Kevin Stein
February 2006

Kevin Stein was born and raised in Anderson, IN, a medium-sized working class town.  He was educated at Ball State University and Indiana University.  Stein is Illinois Poet Laureate, named in December 2003 to the position previously held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg.  He is the author of seven books of poetry and literary criticism.  Notable among these are his most recent poetry collection American Ghost Roses (2005), which has been nominated for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as Chance Ransom (2000) and Bruised Paradise (1996) – all published in the University of Illinois Press Poetry Series.  His first collection, A Circus of Want, won the 1992 Devins Award for Poetry.  Stein's scholarly works include James Wright:  The Poetry of a Grown Man (Ohio University Press, 1989) and Private Poets, Worldly Acts (Ohio University Press, 1996, reprinted 1999).  The latter volume, devoted to the intersection of poetry and history, earned notice as an Amazon.com Recommended Book.   Along with poet G. E. Murray, he edited Illinois Voices (University of Illinois, 2001), the definitive anthology of twentieth-century Illinois poetry.
 
Stein's poems and essays have appeared widely in journals such as American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Southern Review, and TriQuarterly.   Among his honors are the National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, the Frederick Bock Prize awarded by Poetry, the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and three Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards.  In 2004 he received the Vernon Louis Parrington Medal for Distinguished Writing.  Since 1984 Stein has taught at Bradley University, where he serves as Caterpillar Professor of English.


Aesthetic Statement

All poets ought to be leery of spouting broad aesthetic statements about their own work.  Poets often understand the basis of their own work less intimately than their best critics and readers.  This is not to say poets are dolts but simply to emphasize how the aesthetic grounds keep shifting, tremor-like, beneath our wobbly feet.  And the skies keep opening, pouring who knows what down on us or lifting us to elevations we’d once thought inhabitable.  We live in a world of flux, as Heraclitus showed us, and thus so do our poems.   Who’d want it any other way?    For an artist, stasis can be akin to death.  In this regard, I love the mode embodied by James Wright, a poet who continually sought new and more expansive means of expression.  Wright beautifully calls this the artist’s obligation to “furious and unceasing growth.”   

With this in mind, an awareness of the way water elides and thus alters even the sturdiest granite, let me state some tentative aesthetics.  For the past decade or so I have been concerned with the intersection of poetry and history.  By that I mean the convergence of private and public history, the blending of the personal and the communal.  In fact, the issue so absorbed me that I felt compelled to write Private Poets, Worldly Acts, a book of essays devoted to nine American poets whose work negotiated the intersection of private lives and public history.  I have little patience with those who believe History is led solely by what Fernand Braudel refers to as the “intercrossing . . . of exceptional destinies.”  We are here, bound up in a shared fate whether we choose it or not.  To disregard this reality is, in my view, self-defeating.  After all, this is a beautiful, horrific, scarred, and yet somehow redemptive world we live in.  And most importantly, live in together.

So here’s my notion of together.  My poems tend to favor a cornucopia of competing “histories.”  Say, Oppenheimer and the A-bomb, Kandinsky’s theory of the spiritual in art, my own experience working in a box-making factory, the spider-webbed but faithful late-summer blooms of zinnia, and Wittgenstein’s theory of language.  All these are the pure, life-sustaining stuff of poetry.  I like to blend if not altogether fuse ostensibly discrete realms of experience such as High and Low art, the sacred and the profane, the intellectual and the emotional.  Nothing pleases me more than to bring together things most readers would consider antagonistic and to show these things’ mutual dependencies.  So here’s to slang and to Latin phrases, here’s to Bob Marley and to Mozart, here’s to the priest in the confessional and to the drunkard acting up, here’s to the factory’s floor and to the library’s bookshelves.

Two particular forces earn large play in my work:  music and visual art.  A failed musician, I yearn to recreate musical elements in my poems, the inarticulate notions sound brings to our startled awareness.  I can’t carry a tune, so I try to make my poems sing in whatever shaky voice I can muster.  Although I sometimes end-rhyme and follow traditional forms, I’m perhaps more fond of embedding rhymes within lines, packing them side by side and above one another so the affect arrives both immediately and by accrual.  I want the musical line to negotiate between the lush and the quirky, the lovely and the strangely lovely. 

As for visual art, the work of painters has always fueled my own desire for beauty of image and beauty of perception.  I like painters who write about painting, who think about their work’s limits and stretches – painters such as Max Beckman, Vassily Kandinsky, and Degas. 

One reason I pay so much attention to a poem’s and a collection’s architecture is an awareness of space and time garnered from music and painting.  I am intrigued by the poem’s form on the page and its intimate connection to sound.  I love this blending of eye and ear.  What is an image but a figure recorded in space and time.  And sound is time given space, a counting as in music and a space as in duration.  Thus I love stanza and strophe form, the line splayed and the line pinched tight, the line counted and the line merely eyed.

Some say my poems begin in small things, in the quotidian and the daily, and then move outward from there to larger events.  I disagree.  Why?   Because I don’t see those supposedly small things as small.  They’re our world, both intimate and sprawling.   They’re both a portal and the view to be found outside/inside it.   Whitman, who gets it, says the universe waits in a blade of grass.  So yes, I favor the overlooked thing, the thing dismissed as much as I favor the human overlooked and dismissed, the forgotten.  In my poems, they’re the welcome and the necessary.



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