy (Drunk) Mows the Lawn at Midnight
Benediction
Selected Poems from Leaving Town
From Not Such a Bad Place to Be
Not Such a Bad Place to Be
Teenage Halloween
For My Wife’s Father
Braces
Returning to Caves
Thanksgiving
Final Scenario #6
Epitaph for a Grandfather
From Let the Dance Begin
Benediction
My Granddaughter, Age 3, Tells Me the Story of the Wizard of Oz
For My Brother, Who Has New False Teeth
Selected Poems from Honeymoon
Selected Poems from Platte Valley Homestead
Selected Poems from Houses and Beyond
From within the First House
Each Board that Formed the Next House
I Had Been Chained and Padlocked
Franklin Walked Off the Deep End
On a Hot Day after Rain
Janet Moved Away
Standing on the Back Porch
Mother Said She Was Glad Now
Taking the Milk to Grandmother
Killing the Swallows
Rushing the Season
In the Treehouse with Franklin
Whatever Is Elevated and Pure, Precisely on Key
On the Road: Sunday, March 6, 1977
From Collecting for the Wichita Beacon
Collecting for the Wichita Beacon
Sowing the Whirlwind
Waiting to Jell
One of Those
Cornsilk
Solitude
From A Life Like Mine
Onion Syrup
The Great Depression
Christmas 1939
Sunday Morning
Prove It
Black Cat
Walking the Tracks
Kicking Leaves
My Daughter Pregnant
From Where the Visible Sun Is
Creation
Fixing Flats
Christmas 1940
The Louvre
For Proof
An Interlude for Morning
The Day I Pedaled My Girlfriend Betty Lou All the Way Around the Paper Route
You Have Lived Long Enough
Undressing by Lamplight
Easter Sunday
From Drinking the Tin Cup Dry
Last Summer and the One Before
A Red Ryder BB-Gun for Christmas
George Eat Old Gray Rat at Pappy’s House Yesterday
At Shannon’s Creek, Early August
Drinking with My Father
Firstborn
Walking to the Hinky Dinky with My Grandson, Almost 4
Looking for Halley’s Comet
Taking the Test
Watercolor: The Door
Driving Back to Kansas to Watch a Wedding
Independent
Cave
Drinking the Tin Cup Dry
From Dragging Sand Creek for Minnows
Last of the Mohicans
Running Home
Jumping Rope
Driving Back Home in My Wife’s Father’s Old Chevrolet
Wildwood, Early Autumn
Write a Blank-Verse Poem Using Someone Else’s Voice, Someone Dead, Someone Who You Believe Was Not Treated Fairly While Alive
Achilles’ Heel
At Maggie’s Pond
Burning the House Down
From Going Out, Coming Back
Dress
Swallowing the Soap
Dancing in the Cornfield
Epiphany
Odyssey
Last Day of School
Jacks
Fishing with My Two Boys at a Spring-Fed Pond in Kansas
Outage
From Burning the Hymnal
The Color of Dusk
Threnody
This is the Photograph Not Taken
Back to Kansas
Going There Sometime
Legend
Odyssey
From Treehouse: New and Selected Poems
Not Dreaming
Separations
The Day the Earthquake Was Scheduled to Happen But Didn’t
Non-Stop Begonias
On a Porch Swing Swinging
After the Drunk Crushed My Father
Treehouse
Singing Hymns with Unitarians
A City Waking Up
From Covenants
Covenant
Learning the Drum
Rainfall
KTSW, Sunday Morning
Saturday Night
Last Visit
Geese
Afternoon in October
Counting the Cows
Church
Sustaining the Curse
From Welcome to Carlos
Welcome to Carlos
Stuka
Home
Gypsy Rose
Back Roads
Balls
The Great Depression
Revival
Reap the Wild Wind
Quixotic
Circus
Limits
Giddy
Sand Creek
Dirt
Departures
Pennies
From Loup River Psalter
Song
Flannel
Bushmill
Song
Instrumental
Requiem
Catfishing
Woodshed
Connections
Blues
Selected Poems from Sergeant Patrick Gass, Chief Carpenter: On the Trail with Lewis & Clark
From Fielding Imaginary Grounders
Learning Chautauqua
Countries
Bushes Burning
For Some Strange Reason
Covenants
Walking the Grounds at St. Elizabeth Hospital, DC
Somewhere in the Vicinity of Ecclesiastes
The Almost Dead
Soul
Remembering Religion
Brothers
Desiring Desire
From Sunrise, Dayglow, Sunset, Moon
Balsa
Star of the East
In a Church Basement Damp from Last Night’s Rain
Sawdust
Javelin
Moving
Living with Others
Library of No Return
In the Black Hills Whistling Dixie
At Hemlock Hollow Near Logan, Ohio
Funeral for an Old Woman
For My Wife’s Mother
Watching My Granddaughter, 7, Test for Her Purple Belt
Not Dreaming
Discoveries
Shooting the Rabbit
From Walking the Campus
Nouns
November 22, 1963
Assignment
Theater
Moving On
August 12, 1992
After the Ice Storm
Connections: A Toast
From Still Life Moving
Braids
Proud
Flight
Quest
Spheres
Water
Sleep
Grass Woman
Still Life Moving
From Out of Attica
Early July
After the First Good Early-Spring Shower
Avon Calling
Titles
Looking for Scrap Iron at the Village Dump
Digging
Distances
August
Darkroom
Saved
Bits & Pieces
We Take My Wife’s Father Fishing One More Time
Flying over Chicago
At the Mayo Clinic
Daughters
From In a House Made of Time
Walking and Looking Down
Crossing Heaven
