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Norbert Krapf chooses to honor his long family heritage in this country by writing poems that deal with ordinary life. He is beginning a yearlong tenure as poet laureate of Indiana. (Danese Kenon / The Star)

Krapf just released a memoir about his childhood growing up in Southern Indiana. (Danese Kenon / The Star)

Norbert Krapf, Indiana's official poet laureate for 2008, is a romantic soul.

His Downtown Indy townhouse is decorated with the paintings and sculptures of friends, with framed silk-screen prints of his poems, and baskets filled with his mother's hand-stitched quilts. On both floors is furniture of blood cypress and walnut; antique family photographs hang on walls.

Outside, he has a garden blooming with German sage, Egyptian onion, irises, and lilies he brought with him from his home of three decades, Long Island. But Krapf, raised in Jasper, Indiana, is a Hoosier of the heart, at heart. Krapf, 64, was educated at Saint Joseph's College, and then Notre Dame. He served twice in Germany as a Senior Fulbright Professor of American Poetry, and his poetry collection, "The Country I Come From" was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

In December 2007, a Bloomington company released the CD "Imagine -- Indiana in Music and Words," featuring poems by Krapf set to music by composer Monika Herzig.

In April, The Indiana Historical Society Press released Krapf's memoir, "The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood." And in October, the Indiana University Press will release "Bloodroot: Indiana Poems."

As poet laureate, Krapf will represent the State of Indiana and the art of poetry through an ambassadorial role, which involves giving readings and talks in libraries and other public places, as well as visiting schools to promote poetry.

Do you remember the first poem you wrote?

I remember writing some unsuccessful poems in college. They were first efforts, and I was so self-conscious. I was an English major at the time, learning to read and analyze poems, and scanning them. I became so self-conscious that I would actually sort of scan the line before I would finish writing it, which means I was paralyzed.

But I remember the first really good poems were after we (Krapf and his wife, Katherine) got married and I finished my PhD and we moved to New York. I had given up on it happening. I had started to really love poetry about the time I was a senior in high school, and going into college especially. I just assumed, well, it's not going to happen, I'll be a teacher and I'll teach poetry. And so we got married and moved and I started to teach. I started to actually draft what I thought were an interrelated series of short stories, that was the first semester, fall semester of 1970. But in January of 1971, I began to write poems, and they came quickly and they got published pretty quickly, but I was 27 by that time. I remember a very romantic poem that had to do with Beethoven and the Ninth Symphony and stars. I think I may have showed it to one person. I think it wasn't all that good.

What about the first to get published?

I don't remember the title, but I remember what it was about. It was sort of addressed to a young woman I was engaged to -- not my wife. One of the earliest poems (written in 1971) that got published was a Bob Dylan poem, and that was a very good poem, and it didn't appear (in one of my collections) until 2002 (in "The Country I Come From"). I just couldn't find the right place for it, and somehow or other it just fit. That was very pleasing, because Dylan had been in Greenwich Village just 10 years before we got there and he came from the Midwest, and he was part of a folk revival scene. That's sort of related to that, coming from the Midwest, starting my life, and then I started to write, so there was sort of a parallel. But I've always loved his songs, he's a great songwriter. I think, maybe the best ever we've had. The first full-length biography had come out, and it showed this pattern of constant rebirth in his life and his art, and that's really what it's about. That really spoke to me, and it still does. He's still in his 60s, now doing great work, starting over, going in new directions. It's a great model, I think, for artists of all kinds and all people.

Has anything changed in your process since then?

I maybe write a little faster, because I've been at it longer. I also write more meditative poems, especially since we moved here -- short, haiku-type poems. But I still am by and large a narrative poet, and I love to tell a story. And that never dies I think. I myself don't perceive my style as changing, but one of my colleagues at Long Island University said, "There is a change, you're paring, you're paring more and more, making it leaner and leaner." Probably that's true, but I don't see that as a change in style, just as part of an ongoing process.

