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C.W. Post English Professor Celebrates
Long Island in Poems
When Norbert Krapf came to Long Island from Indiana in 1970
to teach English at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University
in Brookville, N.Y., he was struck by the history and natural
beauty of the region. Thirty years later, Waterline Books has
published Krapf's Bittersweet Along the Expressway: Poems of
Long Island.
Bittersweet completes a trilogy of poems about Krapf's three
'spiritual centers,' his native southern Indiana, his ancestral
Germany and his adopted Long Island. He published Somewhere in
Southern Indiana: Poems of Midwestern Origins in 1993 and Blue-Eyed
Grass: Poems of Germany in 1997. "Place" has long been
an inspiration for Krapf.
"I have always felt a strong sense of place," says
Krapf, who teaches English at C.W. Post and serves as Director
of the C.W. Post Poetry Center. "My three homes have given
me my most profound sources of inspiration. When I moved to Long
Island, I became aware of how rich in history and culture a place
can be. Now I often write about a specific scene, experience
or memory. You could say that place is my best muse."
"Arriving on Paumanok," a poem about the Indian
places of Long Island, began Krapf's celebration of the region.
It leads off Bittersweet with such musical names as Quogue, Nissequogue,
Wantagh and Wickapogue. The 81 poems featured in the collection
include Gatsby Country, Old House Near Orient Point and Walking
with Walt Whitman and William Cullen Bryant in Roslyn. The cover
features a woodcut of downtown Roslyn by artist Henry R. Diamond,
whose work was popular in the 1930s and 1940s.
Krapf took his inspiration for "The Roslyn Forge"
from his adopted hometown of Roslyn, where he and his wife, a
Louisiana Cajun, lived for 13 years in a historic house on Main
Street that was once a blacksmith shop. In 1990, they moved with
their son and daughter to a 1925 Dutch Colonial in Roslyn Heights.
Krapf earned his B.A. in English from St. Joseph's College
in Rensselaer, Ind., in 1965, and a M.A. in English in 1966 and
Ph.D. in English and American Literature from the University
of Notre Dame in 1971. He spent the 1973-74 school year as a
U.S. exchange teacher in England, and twice served as a Senior
Fulbright Professor of American Poetry in Germany. Krapf won
the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of
America in 1999.
Krapf will read from Bittersweet and sign copies at the Bryant
Library in Roslyn on October 22 at 2:30 p.m. Diamond's woodcuts
will be exhibited at that time. For a complete list of Long Island
readings, contact Norbert Krapf at (516) 299-2391, nkrapf@liu.edu,
or visit www.krapfpoetry.com
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