Born and raised near Madison, Kansas, on the eastern edge of the Flint Hills, Steven Hind is thoroughly Kansan. He attended Emporia State University as an undergraduate, and received his Master of Arts from the University of Kansas in 1970. He began teaching literature at Topeka High School in 1965, and retired 36 years later from teaching English at Hutchinson Community College. He has been referred to as "the most Kansas Kansas poet I've ever heard." (Robert Stein, English Dept. Chair, Washburn, University.)

First published in the Kansas Quarterly magazine, Steven Hind is the author of four published books of poetry.

• The Loose Change of Wonder (CKS/Woodley Press, 2006)
• Just Folks: Memories of a Country Life (Woodley Press, 2005)
• Waking in the Flint Hills: Poems of the People and the Land (Greenjeans Studios, 2004, CD)
• In A Place With No Map (CKS/Woodley Press, 1997
• That Trick of Silence, Washburn University Center for Kansas Studies, 1990  (Out of print)
• familiar ground ( Cottonwood Review Press, 1980 (Out of Print))
  

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for Jim

If you are from Kansas
you can imagine the cooling sky
and the dew-softened rattle
of an old truck rolling
to a stop on the dam--
The deliberate movements of fishermen
lifting out poles and beer
and walking to thepond,
the baiting up and cool beer
in the dark. There, waiting
is a life of its own.

Later in the silence
a tug at the chicken liver,
the dark feelers
in touch with fingers on the line,
The tail feathering a hold
on a deep place.
You imagine the shock of the hook
and the last thud
of the hatcher and the strung-up
agony of the long fish.
the smooth skin
stripped and hanging in blue fingers
from the pliers.
Butchered flesh quivers
a little in the ice chest
and the cleaving gills
give up. At last.

the heads hang staring
at the stars until morning
on the barbed wire.

At the end of summer you count
52 catfish heads hanging
on a north/south fence
deep in the prairie swinging
like thieves in the wind.

---familiar ground

Kansas: Boring!

I had driven that road
In dust and in mud a hundred
Times in a thousand days, I
Suppose, hauling chores
On the stretched gravel
Between bluestem pastures.
Nothing much to see, right?
Only the usual meadowlarks
Flirting with the windshield,
Except on that hundred and
First trip on a steamy
Morning in May after a night's
Rain running in the gulley past
The old Hunt Place where I came
Upon the craggy hulk clanking
Across the road, snapper as big
As a scoop shovel, his beak
A machine for cutting off fingers,
His yellow eye so old it said
Nothing, a carapace of mossy
Sawbone, leather legs wearing
Bearclaws, making tracks for
Breeding grounds, I guessed,
Restless with the new beginning
Of grass from pond to pond.
I thought of Granddad's saying,

"Eighty percent of this prairie
is below the surface." In spades
I thought: anything can take its
Time and crawl up out of this old
Place. So now, when I've had too
Much of t.v. and taxes, I go out
Over this land I live with, on some
Pretense of erranc. I pray for rain.

---That Trick of Silence

Finding the Calf

Wind breathes in the new
leaves along the creek.
Mockingbird solos,
every note improvised
and right. The mare prances
when the cow shows herself,
swings round, broken rope
of afterbirth swinging
beneath her tail. She noses
her black calf, wet and still
in the grass, new grass
fat with spring. Welcome,
welcome. Even with no name
you will always be the calf
born on the finest day of April.
To see you will make me glad.

---In A Place With No Map

Her Coyote Dream

I wanted to crawl into her den
and become a part of that
place, she said.

I resented my car back there
on the road, giving me away.
I lay in the sweet grass watching
that hole where the big female

disappeared into the earth,
and the wind assembled a chorus
of grasses to make me believe
I was at one with the land.

I wanted more than anything
ever in my life
to enter and belong.

---In a Place With No Map

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 natie
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.

---The Loose Change of Wonder

White Sign

Where the boys had been farmed out
to the twin cabins a shouting distance
from the house, I found the white hat
boxed on the plank above the bunks.
Which boys had lived there I imagined:
Fred and Sam, taking the whole place
after old Fred died, their mother leaving
no doubt about her weird helplessness.

That hat, as clean as new, nestled in
its womb of tissue paper, the sun-
splintered silence of the empty cabin-
some days I think of that dress Stetson,
its perfect uselessness sequestered
in a fancy box, its crown unturned, as if
awaiting a handout, say the loose change
of wonder in that house of the long-lost.

---The Loose Change of Wonder

Summer Night
        (for William Stafford)

On the road tonight with that
shovel of stars overhead, Milky
Blur I christen it, Bill, I
thought of you, traveling
the dark with the trucks and
the skunks. Near Abilene
a pale stain passed under my
lights, apostrophe from some
deer meeting fate in a confusion
of headlights, and your poem
whispered its steady purr
over another recent killing.
At two,
past all disasters that did
not happen tonight, I squat
in a bath of breezes under
my cottonwood. This to say:
Thousands of leaves believe
in summer tonight, saying,
Be true. You are. Adios.

---The Loose Change of Wonder

Steven Hind has recorded a CD of 43 of his poems, recorded in his voice. The CD, Waking in the Flint Hills, is available by contacting him at:

503 Monterey Place
Hutchinson, Kansas 67502-2229

Hind audio track 3, Abstract Landscape: http://av.washburn.edu/ramgen/averillto/2007012503056.rm
Hind audio track 23, Song for the Dancing Dog: http://av.washburn.edu/ramgen/averillto/2007012523056.rm
Hind audio track 43, Summer Night: http://av.washburn.edu/ramgen/averillto/2007012543056.rm
Hind audio track 45, O'Keefe: http://av.washburn.edu/ramgen/averillto/2007012545056.rm

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The answers to these questions are excerpts.

