BIOGRAPHY
My parents and I (1949).
OVERVIEW
After studying with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-7) at the University of Michigan, KEN LAUTER has published poems in a number of journals and 14 books.
Ken's early work has been compared to Robert Lowell's, and distinguished poet William Meredith (US Poet Laureate 1978-80) has said that Ken's poetry displays "a splendid and various gift."
His awards include a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and he has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsaras, or Captain Willard's Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and worked as a mayor's aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist.
Ken and his wife Dr. Judith Lauter – a neuroscientist and poet, and author of How is Your Brain Like a Zebra? A new human neurotypology; Light from the Left – Poems on paintings by Rembrandt; and eight books of haiku (all from Xlibris) – currently live in Nacogdoches TX.
____________________________________
A Micro-Autobiography
ars longa, vita brevis - Horace
My only life raft on the torrents of time (genetics, sex, love, rock ‘n roll, cars, real estate, politics, capitalism, war, global warming, etc.) has been words. As a middle-class American, I don’t have a story as richly mysterious as the one Nabokov described in Speak, Memory; but as a child I received something I suspect he lacked— unconditional love— and I have taken as my mission, both as a poet and a man, to be worthy of that blessing.
Childhood
Born on a freezing night in 1943 in the middle of WW II, I grew up in a comfortable two-bedroom, one-bath house with a big front porch, a coal furnace, and a dank basement, in a suburb of Kansas City MO. Our back yard was studded with trees (apple, pear, peach, cherry, walnut, elm) and bordered a creek and woods that became my Arcadia. I roamed there with other boys and my fox terrier Sox, built campfires, played hide-and-seek, cowboys-and-Indians, and hunted for wasp nests to lob stones at— a KC Huck Finn.
The woods seemed immense and magical, forming a corridor between our house and the school on a hill half a mile away. Next to the school was a pasture spreading southward over rolling hills to meet a bend in the wide, brown Missouri River (from there, downtown KC was visible upstream as a low gray line of granite teeth). I walked to school through fragrant fall, snowy winter, and sweet spring. In the first grade, I fell madly in love with a girl named Ann; but to my everlasting shame, I dropped her in the third grade when I discovered she was dirt poor. I liked my teachers, got good grades, made friends, thought life good.
My parents had been over forty when they married in 1942 (a second try for both of them). My dad, Kenneth Arthur Lauter, the oldest of four brothers in a family of German immigrants, was a recent arrival in KC from St. Louis, his hometown. When they met, my mother Kathryn was living on an 80-acre farm she and her first husband had acquired not long before he had himself committed for schizophrenia and asked Mom to divorce him. She did— and two years later sold the farm and married my father. The middle-aged newlyweds then moved into the suburbs.
With The Feminine Mystique decades away, Mother was proud to be called “just a housewife” (or so she said). She cooked, cleaned, sewed, cut magazine coupons, went to a beauty parlor now and then, and shopped for a new hat for church (Baptist) at Helzbergs department store downtown twice a year (Easter and Christmas) occasionally with me in tow, fidgeting and intimidated by the ornate store décor and the perfumed salesladies who winked at me.
After a small-town Missouri childhood as one of eight kids, two of whom died in childhood, Mom had gone to secretarial school and then clerked in a Western Union Office, but my father insisted that no wife of his would have to work. So she cooked meat-and-potato suppers, shared highballs and cigarettes with him when he got home from “the salt mines” (his words), and loved us both. After dinner and homework— with Dad often helping me— we watched TV (Ozzie and Harriet, the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, Gunsmoke, Johnny Carson). Then Dad relaxed in his recliner, reading detective stories (Mickey Spillane, Shell Scott) and historical novels (Thomas B. Costain, A.B. Guthrie) while I assembled model warplanes.
