Butler University English professor Chris Forhan, 48, started his career in broadcast journalism, but found his passion in poetry. He joined the Butler faculty last fall. (Michelle Pemberton / The Indianapolis Star)

Walter Cronkite, or Walt Whitman?

That was the question facing young Chris Forhan in 1985. Three years out of journalism school at Washington State University, he was building a good career in broadcast journalism in Great Falls, Mont., where he served as a weekend anchor and news director for two TV channels.

After the lights went out in the studio each evening, however, he wouldn't join his pals at the local watering hole. He went home and wrote poetry.

"I was on track. I could have kept going, but I just didn't enjoy it," said Forhan, an assistant English professor at Butler University since last fall. "I didn't enjoy poking microphones in the grieving widow's face."

It was a proverbial long and winding road that took Forhan from Montana to Indiana.

Along the way, there was a marriage, a divorce and stops for two advanced degrees, at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Virginia, along with several years of teaching high-school English in Charleston, S.C., and teaching at Auburn University in Alabama.

Forhan's poem "Rock Polisher" will be included in the prestigious "Best American Poetry 2008" collection due out later this year.

A self-described "hermit" and a "discreet and private person," Forhan spoke about -- what else? -- life and poetry with The Star.

When did you start writing poetry?

That's always a tough question to answer because it depends on how you define poems. I always liked words. From when I was a little boy I liked reading and writing. But what I always remembered was that when I was a preteen and a teen I was writing songs. A lot of us do at that age. So I was writing songs. They were horrible, but they were heartfelt. Then, at a certain point, for whatever reason, I stopped using a guitar accompaniment to the songs, and then at a certain point I even stopped giving them the melodies and all I had were these words. I realized, 'Well, if these are anything, these are poems.'

What kind of statement were you making with your early poems?

I was trying to express myself. I felt the need to express myself, and I did. And, of course, I was in love at 13 and 14 and 15 and 16. I was obsessed with one or two girls, not at the same time, and this was a way to express that, what I now would call existential angst, a teenage variety of it.

Did your peers know you were 'writing poetry'?

My brother, who is 2 and a half years older than I, was writing poems before I was, that is, he was seriously trying to get published before I was, and I started to show him my poems when I was 18. ..... It was a magnificent experience. He was one of my early mentors. I don't know that either of us was looking at it that way. He was just my brother. But he was writing poems passionately, and he was really serious about it and ambitious, and so it's not that I would not have written poems without his example, but I automatically had someone around to show my work to, and he was very encouraging.

You left broadcasting in 1985. Why?

I decided I had enough of (television). I needed to go back to school. I didn't know what would become of it. I hope I'm not exaggerating, but to save my soul I needed to go back to school. I needed to do what I loved. And so I decided to go where my favorite poet was. And Charles Simic, who actually is now the U.S. poet laureate, was teaching at the University of New Hampshire, so that's where I went.

What did you learn in graduate school the first time?

I love the sound and the rhythm of language. I was interested in language as material. I also was under the impression that my poems made sense. I went to graduate school and found that they didn't. I showed them to other people, and they said these don't make sense. The main thing I had to learn, and this is very common in creative writing graduate programs, is how to communicate to a reader. I thought I was making perfect sense and it was completely hermetic.

You went back to graduate school a second time?

I ended up having to go back to get my MFA from the University of Virginia in 2001. I was 40 years old. The reason I did was that it was obvious I couldn't compete for a tenure-track job. I would need a terminal degree. Even then there were older poets I was talking to who were in their 60s at the time and they said, 'You don't need an MFA. All you need is the publication and someone will want you.' But they were speaking from their own experiences in the 1960s and '70s, but it's no longer that way.

You were the 40-year-old graduate student.

I felt a little awkward. Luckily, UVA made it easy for me. There were people there, especially Charles Wright, a poet whose work I really love, and he was the one who eased my way in. It was a little uncomfortable for me because the other students tended to be 15 years younger than I and not as far along in their writing life. That is not to say there wasn't something there I could learn, but I did sense that I was considered the old guy and a little outside the circle. But it worked. I got my degree and I immediately got a job. So it was clear I needed to do it.

Can someone be a poet and not an academic?

Oh, sure. Of course it's possible. I think of someone who is dead now, but Charles Bukowski, the very popular poet from Los Angeles who's vaguely associated with the Beats, not that I'm a big fan of his work, but certainly, yes, you can be a poet without being an academic. These days it just turns out that the academy is a comforting home for poets. The academy offers poets jobs.

Every now and then this debate erupts about whether the academy is killing poetry, or whether poets having these cushy jobs and talking to nobody else but professors and students makes them insulated and incapable of writing poetry that responds to reality, and I think that's hogwash.

Why is it hogwash?

To be an academic does not mean to be a robot. It doesn't mean you no longer have a heart. It doesn't mean you don't have a life in which you have relationships with other people, fall in love and out of love and experience death and have a history of whatever you've experienced growing up and otherwise. I suppose it could be useful if you find yourself cut off from certain aspects of reality by taking a year off to be a postman or go to war or something. But I think it's sort of a romantic illusion that you have to be a big-game hunter or something in order to know reality.

Are you suffering enough as a poet?

Why? Why do you have to suffer more than the standard person? We suffer enough just by being alive. And the proof is in the poetry. If you read the poems of people who are in the academy, people who teach, there are all sorts of poems and poets out there. We are not all alike. There is some very powerful, complex, emotionally and psychologically resonant poetry being written by people in the academy. And of course I'm speaking from within the academy.

Do you ever get tired of writing poetry?

I get tired of reading it, that's for sure. And I get tired of writing it in the sense that I realize I've used up all the gas in my tank and I'm starting to force it. You can't force poetry and there's no reason to. ..... More often, I get tired of reading it. I read a lot of literary magazines and a lot of books that come out and I think, "Not another of these kind of poems." It's so hard to find a poem that really shakes me to the core anymore.

-- Interview by Abe Aamidor