Even Plane Crash Is Poetry for Bard of the North

For Ken Waldman, even the plane crash was a time for poetry.

His small plane slammed into a snowy hill that neither he nor the pilot had seen through the fog. He awoke to blood streaming down his face, his forehead peeled open by the instrument panel.

They were miles from help along Alaska’s western coast. The pilot was showing signs of panic. So Waldman reached into his pack and pulled out a book of his poems.

Dazed and bleeding, he read aloud, starting with a poem that seemed appropriate: “Small Planes Near Nome”:

“For 50 years, each time a plane flew over the village, the woman muttered an Eskimo curse, shook both fists upward. The day of her funeral two planes crashed. . . .”

Poetry amid the wreckage? Just another day on the job for a man who bills himself as “the only plane-wreck-surviving Alaskan fiddling poet on the planet.”

Of all the souls who fancy themselves poets, precious few try to make a living at it, and none tries more improbably than Waldman. He peddles himself and his words across Alaska, reading poems and teaching creative writing in far-flung villages where the prevailing art form is survival.

Like a crocus blooming in snow, Waldman offers would-be poets everywhere an inspirational lesson--or perhaps a cautionary tale--about what can come of surrendering to the muse within.

“It’s the walking dead man, folks,” a pilot in Nome said upon seeing Waldman a few days after his crash.

That was a year ago, but the image still fits. Tall and hungry, with a black, feral beard, Waldman moves slowly and speaks with bemused detachment, as if watching himself from a distant moon.

“I have a funny little life,” he says.

He began it 41 years ago in Philadelphia, a gifted child in an unhappy family headed for divorce. Waldman excelled in school, got a business degree at Duke University, then launched his rebellion, drifting for eight years and building a poet’s resume: furniture mover, waiter, tennis instructor, bookstore clerk.

Twelve years ago in Seattle, he met the woman he thought he could marry, but she thought otherwise. He wrote her a story, “My Love for You Is Like a Car Wreck.” She told him to get out of her life.

So he came to Alaska, which has always embraced those needing to reinvent themselves. Waldman enrolled at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, where he earned a master’s degree in creative writing while living in a cabin with no plumbing or phone.

It was there he discovered how Alaska’s grand isolation can blow away distractions and open windows to the self.

“There are times of darkness inherent in that,” Waldman says. “A lot of people would fill it with alcohol or work or sex or watching videos. I fill it with writing.”

He has written a thousand poems, with more than 200 accepted by literary journals--a few of which even paid him. He writes of fleeting romance and lasting friends, of village drunks and starlit tundra, of the wilderness within as well as what’s beyond the next ridge.

“He sees poems everywhere,” Debra McKinney, an Anchorage Daily News columnist, wrote in December. “If you have him over for dinner, he might write a poem about the way you eat.” (Waldman soon obliged, dedicating “The Way They Eat” to McKinney and her husband.)

For two years he was an assistant professor at the university’s branch campus in Nome. The pay was good, and poems flooded forth. But Waldman didn’t take to Nome, a hard-drinking town by the Bering Sea, an “end-of-the-world tundra compound,” he writes in one poem.

The place made him sick, literally. First one elbow locked up, then the other, and then arthritis-like pain spread through his body. He could barely walk. He couldn’t hold a pen. Taking medical leave from work in 1992, he sought out doctors, who didn’t help much, and wrote more poems, which did.

He still doesn’t feel completely right, saying the plane crash set back his recovery. The thought of a 9-to-5 job exhausts him, yet he pursues his quirky career as freelance poet with gusto.

Through the Nomadic Press, he self-publishes poems in chapbooks such as “Alaska Bachelor” and “Crash Stories”--17 titles in all. He sells poetry postcards and poetry Christmas cards. For $20 plus $2 a line, he’ll write a poem just for you.

His daily bread comes from “teaching gigs” in Alaska’s village schools. From Eek to Elim, Skagway to Savoonga, he coaches students who write about their snowmobiles and their dreams of California, which they’ve seen on TV.

They scrawl, “Welcome to Shaktoolik, where the wind blows, where the Iditarod comes to town,” and Waldman tells them, “Hey, that’s a poem.”

Last year in Brevig Mission, population 230, half the village attended his school-gymnasium poetry reading--attracted, Waldman supposes, by the $20 prize drawn afterward.

He scratched out old-time fiddle tunes and recited poems while babies crawled between his legs. Then he got the children dancing and told them to pretend they were birds and bears and whales, and when the parents clapped hard for the first time that night, Waldman figured he could survive anything.

These days, he hangs on to that thought. To say he makes a living as a poet would be misleading, but for his artist’s appreciation of poverty.

Home is a one-room garret in Juneau. Mattress and phone are on the floor, next to a tiny refrigerator that on a recent day contained one can of ginger ale, a quart of milk and two bruised apples.

“Ken’s making it on the grizzled edge of reality,” said Dan Henry, a friend and fellow Alaska writer who hangs on to his own day job teaching high school.

Waldman dreams of better times, but for now he has his poetry, and that will have to do.

A recent Saturday night found him trudging home through the cold Juneau rain after an all-day writing workshop. He had made about $40, plus three poems he had written while students scribbled.

Not bad, he said: “Three poems. That’s immortality.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Rhyming Immortality

Three poems by Alaska poet Ken Waldman. The mailing address of The Nomadic Press is P.O. Box 22498, Juneau, Alaska 99802.

“Irma,” from “Gathering the Edge,” The Nomadic Press, 1995

Wolf to me is warm ruff over parka,

she wrote, her rough village poetry

an unintended strip of gristle

in three pages of litter. Irma.

Slitted eyes, heavy moon face,

a half-second off. I glimpsed her

once in a Nome grocery store entry,

tough Shaktoolik girl hanging out

drunk, like many. Next day, class,

she called in from prison, shared

her work, wholly incomprehensible

but for a sentence about her uncle--

Mouth of rotten teeth, his talk

a good fearing man spryly present.

Irma. I heard said in her village

God shorts all people--that’s how

we learn love. Why we need family.

“Bird School,” from “Alaska Bachelor,” The Nomadic Press, 1995

When we cracked the window,

a small crow glided to our bed,

roosted a minute, preened

and squawked, delivered

its raucous lecture.

So we removed all glass,

let in the birds--all sizes,

colors, songs--and studied.

For graduation, we took off

outside, opened wings, flew.

“The Lode,” from “Writing Lessons,” The Nomadic Press, 1996

So much to do

and I neglect

my outer life

to lie in bed

scribbling lines

that obsess me

for hours, and

the next morning

forget. I can

barely remember

if this is today.

December now,

maybe, and what

can I show for

this long fall

but a great dark

weight of type,

an equivalent

lightening and

quickening within,

the emptying of

the deep ore. Associated Press