By the time I was ten, an air of exhaustion and regret had crept into our house on 4321 North Spruce. (The street number seemed magical, though, a countdown to something— nuclear war maybe… or poetry?) My handsome, much older half-brother Clark had died in a car wreck in 1949, leaving Mother with an enduring sadness. Working for an insurance company, Dad rode up and down dark, dangerous elevator shafts on the roof of the elevator and pored over client books with green-eye-shade rigor. After two decades as an office manager, he made less than $10,000 a year— which didn’t bode well for my college fund— and he was deeply depressed when he lost a big promotion.
Youth
In high school, I gave up sports as a sophomore because I couldn’t practice two hours every day and still do my homework. Besides, I was a mediocre athlete and got no girls for that. I loved Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and the Kingston Trio (until Dave Guard left). I also loved geometry, algebra, physics, history, drafting, and English lit. And I really loved Janice, Catherine, Glenda, Linda, Marsha, Della, Judy and… Marilyn Monroe! I liked some teachers, made good grades but few friends, still thought life good, and won a prize for a poem beginning: “O mighty ball of sun on high/Riding through the clear blue sky.” (Not exactly Keats.)
With advice from our family doctor (a chiropractor and former Navy CPO) my father conspired to get me into the Naval Academy— no tuition, “great engineering school”— but once I got there it seemed childish after reading Robert Frost, For Whom the Bell Tolls, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Bridges of Toko Ri. In 1964, though near the top of my class at Annapolis, I resigned at the start of my third year, because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, not wanting to die young, and my realization that I liked Shakespeare better than ships.
Continuing with college back in KC, I had summer jobs driving a cab, unloading boxcars, and working the information desk at the public library. A year later in grad school in Ann Arbor, I studied poetry with Donald Hall, got a Masters degree, and won a Hopwood Prize in poetry. I stayed in Michigan the following summer, carrying plaster for a mason, doing union day labor, and falling in love with Judith Snider, a beautiful tan brunette whom I met in one of Hall’s classes. I noticed two things about her immediately: she wore wonderfully taut white blouses, and her poems were better than mine.
In 1966, we married in Tucson— a desert paradise to us mid-westerners. I taught at the University of Arizona by day and wrote poems by night. Judy got the first M.A. in creative writing awarded there, and then discovered her real love (the human brain) after reading Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. We left Sonora desert and Tucson in great sadness, vowing to return ASAP.
After a year at the University of Denver, where we spent as much time driving through the Rockies as we did in class, we moved to St. Louis in 1971. There, in grad school at Washington University, we both went vegetarian, Judy dove into neuroscience, and I swam among poets from Blake to Yeats and novelists from Austen to James. In 1979, after realizing how poor the market for PhDs in English was, I left academe to become a mayor’s aide, enjoying/enduring the circus of big-city politics. We lived in muggy St. Louis for 15 years, always desperate to return to sunny Tucson, which (a miracle!) we did, in 1985, only to become embroiled in a bitter, five-year environmental battle that got us excommunicated by the local power-brokers from Arizona in ‘91. We were both nearly 50. Our youth was over.
Middle Age & Beyond
Our next decade was spent in Oklahoma, where Judy taught at the OU Health Science Center and founded a neuroscience lab, while I wrote, wrote, wrote. We also traveled to Holland twice, loving it except for the incessant rain; and to England once, hating the combo of cold rain and boiling heat, not to mention the crappy hotels, crappy food, and crappy RSC— but loving Steven Berkoff this side of idolatry in Coriolanus at the Mermaid Theatre just off the Thames. We saw the play four times in a month. Unforgettable.
Since 2001 we’ve lived in Texas (Judy’s home state) beneath the towering pines of “Deep East.” Judy retired from university teaching and research in 2012 and has since devoted most of her energy to composing books of haiku based on her original photography. At 74, I’m still hungry to improve at what Chaucer calls the craft so longe to learne-- by which he meant both poetry and love. I’m no longer so sure whether life is good or not; but my primary life raft, though a bit battered after all these years at sea, still consists of those utterly ephemeral yet steel-strong things: words.
