For a long time, the poem I have wanted to write has been George Starbuck’s “Of Late.” The yearning to want to write what someone else has already written is a strange kind of sensation—the rush of recognizing what your heart believes to be yours when your head knows otherwise. It’s extreme admiration and adoration coupled with a kind of secret, frantic wish for aesthetic rebirth or reincarnation or resurrection—the hope that perhaps, if I love the poem enough, a part of it will become of me and I will create another poem that carries some of the qualities of the beloved poem out into the world again. It hasn’t happened yet. I continue to read the poem and teach the poem. It’s not the poem’s fault that I haven’t learned all of its lessons.
The poem begins with what we assume is a newspaper quote:
“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card”
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Loving a poem or a person, one wants to know everything there is to know about how the beloved came to be.
Above, Stephen Lynn Smith burns his draft card in the Iowa Memorial Union on October 20, 1965. In a 2012 “Old Gold” column in IowaNow, archivist David McCartney writes about this “watershed moment of antiwar activism on the UI campus,” describing Steve Smith as “the all-American boy” growing up in Marion, Iowa. In the summer of 1964, McCartney writes that “[Smith] became a political activist, speaking out against racial segregation and participating in local marches calling for an end to racial discrimination. In July 1964, while in Canton, Miss., to help register African-Americans to vote, he was detained by a sheriff’s deputy and beaten brutally while in custody (The DesMoines Register, July 18, 1964). He was 19 at the time.” (I was going to write “In the summer of 1964, however“—contrasting Smith’s “all-American boy” upbringing as an athlete and honor roll student with his newfound activism—but there need be no “however.” I’d rather redefine what we mean by “all-American boy.”)
Smith was the first American to burn a draft card on a college campus after the destruction of draft cards was criminalized by the federal government. Read the rest of McCartney’s story of Smith’s activism and the price he paid for that act here:
Recently, McCartney added a chapter to Smith’s legacy, when civil rights activist Eric Morton, who died on October 7, 2015, donated his papers to the University of Iowa Libraries “to be housed alongside Smith’s.” Read McCartney’s story of friendship and history here:
Smith died in 2009 after a massive heart attack in the parking lot of Kirkwood Community College (where he was an assistant professor of computer education) left him severely brain damaged for the last nine years of his life. Read more about the price Smith paid for his activism in The Gazette as well:
“Iowa man, an anti-war, civil rights activist, pays lifelong price”
In 2014, the National Archives released FBI documents pertaining to Smith’s police brutality allegations. The documents themselves are included in the following article from The Gazette:
“50-year-old FBI files shed light on Iowa man’s police brutality case”
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George Starbuck, who died in 1996, arrived as a lecturer at the University of Iowa in 1964. He became an assistant professor in 1966 and associate professor in 1967. In other words, he was on campus in the fall semester of 1965. Were the students at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop also writing of Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore? Were Smith’s classmates? Were Starbuck’s colleagues? What’s in the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & Archives “Records of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop” from that time? The library’s collection of student coursework begins, of all moments, in the fall of 1965.
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A year to the month later, George Starbuck’s “Of Late” appears in the October 1966 issue of Poetry. Henry Rago would have been the editor of the magazine at that time. Do we know if Smith read the poem? Do we know if Starbuck met Smith?
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“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card,” Starbuck begins. What quotes in our campus papers and local papers and national and international news outlets might begin our version of “Of Late” today?
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“Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card,” Starbuck begins.
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