Steven Hind
Kansas "Shoptalk" Poetry Series

Featuring Kansas’ First Poet Laureate
-- Jonathan Holden -- Distinguished Professor of English, 
Kansas State University

Steven Hind is a native Kansan who grew up at the headwaters of the Verdigris River near Madison.  He was educated at Emporia State University and the University of Kansas.  He taught English in Kansas for 36 years.  Three collections of his poetry have been published:  Familiar Ground (1980), That Trick of Silence (1990), In a Place With No Map (1997) and The Loose Change of Wonder (2006).

Hind’s poetry has been published in periodicals, including Cottonwood, Farmer’s Market, Midwest Quarterly, Inscape, Ellipsis, Kansas Quarterly, American Land Forum, and Kansas English.  His poems have been printed in various anthologies, including 30 Kansas Poets, Kansas Voices, The Book of Contemporary Myth, and As Far As I Can See.  He served as editor of Young Kansas Writers for five years and has been a book talk presenter for the Kansas Humanities Council since 1986.

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L-R ... moderator Jerry Reeck, Steven Hind, Jonathan Holden

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Kansas Poet Laureate Jonathan Holden on Steven Hind

Often, when I think of the Poet Laureateship of Kansas, I think the true Poet Laureate of Kansas will always be the late William Stafford (1914-1993), signaled by such poems as The Farm on the Great Plains with its ending "My self will be the plain . . . "  ...but Stafford left Kansas for Oregon years ago.  He was always playing on an international stage, and, at one point, Stafford chortled over this ("They call it regional, this relevance.")   Who are the poets who stayed in Kansas?
 
One of the best of them is Steven Hind, and his latest poetry collection, The Loose Change of Wonder (Woodley Press, 2006) mentions Stafford several times. Let's take as a paradigm of Hinds' best poetry the poem below,

Fall Morning at the Santa Fe Tracks, west of Dodge City, Kansas
 
The first north wind of fall ruffles
clumps of little bluestem, the seed
flags of buffalo grass, and ragged
plumes of gayfeather. Snake cotton
edges the sidewalk above U.S. 50.
 
On the covered sign, Little Raven
laments Arapahoe losses, a silence
carried on the wind.  A stranger
with a camera asks me how I'm doing.
"Fine." I say, holding to my hat as
we pass in the wind.  For a moment by
my car I stare at a sunflower's struggle.
 
A driven mist clouds the river valley
where a John Deere u-turns at the end
of the brown expanse, dragging a wheat
drill.  A plastic cup top at my feet
points a red and white drinking straw
at the sky.  Cars rush past, a few
with their fog lights still gleaming.
 
Immediately, I think of Ezra Pound's famous dictum, "The natural fact is always the adequate symbol."  The Pound dictum was, of course, a reaction against the poetry of his moment, in particular a brief fashion called Georgian poetry.  But it's good advice for all poets, at any historical moment.  Don't be artificial.  Be authentic, difficult advice, recalling Lionel Trilling's famous essay Sincerity and Authenticity in which the last chapter was The Authentic Unconscious.
 
 A second poem which touches me in this rigorous book is,

Waking in the Flint Hills
 
Piercing the peace of a morning moon,
an oil well bows its head and squeaks
up a dipper of crude.  In the far darkness
a diesel fumbles gears to make the grade
as two crows by the roadway caw about
breakfast on the asphalt, and the native
grasses whisper under another assault
by the grazers.  A Brangus ruminates
behind a scrim of sumac.  A quavering
column of coyote song rises to the sky:
"This is a good day to cry" they might
be singing. A poet in his tent joins in,
reciting his sword words over the world.
 
 In all the best poetry we find duality:  Is the oil well crying or laughing?  Or both?  This question, this paradox underlies all of the best modern writing that I know.
       
   -- Jonathan Holden