Tom Eblen
Jeff Worley
When Jeff Worley was an English major at Wichita State University in the late 1960s, he made a little money playing guitar and singing, mostly in bars around his Kansas hometown.
“I wasn’t ever a particularly good guitarist, and my singing was maybe acceptable,” he said. “But I never forgot the words to a song.”
His favorite songs were by Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Gordon Lightfoot—writers who could tell a story in poetry. But it wasn’t until Worley took a poetry class that he got up the courage to begin writing his own poems—and go on to earn a master of fine arts degree from Wichita State in 1975.
“I think what attracted me to poetry was the serious play with language,” he said. “And the possibilities of making something that other people would appreciate. I always wanted my poetry to be understandable and, at its best, memorable.”
Worley, 78, has produced 10 books of his poetry and published more than 500 poems in journals and magazines. His most recent book, The Poet Laureate of Aurora Avenue (Broadstone Books, 2022) includes some favorite poems from his previous books, plus new work. He edited the book What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets (University Press of Kentucky, 2009). And he served as Kentucky’s poet laureate in 2019 and 2020.
“Jeff Worley is a poet’s poet,” said Richard Taylor, another former state poet laureate who was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2023. “His work seems motivated not by the latest fad or fancy that editors want to publish but by what ordinary readers want to read. He decodes the confusing world with which we are confronted and renders it knowably, often humorously, lest we take ourselves too seriously.”
Worley moved to Lexington in 1986 when his late wife, Linda Kraus Worley, was hired by the University of Kentucky as a professor of German studies and folklore/myth. They met while Worley was teaching English in Germany as part of the University of Maryland’s European division. She died in 2021.
After what he described as a lackluster stint as a freelance writer in Lexington, Worley became a writer for and later editor of Odyssey magazine, which the University of Kentucky published from 1982 until 2010 to highlight research and scholarship on campus.
In Lexington, Worley found the writing community he needed to develop and improve as a poet. He and Marcia Hurlow, a former English professor at Asbury University, formed a poetry group in 1989 that featured several notable Kentucky writers, including Taylor, Michael Moran and Devin Brown.
Critical feedback from his wife and fellow poets was invaluable. “So were some of the rejection slips I got from magazines, with an editor pointing out that this and this don’t work very well,” Worley said. “I have a whole drawer full of these rejection slips.”
For Worley, writing has always been a process of discovery.
“I kind of don’t know what I think about anything unless I write about it,” he said. “The more I write about something, the more I understand what it is I feel about it. And so, a lot of my poems are about my parents and about extended family.”
Worley started writing poems about animals two decades ago, after he and his wife bought a weekend cabin on Cave Run Lake.
“Animals really intrigue me,” he said. “It’s a total delight to sit in the morning with my coffee and my roll on the screened-in back porch and just watch the deer come in. This time of year, they’ll be coming in with their babies. And to me, that’s about as delightful as anything can be.”
Other poems spring from things he overhears, and he advises students to always carry a pen and notecard to jot down gems. Such as when he overheard a little boy in the grocery produce section ask his father, “Dad, we have two legs and two eyes and two arms; why don’t we have two penises?”
“I reached in my back pocket for my notecard, and it wasn’t there,” Worley recalled. “I discovered that you can write on a banana. I wanted to get his words exactly, this kid. My failing is that I don’t know how the dad answered. This other little kid came by and stared at me a long time and went over and said something to her mother. I bet it had to do with, ‘There’s a crazy man over there writing on a banana.’ ”
And, yes, a bit of that story ended up in a poem.
Humor is the secret weapon of Worley’s poetry, often inspired by his own misadventures or the absurdities of life. Humor is a rare commodity in modern poetry, and Worley thinks that is a shame.
“I think a lot of poets, like a lot of people, don’t have a very good sense of humor,” he said. “And there still are a lot of poets out there who believe in poetry as a serious calling and that there’s no room for levity.”
Worley has hundreds of books by other poets on his study shelves and reads widely. His favorites include Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds, William Stafford, Stephen Dunn and Michael Van Walleghen, his first poetry teacher at Wichita State.
In recent years, Worley has found himself writing fewer short poems and more long, narrative pieces. “I like to get into a subject that is really difficult to write about and see if I can do it without falling into various traps that a difficult poem lays out for you,” he said. “That’s a challenge, and I never get tired of it.”