POET

Kevin Stein (1954 - )

BIOGRAPHY

Kevin Stein is a poet who is primarily concerned with the nature of significance and appreciation. Sally Thomas, writing in Quarterly West, declared that "Stein's poems represent the part of the story that can be told: what we can see, know, and say, all we can mean when we say we love our lives." Thomas noted that in the volume A Circus of Want Stein explores "what it means to live in a universe in which life is not easily lovable, and beauty and despair are often the same thing."

Stein told Contemporary Authors: "My work in recent years has been increasingly fueled by the belief that poets face a dual obligation not only to write their own poems but also to write thoughtfully about others' work. Doing so, they give back to the art something larger than themselves. Not surprisingly—though happily—doing so also helps poets avoid the solipsism so often debilitating to artists whose world narrows to something no broader than the coffee cup in which their own reflection looms waiting to return their lips' kiss. No doubt my own poetry has been deepened by the study of James Wright's work and its characteristic 'furious and unceasing growth.' Additionally, the study of others' poetry often interrogates my easy assumptions about what a poem is and might become, as I discovered examining Lowell, Rich, O'Hara, Wright, Levine, Komunyakaa, Dove, Forché, and Wojahn in researching the essays of Private Poets, Worldly Acts. The inventive ways these poets found to intersect private and public history have come to inform my own poems in a fashion I'd simply not expected.

"As a result, a number of poems in my recent collection Chance Ransom render intersecting planes of high and low art, pop culture and staid history, as well as racial, social, and economic dialogues played out in forms ranging from rock lyric to history text. Nothing pleases me more than to imagine the poem as a field of possibility welcoming on even terms profound philosophical inquiry and crass commercial marketing. The work is both agent and end product of this discourse. Thus, understanding how words simultaneously construct and express our lives asks that we're alert to a world in which The La-Z-Boy, Bob Marley, and Martin Heidegger prove variously (and equally) instructive.

"One result of this notion is my escalating use of the musical phrase. More and more I've worked to flesh my lines with assonance, consonance, and scores of slant and exact rhymes. I've purposefully enhanced the sonic qualities of my poems beyond the typical possibilities offered by shopworn end-rhyme. It's a way to update the furniture of the traditional meditative lyric or narrative poem I'm so fond of. It's also a way to make music exhibit qualities of thought and to make thought itself aspire to the passionate fluidity of music. In my view, the current version of the meditative poem often overlooks the pleasurable play of sound, music, and rhythm in favor of the play of mind. Similarly, the conventional narrative overlooks the same pleasures in favor of story. Why not slow down, turn up the treble, and see what discoveries of mind and story that music itself might offer? Why not enable music to do more than simply embellish thought and story but actually to generate both? Such a poem is surely more fun for the poet to write and, I trust, more fun for the reader to read."

Earlier Stein told Contemporary Authors: "What most interests me is the way our lives continually surprise us, how the common may suddenly glint with uncommon light or darken with horror. How these quotidian events change our lives, or fail to. How what matters comes to matter, or matter not at all. It is precisely this mysterious process, through which we sort our lives and apply to their vagaries intellectual or emotional significance, that fascinates me. My poems, and to some extent my critical essays, reflect that, for what else is an essay if not a sorting out of what attracts or repels us as readers?

"I've always been interested in muting the line between lyric and narrative poetry, a fictional boundary created and maintained by writerly convention. A number of poems in A Circus of Want experiment with ways to invoke elements of story with an essentially lyric form and, conversely, ways to make lyrical the telling of a story. This enables the speaker to follow meditative tangents along the way, to delay and transgress. Recently, I've worked with the dramatic monologue in poetry. Doing so offers me—because dramatic monologue is seemingly out of fashion—the enviable opportunity to be radical using traditional forms. I worked from a small packet of my great-great-grandfather's personal papers: a few letters, his immigration documents, a note absolving him of chicken thievery, some bills and receipts. I researched county historical records where he settled in Richmond, Indiana, in the 1850s, and found mention of him and his family in microfilmed copies of old newspapers. The result, a series of twelve or so dramatic monologues spoken in his voice, are part fact and part fiction, some measure real and much more imagined, an invented flesh of history stitched over skeletal facts.

"Those writers whom I find most compelling are characterized by what James Wright called a 'furious and unceasing growth.' I admire those writers who, while not abandoning all they've learned to do, journey into the unknown spreading before them like Arctic tundra and see in its vast emptiness only possibility. Not nothingness but something they've yet to discover. That fierce embracing of aesthetic change first attracted me to Wright and led to my critical study, James Wright: The Poetry of the Grown Man. In the process of my research, however, I was startled by the continuity of themes beneath the surface of Wright's stylistic alterations. The need for change and the will for order provided a useful, generative tension throughout his career. For the last two years, I've focused on poets whose work demands an intersection of public and private 'history,' poets such as Wright, Philip Levine, and Yusef Komunyakaa. I'm thinking, for example, of the importance of work and workers in Wright's poetry, or the significance of the Spanish Civil War in Levine's. Given the day's vertiginous theory and ideology, it's more necessary than ever for writers to enter the dialogue by examining and responding to the work of others. Silence, while protective, amounts to the worst sort of abnegation."

CAREER

Ball State University, Muncie, IN, instructor, 1978-79; Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, associate instructor, 1980-84; Bradley University, Peoria, IL, assistant professor, 1984-88, associate professor, 1988-94, professor of English, 1994—, Caterpillar Professor of English, 2000—; writer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

POETRY

A Field of Wings, Illinois Writers Inc. (Normal, IL), 1986.
The Figure Our Bodies Make, St. Louis Poetry Center (St. Louis, MO), 1988.
A Circus of Want, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1992.
Bruised Paradise, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1996.
Chance Ransom, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2000.
American Ghost Roses, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including Black Warrior Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, Plougshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.

OTHER

James Wright: The Poetry of a Grown Man (literary criticism), Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1988.
Private Poets, Worldly Acts: Public and Private History in Contemporary American Poetry (essays), Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1996.
(Editor with G. E. Murray) Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Poetry, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 2001.

Contributor of essays to periodicals, including American Poetry Review, Boulevard, College Literature, Concerning Poetry, Indiana Review, Iowa English Journal, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Poetry East, and Ohio Review. Editor, Illinois Writers Review, 1988-92; associate poetry editor, Crazyhorse, 1992-94.