What about the way you work, your schedule? Do you sit down every day?

No, I don't work that way. I work that way in my journal. Regular days, when my children were taking violin lessons or German lessons, I would take my journal along, and I would write some poems, but more and more I'm writing early in the morning. It just seems kind of natural to me. When I was starting, I probably wrote more at night. Maybe that has something to do with getting older and sleeping less. But I've always been pretty much of a morning person. The problem is, often I'm a night and a morning person, so there isn't a lot of time in between for sleep.

What about your work station, your habits as you create?

We listen to a lot of music, especially when we have breakfast. I'll put something on. A new Dylan album or folk or Joshua Bell playing his beautiful classical violin, but I don't use it necessarily as a trigger. Except when I'm working with Monica Herzig, I've responded to some of her work directly. Or somebody like Hoagie Carmichael or Cole Porter, I've deliberately listened to a song that they've written to respond to it. I don't have to be in the same place all the time, but I do write up at my desk most of the time. There was a period of time when my son was taking an after-school German program in a different community, and there was a Taco Bell nearby. And I would sit in there and buy a Diet Coke, which you can refill, and just write poems for 90 minutes. That's not your stereotypical way for a poet to write, in an ivory tower or an attic or somewhere. But I've written a lot of poems in situations like that. I would say that that kind of changes with my life. When I had young children, my rhythms changed. It's harder to sleep. I did a lot of driving them around, and I would bring paper. I write in my journal over at the City Market a lot. I enjoy being a part of hearing people talking, women working and men working, I like being part of that.

In your poetry, and your recent memoir, the sense of place comes through -- your connection to southern Indiana.

I think I always had it but didn't know it. And when I moved away is when I started to write poetry, so I look at it from a different perspective, from the east coast. And we were going back and forth those 34 years. And when you go back and forth, you come from New York, and you could see and feel the contrasts. I think that being somewhere else helps you see where you were before. We've had three different years living in Europe, and each time it really helped me see what America is all about and what the American character is like, and how the people are with their openness and friendliness, and sometimes their naiveties and arrogance. But I think the going back and forth between southern Indiana and New York all those years was very stimulating and good for my writing. I wondered if I ever moved back to Indiana would I still be able to write about Indiana, or would that change? What's happened is, of course I've retired from teaching, but I'm probably writing two or three times as much as I did before. But that has to do with time and giving all my energy to it. But you know a lot of things started to happen to us right at the time we moved to New York. I started to study German, in an adult education program, I started to write poetry, and I started to trace family history. We knew we were German, but we didn't know where we were from in Germany. Eventually I connected with the places where both sides of my family lived in Germany, and ironically they were about 20 miles apart, and nobody knew that anymore -- that was lost. I say this often, I think when you are denied something, or when you can't have it, or when it's not there for you, you want it even more, and you work harder to get it, and that applies to my search for roots, probably. But you know it's a very rich kind of thing to do, and it can lead you to areas you didn't think you'd ever get to.

It seems like the appeal is much broader than anything specific about the place -- as if your connection to that land is no different than any person's connection to their own place?

I'm not a big theoretician. Academics are good at that. I was an academic, but I wasn't a typical academic. I got my PhD in American literature, and when I was hired I was expected to be a scholar of American literature, and in a way I was, but what I really did was become a poet. But I didn't teach creative writing, which is what poets usually do at universities. Yes, I think that when you go into a place and you go down deep into it, you reach the universal, because all places are alike. And I've always loved literature that has this sense of place. I mean, Faulkner, his style is difficult, but I love his story, "The Bear" -- which is a growing-up story, an initiation experience. I did a lot of hunting growing up in southern Indiana. I haven't hunted for decades, and I won't. But it was an important part of my growing up. Somehow or other I got way out into the countryside, and got to see all kinds of things about the place. Learned about trees and woods as part of going to the woods with my father and uncles. But yeah, I think I try to find the human constant and the universal.

