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Duke Cop Finds His Muse as Continuing Ed Student

Kevin Boyd is both a Duke police officer and poet. While some might consider that a contradiction in terms, Boyd doesn't. The 31-year-old Boyd, who sports a policeman's buzz-cut hair style, says poetry is an important constant in his fast-paced life, which also includes making time for psychology courses as a continuing education student at Duke. "I wouldn't say that I'm compelled to write poetry," he says, "but I enjoy it and it fulfills me or I wouldn't go out of my way to do it." He says he is as likely to versify on the back of an envelope as at his home computer. "It strikes me that humans are most fulfilled when they're giving their creative impulse expression. Poetry for whatever reason just clicked with me the most." Boyd's passion for poetry came early. He wrote his first poems at about the age of 12. At age 9, he basked in the encouragement of a teacher who read one of his stories out loud to his class. "She thought I would enjoy reading The New Yorker, of all things," he says. "I'm sure that two-thirds of it went over my head. But I guess that was the first overt encouragement that I got." The son of a Tampa police officer father and homemaker mother, Boyd says he believes his inclination to be a mediator suits him for police work. "That's the part of the job that I enjoy the most -- mediating disputes. Sometimes in the heat of the moment people lose their ability to be reasonable about things and sometimes it takes a third party to calm everything down and get people communicating again." Boyd got his first taste for law enforcement as a volunteer with the Florida Highway Patrol. "That easily convinced me that it was what I wanted to do," he says. Boyd and his wife Heidi moved to Durham three years ago from Tampa so she could take a job as a conservationist at the Primate Center. He subsequently took a job with Duke as a security officer, then got the chance to attend a police academy at Vance-Granville Community College and went to work as a regular Duke officer. He keeps watch over a campus and medical center he describes "as just a giant place." Taking classes that relate to his interest in abnormal psychology, Boyd hopes to one day pursue a law degree. He earned a liberal arts degree at St. Petersburg Junior College. "The thought of quitting work to go to law school sort of scares me, but I guess it will take three or four years to even finish my undergraduate degree going part-time so I have a long time to think about it." A law degree or a joint psychology/law degree could be helpful, he says, within law enforcement. "I like law enforcement so much that I can't see myself ever really being completely away from it, but that doesn't necessarily mean in the trenches for the rest of my life. There are plenty of other ways to work with it." As a non-degree continuing education student, Boyd is in his probationary period. After completing four regular Duke courses with at least an overall 3.3 GPA and getting two of his teachers to write letters of support, he will reapply for degree-seeking status. Of his tight school and work schedule, Boyd says it doesn't bother him because "this is something I want to do...but I do wish I could find time to go to the gym." He says he believes his decision to postpone college was a good one. He says he's more invested now in his academic decisions and "pulls out all the stops" for his goals. Support along the way comes from his academic dean, continuing education director Paula Gilbert. "She's the best," he says. "She's been incredibly helpful in navigating me through the whole Duke system or when I run into a roadblock or something because everything is oriented toward 18-year-olds." Gilbert says she has every confidence Boyd will complete his degree here and eventually go on to earn an advanced degree. "His thoughtfulness, energy and enthusiasm -- coupled with his determination and intelligence -- are exactly the characteristics needed to succeed as an adult student seeking a bachelor's degree at Duke," she says. She says Boyd is one of only about 25 older students who are currently seeking a bachelor's degree at Duke. She says the vast majority of these are Duke employees taking advantage of the employee tuition benefit. "It's never an easy thing to do because you have to juggle school, work and family responsibilities," she says. "It takes an incredible amount of commitment and persistence." Although Boyd has been writing steadily over the years he only recently decided to give his poetry a higher public profile. Last March he traveled to Glasgow to accept a "diploma" for his finalist poem in the Scottish International Open Poetry Competition. He has heard about the contest in "The Poet's Market" and first entered three years ago, also winning finalist honors last year. "It was pretty heavy in the sense that it was my first public poetry reading," he says. He read his poem "Frame" in the wood-paneled Robert Burns Club of Irvine, the oldest Burns club in Scotland. "The audience was wonderful that afternoon. There were a little over a hundred people from all over the world." His winning entry begins: "I do not hope to forget/the way with which/I chased your ghost across the sky,/and watched it scatter into the nighttime air./Here, where tonight's landscape is flat and cold./Your ghost;/a trajectory of emptiness,/a scattering of automobile headlamps,/lost to all but me in this wretched hour." "Most of the time when I write a poem," he says, "it's merely me trying to put a body on a feeling, a certain spirit, a certain context, me putting it in a form that I can touch, so to speak. So there's not necessarily any literal meaning to some of them, not in the sense that you're describing an event." While in Scotland, Boyd also stopped by Burns's cottage in Alloway and made a pilgrimage to Dean Castle, the ancestral home of the Boyds in Kilmarnock. In Scotland, as in this country, Boyd sometimes meets people who doubt his dual police/poet credentials. After getting a shocked reaction from one other Glasgow participant, Boyd had to "broaden her cop paradigm a bit." Boyd says the 15 officers in his campus police squad are supportive of both his writing and his part-time course work. "If it wasn't for them covering for me and working hard to make sure I make it to class it would be a lot harder. It's almost as important to them that I get to class as it is to me, so that really helps, that everybody supports me so much in the endeavor." Some of those same officers have found expression for their own creative sides, Boyd says, noting that one of his co-workers paints watercolors, another writes poems and yet another composes songs. "There is a lot of talent in our department," he adds. "I think our creative outlets keep our lives well rounded, enriching us personally, and helping to counterbalance the stress of the job."