Research Catalog

Title

Swallowing the soap : new and selected poems / William Kloefkorn ; edited and with an introduction by Ted Genoways.

Author

Kloefkorn, William.

Publication

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, c2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Genoways, Ted.

Description

xxi, 439 p.; 23 cm.

Summary

• "Kloefkorn is a perfect blend of poet, raconteur, and scholar ... Kloefkorn's poetry--perhaps like all poetry--is about the price of wonder. Wonder at nature, wonder at fate, and wonder--finally, luminously--at the miraculous depths and tributaries of the human soul."--Brent Spencer, Nebraska Life.
• "Kloefkorn's style comes not only from long attention to the world, but from sustained immersion in the art and craft of language, and from granting himself the freedom to write at length and in depth about the people and places he cares about most. Such work can rise toward sublime visions of the interconnections of people and place."--Jeff Gundy, Georgia Review.
• This volume, the first to span the forty-year career of Nebraska state 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, Swallowing the Soap is an indispensable one-volume compendium of the work of a major American poet.
• "These poems aim for nothing less than the impossible: to understand what it means to be alive and human on this moveable earth," writes the editor, Ted Genoways. Swallowing the Soap is filled with the panoramic landscapes of Kansas and Nebraska, the stories of the rough and tender people who live there, and the moments of heartache, brutality, loss, and redeeming joy that shape their lives. It offers a vision, at once intimate and expansive, of the world of the Great Plains as seen by one of its most eloquent poets. --Book Jacket.

Subject

• Poetry

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

• Machine generated contents note: 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 ludijr -- 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 of 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 -- 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.

ISBN

• 9780803234055 (pbk. : alk. paper)
• 0803234058 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^2010003405

OCLC

503595894

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library