Nature plays a strong role in your writing. You rattle off the names of flora and fauna, and have a knack for describing them in human terms. I understand you wanted to be a forest ranger as a child?

That's right. There was a time when I thought that was the coolest thing I could do. And a part of me still has a yearning to do that. But the great thing about being a poet is you can go anywhere with it -- you can write about whatever moves you. I learned a lot about trees, by growing up in the boy scouts, and hunting and fishing and having rabbit traps. A lot of the stuff that I now know, I picked up later. I remember buying a lot of guides to wildflowers and leaves and obsessing over it. That's a part of the would-be botanist biologist in me.

Do you get back to nature still?

We walk a lot. Actually, we like to walk over to Lockerbie Square where there are a lot of trees and people have beautiful gardens. We have this garden out here, the biggest one in this complex of 56 units. We bought bulbs from our lilies on Long Island, and they're coming up. All the irises you see, we went to Jasper not long after we moved here, and I went to all my relatives and said, "All right, let's have some irises." They gave me a lot. At the end, I was at a cousin's house, and the wife of my first cousin said, "Would you like some of this flower? That's from your mother's garden." She gave it to me. It's called widow's tears. So I have some things from my mother's garden that we didn't even know had been passed along.

Your work also makes a habit of investigating rituals, rites, the negotiations of everyday life -- are you always observing human transactions and interactions, like an amateur psychologist?

I've got an interest in writing what I call the portrait poems of people, and I feel a sense of mission about writing poems about people that aren't often written about. That's part of my principle, too, to write about daily life. One influence in that regard was a poet named William Stafford, who died in the early '90s. He was from Kansas, but taught for 30 some years near Portland, Oregon, and he was a sort of mentor to me. And I love Walt Whitman, who was probably the biggest influence. And that was his thing, writing about American people, the streets of New York City, and the beaches of Long Island. One of things I love about his work is that he wrote about the city and nature equally well. And that's a great model, I think. And the language that he wrote in was language that I could relate to. I could remember saying in college, "I don't think I can do this, write like T.S. Eliot." The Wasteland has four of five languages in it, references to maybe 30 works of literature and spirituality, and that didn't seem natural to me. I wrote my dissertation on Robert Lowell, a contemporary poet, and his use of the American past. He was from a well-to-do family in Boston, and he was quarreling over his family's treatment of Native Americans. And I remember saying, "Why can he do this, write about his family, but we who came from Europe and were peasants and aren't that learned, isn't that a valid subject?" And, yes, we can.

The daily and the mundane, then, are inspiration to you?

I believe that, I really do. In one poem, that is not in a book, I talk about the elegance of the ordinary. Most people wouldn't think that the ordinary can be elegant, but it depends on how you look at it and how you see it. For me, writing poems requires you to listen and look. Especially when we were caught up in teaching and that fast pace of the New York area. It's hard to see what's in front of your eyes, because there's so much pressure. The pace is so hectic and so maybe that's another reason why I'm writing more now that I'm back in Indiana. It's not just a question of time, but it's also a question of being able to be more open more often. So I feel very lucky. I took early retirement at age 60, and it's been four wonderful years so far.

Do you think your poetry is something that could fall on untrained ears more easily than other poets?

I'm conscious of trying to write a poem that is accessible, and I'm pleased that a lot of people who read my poetry do not have college degrees, and they come to hear me read. I think that it's obvious that a lot of people, a lot of Americans, don't like poetry, or think they don't like poetry, and don't want to get near it. And I understand why. It's partly because the poetry of the early 20th century and the modernist movement was very difficult and very challenging, and those poets, including Eliot and Ezra Pound, they felt that people were no longer interested in good poetry, they just wanted sentimental parlor game type poetry, and in fact what they said is, we'll write for one another. And I don't want to be a poet's poet. I think part of that has to do with the fact that my family came to this country in 1840, and I was the first one on either side to graduate from college. So if I'm going to be a poet, do I just start writing poems about the books I read in graduate school, so that only people who've read those books understand my work? It just didn't seem to make any sense. So I began to see what a rich mine of material was there from my background. But I think I could see it more easily because I moved away from it. I couldn't wait to get out of Jasper -- that's part of growing up and getting away from home, and going out on your own and making your own life. But when I got away, I began to see that there was something really unique about the culture there -- this German Catholic culture. It could be oppressive, and that's part of the reason I needed to get away, but then I saw a richness and depth to it. It's not a question of saying, "I've got to promote this place." It's more like, I've got to explore it, and see where it takes me. And I think that most places are like that if you could just see them in the right way.

