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 Fred Chappell has laurels, but he doesn't rest on them.

"Backsass: Poems" came out in 2004. "Shadow Box," a book of poems, was published in July. "Ancestors and Others," a collection of short stories, will be out in October.

While a student at Duke University, Chappell gave his first invited public reading in Greensboro. "It was at the Woman's College (now UNCG) in 1963," Chappell said. "Unofficially, the invitation came from Robert Watson. He'd seen one of my stories. It may have been a piece in 'The Saturday Evening Post,' I'm not sure."

Watson, a poet, founded the creative writing program at UNCG.

Chappell spent his entire academic career there, retiring from the university in 2004 as the Burlington Industries professor of English. In his 40 years on the faculty, he taught a small town of students, about 5,000, learning the names of all each semester. Kathryn Stripling Byer was among them. She succeeded him as state poet laureate.

Chappell taught perhaps 30 different courses in the English department, including science-fiction, a lifelong interest. He co-taught a course on film in the Department of Media Studies for 15 years. He taught fiction and poetry in the graduate program in creative writing.

"The creative writing program enjoys a particularly good reputation," he said. "It's capped at 25 students; we didn't want it to become a factory. It's not competitive but cooperative."

While teaching, he wrote. To date, he's the author of at least a dozen collections of poetry, eight novels, two collections of short stories and two books of essays. He's the winner of awards such as the Bollingen Prize in Poetry from the Yale University library. Robert Frost won it, too.

"Anybody who knows anything about Southern writing knows that Fred Chappell is our resident genius, our shining light, the one truly great writer we have among us," novelist Lee Smith has said.

Chappell also is one of the most well-read people you'll ever meet. Allusions to literature sprinkle his conversation, never forced, never showy, just part of who he is. In his poetry and prose, Chappell's personality is split. There's Ole Fred: irreverent, bawdy, hard-drinking, wildly comic. Then there's Chappell the professor, erudite and urbane translator of French, Greek, Latin and Italian poets and playwrights, comfortable with Aeschylus, Euripides, Virgil.

He works on poems most mornings. He's writing a fairy-tale fantasy novel, "The Shadow Thief," and essays on female poets in the South. He's stuffed both in a desk drawer for a while.

That desk sits in his study in the oak-shaded brick house on a street three blocks from UNCG. He and his wife, Susan, have lived there for decades. They were married 50 years ago, on Aug. 2.

In the front room, Chappell sat recently in a red-cushioned, straight-backed chair. Matching, but smaller, square red cushions lay in the corners of an off-white sofa across from him. A large painting, swaths of pastels deepening into black, hangs at one end of the room. A jade-green abstract sculpture is hung by the door. Chappell wore a long-sleeved tattersall shirt, white, red and blue; olive slacks, cinched with a black belt; and white running shoes tied in loopy bows. He walks daily.

Chappell has the reputation of being a tough interview, reluctant to talk about himself or his books. It's deserved. If the question is personal or about one of his books, Chappell answers with a few sentences, then clams up. If the question addresses former students, friends or poetry, the answers become paragraphs. His rich voice grows animated. His hands chop the air.

Chappell is an uncommonly modest man, observed his late good friend George Garrett, novelist, poet, story writer, essayist and a poet laureate of Virginia. Chappell shuns self-promotion, which may explain why the big, national literary awards haven't come his way, although serious critics agree he's almost without peer.

Chappell perhaps addressed his own situation in a few lines titled "Epitaph for a Book of Poems":

I never truckled.

I never pandered.

I was born to be remaindered.

Is poetry important?

"I don't know," Chappell said. "I do know this. It's inescapable. People listen to poetry all the time: pop music, TV jingles. It's shot through popular culture. Granted, it's low-wattage, but it's poetry.

"There's never been a society without poetry. There have been societies that have had no concept of money. An anthropologist found a culture in the South Seas that had no concept of fatherhood. They didn't know where babies came from. But they sang, they danced, they chanted. They had poetry.

"Poetry is wired into us. It's physiological. People say they don't read poetry. They read it every day."

Like the farm boy he once was in the mountains outside Canton, Chappell gets up at milking time, 5 or 5:30 a.m. But instead of trudging to the barn, he pads downstairs to the kitchen with a notebook, spiral-bound with blue-ruled pages, the kind schoolchildren use.

"My handwriting's so small and crabbed I can't keep up with anything if it gets out of order."

With coffee, he writes for a couple of hours in longhand at the kitchen table. If he's writing prose, the goal is two pages. Poetry is another matter. "Usually I scratch out the two lines I managed to come up with the day before and start in again. It's a slow process."

Chappell has told other interviewers that he's not a writer, but a dogged rewriter. He wrote about the process in a poem, "How the Job Gets Done":

A dust of rubble warriors whitens the plain

where the chariots plunged and shattered. The sleep

of bronze and the ceaseless memorial wind

caress those acres like a crop of wheat;

the rivers have carried away the mules flyblown

and bloated, the torn veils of the widows,

the hafts and dented greaves, the portable gods.

Insubordinate Thersites got seven solid years

latrine duty no one is marking now, except

the poet in his garden, laboring to line-end

then turning back like a sweating plowman to fold

another loamy furrow over the crumbled palaces.

After breakfast, he goes back upstairs to a small desk in a nook of the bedroom to complete the day's writing goal. When he thinks a piece is in reasonable shape, he enters it in his computer.

"I use the computer as a glorified typewriter," he said. "I don't do e-mail."

His wife, Susan, is his only editor. "If I run into some technical problem with a poem, I'll mail it to Jim (James Applewhite) or David (Slavitt)."

Both are poets. Chappell and Applewhite were students in professor William Blackburn's creative writing class at Duke. Blackburn's students included Reynolds Price, William Styron, Anne Tyler, Wallace Kaufman.

Chappell was expelled from Duke for two years. "Joe College stuff," he said. "I back-sassed the student government people at my hearing."

Chappell went back to Canton. He worked in a farm supply store, then a furniture store. Some of the people he met showed up later as characters in his fiction.

He became reacquainted with Susan. They were married when he returned to Duke. They have a son, Heath, a jazz drummer in Chicago. At Duke, Chappell edited the student literary magazine, "The Archive."

Chappell stayed at Duke to earn a master's degree. His thesis was a concordance to the English poetry of Samuel Johnson -- an alphabetical index of the principal words in the poems with their immediate contexts. It ran 1,110 pages.

About midmorning, Chappell moves to his desk to deal with the mail. A hint of the volume is on the front porch. The mailbox by the front door is big. Chappell answers all personal mail, limiting his replies to three a day. Then there are the manuscripts: poems, short stories and novels from former students in the graduate creative writing program.

"You can't say no," he sighed. "You just can't."

Charles Wheeler is a News & Record copy editor.