Q: When did you first begin writing poetry?
A: Steven replied that he had recently found, in a box of his mother's things, a poem about geese flying over the farm in fall. "So I guess I would have to say that occasionally I was trying to write poetry from an early age. ...I wrote a few poems during my college days,... but I didn't sustain the attempt to write poetry until I began teaching ...(American literature, my great love) at Topeka High School in 1965. I suspect that teaching poetry caused me to begin to understand the form of great poems more richly than I had previously, thus I began to 'get it'."

Q: When did poetry become your avocation as well as your vocation?
A: In response, Steven Hind reported that it was 1970 when he first began writing poetry that felt right, and began sending things out to magazines. "By the mid-seventies I was committed to the craft with a sense of confidence: I was a poet. I have never pursued poetry as a vocation. Teaching has been my vocation, but the dividend is that, as a teacher, you are usually teaching yourself more than anyone else in the room."

Q: You taught at Hutchinson Community College for some time. What aspect of teaching did you find the most frustrating?
A: Hind notes that teaching English at a community college is essentially a service. He was told by students, "more times than I like to remember," that they just wanted to get their English out of the way. "Often my best students were not in the least interested in writing for its own sake... But I caused a good many students to re-evaluate reading and writing, a most satisfying conversion when it happened...I should confess that I found teaching immensely satisfying when it succeeded."

Q: Is the home in which you grew up still in your family?
A: "...yes, the land where I roamed as a kid is still in the family...but when my parents had to leave the farm, something irrevocably changed in my relationship to the place...things change and you change with them, like it or not. I feel closest to a small pasture on the hill across the river and above the farm where I roamed with my dog as a kid. I still camp there in good weather...it's forever vivid in my head, or my heart."

Q: Your poetry reads like personal experience. How much of what you write is based on your experiences, and how much is based on dreams or imagination?
A: "I would say that my poetry usually springs from personal experience, treated by imagination, or laundered through imagination by the catalyst of emotion. Camping under a night sky, rambling in windy grassland in glorious privacy, and so on - the experiences generate a kind of ecstasy that I spin out into words as a matter of habit."

Q: It seems apparent to me that William Stafford was a major influence in your life, as he was in the lives of so many Kansas writers. Is there another person you consider to be a major influence in your writing?
A: "I think Stafford has influenced me in ways I can't even explain. I know that I can be reading his poetry and suddenly have a flash of possibility in my own mind that has no discernible relationship to what I'm reading in his work. It's strange...No one I can think of offered such a generous invitation to participate in the art as he did...as for others who influenced me? Well, my mother, first of all. She read to us every night when I was a child...I suppose we were all seduced by modern criticism and T.S. Eliot in college. It was not until I began teaching that I realized how far my sense of life was from his (and lucky for me). I remember William Carlos Williams..." Hind stated that when he realizes something he is writing is perceptibly influenced by another poet he stops writing it. He listed Elizabeth Bishop, Alan Dugan, and Robert Lowell as other poets who provoked deep admiration, if not directly influencing him. "Harley Elliott of Salina has been a long-time friend, and we exchange poems in letters, have for years. I often take his suggestions for changes that a poem needs, much more than he benefits from mine, I suspect. I've just been reading a good bit of Jonathan Holden's work, and his intelligence is refreshing, invigorating..."

Q: What is your favorite recently-read book?
A: The last book of poems I read that really set me back on my heels, and it's been a while I confess, was Linda Gregg's Too Bright To See. She went to Greece and took a little stone house and stuck to her business. What she did for that place is what I want to do for mine, would like to do for mine: create that charged sense of being alive in a particular locale...I value books that take up the real issues that face us, rather than the issues politicians use as distractions. Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver; At Home on This Moveable Earth, by William Kloefkorn; Flint Hills Cowboys, by Jim Hoy...many of Tom Averill's short stories stick with me, rich in authentic detail and wisely humorous...The New Yorker when it's good...my favorite plays are Hamlet and The Glass Menagerie...as you can see, I read as if at a Smorgasbord.

Q: What is your favorite movie?
A: I don't know that I have a favorite movie. It's easier with books. The Great Gatsby is an American masterpiece that I cherish. It's so good that it can't be made into a successful movie..Hud...Apocalypse Now! is abrilliant failure about the horrors of war...The Treasure of the Sierra Madre...The Hours just knocked me back on my heels, to name a recent movie that's fine.

Q: What is your favorite style of music?
A: "...folk music still appeals to me most of all...I like music that employs American elements--much of Copeland's work, and 'The Grand Canyon Suite'. I reveal myself as narrow and unsophisticated."

Q: Have you written short stories?
A: "I wrote a couple of novels, neither of which ever quite worked... I wrote a number of short stories, but only two of those have been published." Hind stated that, in a fiction writing course during his junior year in college he wrote a story about finding a dead body called Sing, Damn It, He's Dead. "It attempted to deal with the same experience of The Third of September in Sixty-Three (Loose Change of Wonder). So it's only taken my forty years to find the form for that subject."

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Three Poems by Steven Hind, 1984

Poem by Steven Hind - "Coming Home on Memorial Day, 1987" - May, 1987

Poem - "Valentine's Day" - by Steven Hind, February, 1992

Poem - "Shirttail Poet in His State" - by Steven Hind, November, 1992

Letter from Steven Hind, October, 1993

Poem by Steven Hind - "Zoo You Too"- July, 1993

Poem and Letter from Steven Hind, July 1993

Letter and Poem - "The Last King" - by Steven Hind, September, 1993

Poem - "Eyes Like a Lizard" - by Steven Hind, September, 1993

Letter from Steven Hind, January, 1994

Poem - "Badger" - and Letter from Steven Hind

"Tricks" by Steven Hind