Lexington poet Jeff Worley reflects on his journey during the final months of his tenure as state poet laureate
After growing up in Wichita, Kansas, and spending much of his early adulthood teaching internationally, writer Jeff Worley has found great contentment in calling Kentucky home for the past 34 years.
His charge as a champion of words in the Commonwealth was fortified when he was appointed 2019-20 Kentucky state poet laureate. Sworn in in 2019, Worley will remain poet laureate until April, when the torch will be passed to someone new. While the pandemic halted many of the traditional poet laureate duties for most of the past year, he deeply cherished the outreach opportunities the first 10 months afforded him.
“It was great meeting people and sharing poetry with Kentuckians far and wide,” said Worley, who visited schools and libraries to promote the state’s literary arts.
While wistful for the community experiences he had to forgo, he was also quick to note his losses pale in comparison to those the pandemic has wrought for many others.
“It’s unfortunate the pandemic has curtailed that part, but there’s a great tradition of respected writers and poets in Kentucky, and I am honored to have had this opportunity to share that,” he said.
These days, Worley rarely veers from his Mentelle neighborhood home, other than to steal away to Cave Run Lake. He and his wife, Linda, purchased a cabin there in the late ’90s.
“We go as often as possible,” Worley said. “[It’s] far enough off the beaten path [that] you know you are in the woods.”
“I write best with no distractions,” he added. “I can find quiet there.”
Here, Worley is pictured typing out some “clumsy” early poems, as he says. One of the first graduates from Wichita State’s creative writing MFA program, Worley has been focusing much of his spare time on the craft of poetry ever since. Photo by Paul Briggs
Jeff and Linda’s first encounter took place in the 1970s, when both were expat teachers in adjacent classrooms while teaching in Germany for the University of Maryland’s European division.
“There was always laughter coming from the classroom next door,” Worley recalled. “I was teaching basic grammar, so there was very little to laugh about.”
Upon further investigation, he discovered “this engaging teacher who had her students laughing every day.”
“I decided I needed to buy her a pizza,” he said. “As I like to say, if you buy a girl a pizza, the rest is easy.”
After getting to know each other, the couple found they had much in common. They married in 1982 and, following a “good run” in Europe that included visiting every country in the continent, moved back to the United States in 1983. When Linda – whom Worley lovingly refers to as his “brilliant wife” – finished her PhD, she was offered a job teaching German literature at the University of Kentucky. Worley, who was teaching at Penn State at the time, eagerly agreed to move to Lexington, and upon arrival, found the city to be “friendly, welcoming and beautiful.” He also found a good fit for his skills as a writer and editor for Odyssey Magazine, a University of Kentucky research publication (no longer in print), where he worked for 23 years before retiring in 2010. He has continued to lead writing workshops at the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning since his retirement.
Since retiring in 2010, Kentucky poet laureate Je Worley, who lives in Lexington’s Mentelle neighborhood, has regularly taught workshops and classes at The Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning. Photo by Mick Jeffries
Exploring everything from birth and death to tender remembrances and dangerous encounters, Worley’s work is collected in six poetry books and four chapbooks, including the Larkspur Press-published collections “A Simple Human Motion” and “Best To Keep Moving.” A longtime fan and champion of contemporary poetry, Worley also served as editor of the 2009 University of Kentucky Press collection “What Comes Down To Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets.”
The writer recalled his childhood as being chock full of outdoor adventures and the freedom to wander and explore – an apt foundation that has carried over into his life as a poet who often writes about the natural world. He often performed as a folk singer during college and cites his connection to the lyrics of favorite songs as an early portal that opened his eyes to the power of words and verse. He chuckled a bit looking back at the diversity of his early career path, which also included working as a movie theater usher, drapery installer, offset pressman and a cab driver, among other odd jobs. These experiences all ultimately served as fuel for the poet, whose writing also tends to focus on the human condition and all the dramas, large and small, of each exquisite life encountered along the way. Family storytelling and even his father’s gut-wrenching journal from World War II have provided further powerful material for Worley’s poetry, which has appeared in publications in the United States as well as Canada.
Overall, Worley sees poetry as a way to widen and deepen the human experience on this plane. And during this current moment, marked by increased isolation and divide, it can be, more than ever, a way to bind the community together.
“The best poetry invites us to honor and celebrate our common language,” he said. “The scrawl of words across a page is a way to try to understand who [we are] and try to make some sense of the cards we’ve been dealt.”