After studying with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-7) at the University of Michigan, KEN LAUTER has published poems in a number of journals and 14 books.
Ken's early work has been compared to Robert Lowell's, and distinguished poet William Meredith (US Poet Laureate 1978-80) has said that Ken's poetry displays "a splendid and various gift."
His awards include a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and he has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsaras, or Captain Willard's Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and worked as a mayor's aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist.
Ken and his wife Dr. Judith Lauter – a neuroscientist and poet, and author of How is Your Brain Like a Zebra? A new human neurotypology; Light from the Left – Poems on paintings by Rembrandt; and eight books of haiku (all from Xlibris) – currently live in Nacogdoches TX.
____________________________________
A Micro-Autobiography
ars longa, vita brevis - Horace
My only life raft on the torrents of time (genetics, sex, love, rock ‘n roll, cars, real estate, politics, capitalism, war, global warming, etc.) has been words. As a middle-class American, I don’t have a story as richly mysterious as the one Nabokov described in Speak, Memory; but as a child I received something I suspect he lacked— unconditional love— and I have taken as my mission, both as a poet and a man, to be worthy of that blessing.
Childhood
Born on a freezing night in 1943 in the middle of WW II, I grew up in a comfortable two-bedroom, one-bath house with a big front porch, a coal furnace, and a dank basement, in a suburb of Kansas City MO. Our back yard was studded with trees (apple, pear, peach, cherry, walnut, elm) and bordered a creek and woods that became my Arcadia. I roamed there with other boys and my fox terrier Sox, built campfires, played hide-and-seek, cowboys-and-Indians, and hunted for wasp nests to lob stones at— a KC Huck Finn.
The woods seemed immense and magical, forming a corridor between our house and the school on a hill half a mile away. Next to the school was a pasture spreading southward over rolling hills to meet a bend in the wide, brown Missouri River (from there, downtown KC was visible upstream as a low gray line of granite teeth). I walked to school through fragrant fall, snowy winter, and sweet spring. In the first grade, I fell madly in love with a girl named Ann; but to my everlasting shame, I dropped her in the third grade when I discovered she was dirt poor. I liked my teachers, got good grades, made friends, thought life good.
My parents had been over forty when they married in 1942 (a second try for both of them). My dad, Kenneth Arthur Lauter, the oldest of four brothers in a family of German immigrants, was a recent arrival in KC from St. Louis, his hometown. When they met, my mother Kathryn was living on an 80-acre farm she and her first husband had acquired not long before he had himself committed for schizophrenia and asked Mom to divorce him. She did— and two years later sold the farm and married my father. The middle-aged newlyweds then moved into the suburbs.
With The Feminine Mystique decades away, Mother was proud to be called “just a housewife” (or so she said). She cooked, cleaned, sewed, cut magazine coupons, went to a beauty parlor now and then, and shopped for a new hat for church (Baptist) at Helzbergs department store downtown twice a year (Easter and Christmas) occasionally with me in tow, fidgeting and intimidated by the ornate store décor and the perfumed salesladies who winked at me.
After a small-town Missouri childhood as one of eight kids, two of whom died in childhood, Mom had gone to secretarial school and then clerked in a Western Union Office, but my father insisted that no wife of his would have to work. So she cooked meat-and-potato suppers, shared highballs and cigarettes with him when he got home from “the salt mines” (his words), and loved us both. After dinner and homework— with Dad often helping me— we watched TV (Ozzie and Harriet, the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, Gunsmoke, Johnny Carson). Then Dad relaxed in his recliner, reading detective stories (Mickey Spillane, Shell Scott) and historical novels (Thomas B. Costain, A.B. Guthrie) while I assembled model warplanes.
