Date: June 15, 2024

ISBN: 97818800788615

Price: $18.00

96 pages, 2 Sections, 38 poems

NCSA Literatur (Indiana German Heritage Society)

Direct orders:
NCSA Literatur
401 East Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46204

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Table of Contents

Author's Note

I begin this note on Martin Luther King Day, 2024. I wrote, revised, and completed these poems about the life of Ida Hagan over the period of fourteen years, with suggestions for improvements from several black women writer friends and others. When I grew up in Jasper, in Dubois County, I had never heard of a Pinkston Settlement. Nor had anyone else of my generation. It is still not widely known about, even in our time. Ida Hagan’s father, Ben Hagan Jr., was the last Black buried in Pinkston Cemetery, in 1939. I was born in 1943, by which time Ida’s father had died, and her uncle, Larkin Pinkston, her father’s brother-in-law and friend, had left the Settlement empty. I know of no other book of poems written about Ida Hagan. It’s high time the impressive story of this woman is told in a book of narrative poems, my favorite way to tell stories for some fifty plus years of writing and publishing. But you will also find more than a few lyrical moments.         If you have not met Ida Hagan, just as I had not growing up in the area in which she was born and worked for a Swiss Doctor Wollenmann in German-Catholic Ferdinand, she may surprise you. Ferdinand is not far from little German-Catholic St. Henry, where my father was born in 1904. I will not repeat the story of the most impressive Ida Hagan here, because I tell it in detail in the book you are holding. I will, however, tell you that Ida was born in 1888 in Huntingburg, Indiana, where she attended high school after finishing “common” or elementary school, in a country school. After Doctor Wollenmann died in 1912, Ida moved away from Dubois County, lived with her first husband and worked as a pharmacist in Indianapolis, where in 1926 she married a second time, and moved with her new husband to Detroit, where she lived until 1978. I believe in learning about Ida you will be surprised, as I was, and probably, also like me, be amazed and gratified that you came to learn about such an impressive woman. Like me, you may want to learn more about Ida. Perhaps, like me, you will also regret that you were not lucky enough to meet and spend time with her. You may want to share Ida’s story with friends.

 

Sample Poems

About the Author

     Norbert Krapf, former Indiana Poet Laureate, is a native of Jasper, Indiana, in Dubois County. His father grew up in the German-Catholic village of St. Henry, a few miles from where the Pinkston Settlement was located, but which closed in 1940, three years before Norbert was born. He is the editor of Finding the Grain: Pioneer German Journals and Letters from Dubois County, Indiana (1996) and the editor-translator of Beneath the Cherry Sapling: Legends from Franconia (1988) and Shadows on the Sundial: Selected Early Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1990). For thirty-four years he taught English at Long Island University and for eighteen years directed the C.W. Post Poetry Center. He received his BA in English from St. Joseph’s College and an MA. in English and a Ph.D. in American Literature at the University of Notre Dame. He was a Fulbright Professor of American Poetry in Germany at the Universities of Freiburg (1980-81) and Erlangen-Nuremberg (1988-89).

     His many poetry collections, often focused on place, include Somewhere in Southern Indiana (1993), Blue-Eyed Grass: Poems of Germany (1996), The Country I Come From (2002), Looking for God’s Country (2005), Invisible Presence: A Walk through Indiana in Photographs and Poems, photos by Darryl Jones (2006), Bloodroot: Indiana Poems (2008), Catholic Boy Blues (2014), Indiana Hill Country Poems (2019), Southwest by Midwest (2020). He is the author of The Ripest Moments: A Southern Indiana Childhood (2008), Shrinking the Monster: Healing the Wounds of Our Abuse (2016), winner of an Illumination Award, and Homecomings: A Writer’s Memoir (2023).

     Norbert released a poetry and jazz CD, Imagine (2007) with pianist-composer Monika Herzig and collaborates with Indiana bluesman Gordon Bonham. He received the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Creative Renewal Fellowship from the Arts Council of Indianapolis to combine poetry and the blues, and a Glick Indiana Author Award. He has a poem in stained glass at the Indianapolis International Airport and his poems were read on The Writer’s Almanac.

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