Your family is from German stock, and you grew up hearing the language but not speaking it until you were almost 30, then moving to Germany.

My parents did speak a kind of German, at home, a dialect, when we were little. And it's a typical thing. They would talk to one another in German at the table, but then when we got to the point that we could understand them, they stopped, because they lost the secrecy. This was something very moving for me: when my maternal grandmother died in 1977, she was 94, and she had 90 grandchildren and great grandchildren, and I was talking to my mother, and she said, "You know, you were the only one who ever talked to her in German." It's kind of amazing.

Did picking up a new language change the cadence of your poems or your writing in any way?

There is a dear friend I have who was a poet, not very well published but a very good poet, and she was the first person I would always show my poems to in those early years, and she felt she heard a German cadence in my poetry, and I think that probably it does. It's got a heavy accent, my poetry, quite often. I love the Anglo-Saxon poetry, the earliest poetry in English, which sounds like German. It has three alliterating words per line, with a caesura (pause) in the middle ... and I think that's been an influence. And I wonder if that doesn't happen with other groups. One of my favorite poets, a contemporary poet, is Etheridge Knight, the great African-American poet from here. I've served on the board of Etheridge Knight Incorporated the last three years. His rhythms are different from my rhythms, partly because of his ancestral background I think. He's got a beautiful poem about African drumming, and he is a very oral poet, too, a street poet. We had a tribute to him at the Chatterbox in December of 2006, and I'm organizing another one at the American Cabaret Theater. I think that's one of the fascinating things about American poetry is that we have poets who come from these different traditions, and it has an impact on their American English. My poems are not written in the King's English -- not even the king of Bavaria.

You've been back in Indianapolis since 2004, after 34 years in Long Island. Do you feel like a stranger settling back in, or has it been the homecoming to the Midwest you might have hoped for?

I feel very much at home here, I always have. We have been coming to Indianapolis since the late '80s. We have friends at IUPUI in the German department and we stayed with one of those families often, so we saw the turnaround in Downtown Indianapolis from the '80s on. And then our daughter got a violin scholarship to Butler University, and that brought us back even more. But these people from IUPUI knew me as a poet who wrote about his Indiana German roots, from New York. I've made a lot of good friends through the writing of poetry. That's been one of the most gratifying developments -- you don't make much money, you know. Even people who are not in the poetry world are interested in what I do. We were looking for retirement houses on eastern Long Island, and Katherine said, "Are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you don't want to move back to Indiana?" And I did. A lot of my New York friends would not like to hear me say this, but I don't miss Long Island. I miss New York City, and I miss friends. I feel very much at home. I didn't grow up in Indianapolis, but I love the small town feel of the city. I think it's a very livable, comfortable, open place to be. It's not as dynamic as New York, but it shouldn't be. I've been to panel discussions here where people have said we need to change the city, but it's not New York or Washington or Seattle -- Indianapolis is Indianapolis. I'm a localist. That's the best way to live, because then you develop a sense of pride about where you're from, where you are, and where you're going

Poet Laureate Party

What: In honor of his status as the 2008 Indiana poet laureate, Norbert Krapf will perform an hourlong poetry and jazz set with Bloomington-based musician Monika Herzig.

When: 5:30 p.m. today.

Where: American Cabaret Theatre, 401 E. Michigan St.

Cost: Free.

Info: (317) 631-0334, www.krapfpoetry.com or www.actindy.org