Click here to read the poem "Playing Possum: My Wife and I Take Up Arms Against a 3 a.m. Critter," by Jeff Worley.
Photo by Mick Jeffries
Worley recently took the time to answer some questions from writer Celeste Lewis.
Tell me a little about growing up. I was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas, and went through the public schools there. This was in the Eisenhower ’50s. It was a great time and place to be a kid, and I did all the Midwest boy things – played baseball, basketball, collected baseball cards, played kick-the-can on summer nights and collected fireflies in jars [back when there were fireflies], rode my bike around with friends. We kids played all the time – made our own play dates. Our parents were never worried about our safety.
How were you first introduced to poetry? I came to poetry through my various folk singing jobs when I was in college. I played bars and clubs, a solo guitar guy, and I was always most interested in folk music that had the most poetic lyrics: early Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot, Leonard Cohen. I was a mediocre player and singer, but I never forgot the words to a song. That focus was a clue that poetry just might be in my future.
Was there a poem you read that crystalized the idea that you wanted to be poet? No one poem did the trick, but in my first poetry writing class at Wichita State, we had an anthology of contemporary poets who wrote accessible and memorable poems – William Stafford, James Wright, Lisel Mueller, Robert Lowell, Philip Levine – and I was hooked. I took five or six more undergraduate poetry writing classes, wrote a lot of really awful poems but was admitted anyway into the brand-new Wichita State MFA program in 1972. I was the second graduate of that program.
In your view, what makes an exceptional poem? There are some general definitions/observations that ring true to me in answer to this question. Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser says, “Poetry always appealed to me because it was a genre in which it seemed you could establish perfect order, a piece of writing with everything in its essential and appropriate place, every punctuation mark, every syllable.” I’m particularly attracted to poems that seem to me have succeeded after some intense struggle, emotional or otherwise, by the poet.
Tell me about your writing process. Sometimes an image you want to capture can start a poem, sometimes a phrase or sentence from a book, sometimes a conversational remark you’re lucky enough to have overheard. William Stafford talks about just starting anywhere — just get some words down on the page and see where they seem to want to take you. A process of discovery. Unlike other poets I know, I need absolute quiet with no distractions when I write. Or to quote the poet Franz Wright, “For me, poetry, like crime, can only be accomplished in absolute privacy and secrecy.”
What have been some of the highlights of your time as Kentucky’s poet laureate? The first 10 months were absolutely wonderful. I did readings and workshops in high schools and universities and libraries from Pikeville to Danville to Campbellsville to Murray and stops in between. I loved that my ‘job’ was to spread the news about Kentucky poets and their poems.
The most surprising thing was an email invitation I got in September [2019] from the ambassador of the EU delegation to the United States, to be part of a “Celebration of Kentucky” at his residence in Washington, D.C. Ambassador [Stavros] Lambrinidis had seen a copy of the anthology of Kentucky poets I edited and published with the University Press of Kentucky (‘What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets’). The ambassador was impressed with the literature of our state and wanted to fly my wife, Linda, and me to D.C. to join the party he was throwing and wanted me to read some poems. I thought long and hard about accepting his invitation – like about a second and a half – and said yes. It was an amazing night, which included presidents and CEOs of national and international companies, ambassadors from eight European countries, directors of international trade organizations and several Kentucky distillers [with free samples!]. Linda and I were glad to have a nice talk with [Kentucky] Congressman Yarmuth, whom we’d never met.
Then COVID hit, and almost all of my poet laureate activities ground to a halt.
As Kentucky’s Poet Laureate and as a former professor, what advice do you have for aspiring poets and writers? Three things I tell students day one: Read a lot and not just poetry and fiction. Read all kinds of things. It provides triggers to write. National Geographic Magazine is a favorite for me. There’s a wide, crazy, beautiful world out there.
Second: Write a lot of poems. You have to write a lot of bad poems to write good ones.
And third, get out of town – whatever time and finances will allow. Sights, smells and experiences develop a writer.
Is there a place in Lexington you go to relax or recharge? I really like Kentucky Native Café. They did everything right. I do some writing there. It reminds me of some of the wonderful beer gardens in Germany.
If you hadn’t become a professor and a writer, what is another career you might have liked to try? I’ve written quite a few poems about animals – how they survive, where they find joy, how they process death, and how they think. I might have, instead, worked in animal research – animal consciousness and how as human beings we can learn from our animal partners and make their lives better.
Photo by Mick Jeffries