Glen Coffield

Who was Glen Coffield?

Glen Coffield was an American poet and conscientious objector. He was born in Prescott, Arizona, and received a B.S. degree in education from Central Missouri State Teachers College in 1940. During World War II, he served in Civilian Public Service Camp #7 in Magnolia, Arkansas, and then was transferred to the Camp Angel CPS camp near Waldport, Oregon in 1942. Coffield is sometimes called Oregon's first hippie.

The artist Kemper Nomland was at Camp Angel, and attempted to capture Coffield's creativity in a painting donated to the Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Coffield's first collection of poems Ultimatum was a one-man operation since he was author, typist, designer and illustrator, as with most of his subsequent works. His anthology Horned Moon was published by Everson's Untide Press in 1944. In the poem Indivisible he describes the world as more loosely strung than a nation, feeling pain more slowly "as when wild horses stampede on broken hooves". Some of his poems were also published in the Untide Press magazine Illiterati.

After the war Coffield did some acting in San Francisco with a repertory called The Interplayers led by Kermit Sheets. From 1947-1954 he ran the Grundtvig Folk School at Eagle Creek in the Mount Hood wilderness in Oregon, where he published numerous small poetry journals and newsletters. In the 1960s Coffield moved back to San Francisco, where he was severely injured in a hit and run accident. Coffield spent the rest of his life in Missouri.