By the time I was ten, an air of exhaustion and regret had crept into our house on 4321 North Spruce. (The street number seemed magical, though, a countdown to something— nuclear war maybe… or poetry?) My handsome, much older half-brother Clark had died in a car wreck in 1949, leaving Mother with an enduring sadness. Working for an insurance company, Dad rode up and down dark, dangerous elevator shafts on the roof of the elevator and pored over client books with green-eye-shade rigor. After two decades as an office manager, he made less than $10,000 a year— which didn’t bode well for my college fund— and he was deeply depressed when he lost a big promotion.
Youth
In high school, I gave up sports as a sophomore because I couldn’t practice two hours every day and still do my homework. Besides, I was a mediocre athlete and got no girls for that. I loved Elvis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and the Kingston Trio (until Dave Guard left). I also loved geometry, algebra, physics, history, drafting, and English lit. And I really loved Janice, Catherine, Glenda, Linda, Marsha, Della, Judy and… Marilyn Monroe! I liked some teachers, made good grades but few friends, still thought life good, and won a prize for a poem beginning: “O mighty ball of sun on high/Riding through the clear blue sky.” (Not exactly Keats.)
With advice from our family doctor (a chiropractor and former Navy CPO) my father conspired to get me into the Naval Academy— no tuition, “great engineering school”— but once I got there it seemed childish after reading Robert Frost, For Whom the Bell Tolls, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Bridges of Toko Ri. In 1964, though near the top of my class at Annapolis, I resigned at the start of my third year, because of my opposition to the Vietnam War, not wanting to die young, and my realization that I liked Shakespeare better than ships.
Continuing with college back in KC, I had summer jobs driving a cab, unloading boxcars, and working the information desk at the public library. A year later in grad school in Ann Arbor, I studied poetry with Donald Hall, got a Masters degree, and won a Hopwood Prize in poetry. I stayed in Michigan the following summer, carrying plaster for a mason, doing union day labor, and falling in love with Judith Snider, a beautiful tan brunette whom I met in one of Hall’s classes. I noticed two things about her immediately: she wore wonderfully taut white blouses, and her poems were better than mine.
In 1966, we married in Tucson— a desert paradise to us mid-westerners. I taught at the University of Arizona by day and wrote poems by night. Judy got the first M.A. in creative writing awarded there, and then discovered her real love (the human brain) after reading Arthur Koestler’s The Ghost in the Machine. We left Sonora desert and Tucson in great sadness, vowing to return ASAP.
After a year at the University of Denver, where we spent as much time driving through the Rockies as we did in class, we moved to St. Louis in 1971. There, in grad school at Washington University, we both went vegetarian, Judy dove into neuroscience, and I swam among poets from Blake to Yeats and novelists from Austen to James. In 1979, after realizing how poor the market for PhDs in English was, I left academe to become a mayor’s aide, enjoying/enduring the circus of big-city politics. We lived in muggy St. Louis for 15 years, always desperate to return to sunny Tucson, which (a miracle!) we did, in 1985, only to become embroiled in a bitter, five-year environmental battle that got us excommunicated by the local power-brokers from Arizona in ‘91. We were both nearly 50. Our youth was over.
Middle Age & Beyond
Our next decade was spent in Oklahoma, where Judy taught at the OU Health Science Center and founded a neuroscience lab, while I wrote, wrote, wrote. We also traveled to Holland twice, loving it except for the incessant rain; and to England once, hating the combo of cold rain and boiling heat, not to mention the crappy hotels, crappy food, and crappy RSC— but loving Steven Berkoff this side of idolatry in Coriolanus at the Mermaid Theatre just off the Thames. We saw the play four times in a month. Unforgettable.
Since 2001 we’ve lived in Texas (Judy’s home state) beneath the towering pines of “Deep East.” Judy retired from university teaching and research in 2012 and has since devoted most of her energy to composing books of haiku based on her original photography. At 74, I’m still hungry to improve at what Chaucer calls the craft so longe to learne-- by which he meant both poetry and love. I’m no longer so sure whether life is good or not; but my primary life raft, though a bit battered after all these years at sea, still consists of those utterly ephemeral yet steel-strong things: words.
Copyright Ken Lauter, 2017
