Stephen kampa

Stephen Kampa was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1981 and grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. He received a BA in English Literature from Carleton College and an MFA in Poetry from the Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Cracks in the Invisible, won the 2010 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and the 2011 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards. His poems have also been awarded the Theodore Roethke Prize, first place in the River Styx International Poetry Contest, and two Pushcart nominations. He currently divides his time between teaching poetry at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida and working as a musician, most recently with Florida swamp blues master Robert “Top” Thomas and as a session player for WildRoots Records.

Articulate as Rain
by Stephen Kampa
Pub: Mar. 15, 2018

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A collection that encompasses the Garden of Eden (Something for Everything) and the end of the world (Have It, Eat It), Articulate as Rain is an omnium-gatherum of tones, themes, prosodies, and poetic ploys. With characteristic comedy and surprising darkness, Stephen Kampa explores the relational aspects of our lives—love, faith, metaphysics, our civic selves—while revelling in the ranginess of the English language and in the music of its metrics. Yet for all its variety, this book reminds readers that countless raindrops can belong to the same storm.

  • “What first impresses and finally astounds in Stephen Kampa’s new collection is the unflagging richness of his invention and virtuosity of his execution, the way in which technical precision allows him to speak to us in an amazing variety of registers. We are privy to existential dilemmas and prone to collapsing in helpless laughter, sometimes on the same page. As was said of Ovid, Stephen does not know when to stop. Good for him and good for us.” – Charles Martin

    “Articulate as Rain, Stephen Kampa’s latest collection, moves crisply between registers, sounding out ‘the revelations / of rhythm’ by which a man measures his life. Whether his subject is a tropical cyclone or an overflowing toilet, Kampa renders it with precision and wit, and each poem’s intricate architecture expands or contracts to suit the occasion. Elegant, wise, and resolutely tender, these are songs of experience, and Stephen Kampa is a masterful singer.” – Caki Wilkinson

    “Stephen Kampa’s poems can ‘count the seconds, click by weighted click, / As though they were the tumblers to a safe,’ until what has been locked away in darkness—the musings of our moral and ethical lives—is revealed. His classically poised verses make a winningly modern music, and his recurring themes (also classical!) of lust and booze, culture shocks and attenuated verities have never been fresher. Ask Kampa’s tattoo artist for the skinny: ‘Fate, circumstances, physics, God—will pierce you / More times than you can count.’ This book is a boon!” – David Yezzi

  • Something for Everything

    Adam sat naming everything he’d miss.
    He couldn’t quite explain
    Why he was doing this
    Or how he drew such pleasure from the pain

    Of his enumerations: snowdrops twice
    As vibrant from the view
    Outside of paradise,
    And paradisiacal birds with curlicue

    Tail feathers drooping in foreboding loops,
    And howler monkeys calling
    To other howler troops,
    The shade trees and the footpaths and the falling

    Fruit, unforbidden, he was meant to eat—
    To think of losing it
    Made every bite more sweet,
    So he indulged such thinking as he bit,

    Grateful that loss was merely nomenclature,
    A term to understand,
    And reveled in his nature
    As Eve approached him, something in her hand.

    The Waywiser Press

     

    Have It, Eat It

    What I expect
    to see at the end
    isn’t the moon
    gray as a dusty plate
    or red as
    a party balloon let go

    because its holder
    just couldn’t wait to open
    her first gift,
    tearing sky-blue paper the way
    the sky itself
    will be torn to celebrate

    in due time
    with apt atmospherics the day
    we all were
    born, nor dune upon dune
    of radioactive sand
    blowing in a staticky hiss

    like a radio
    tuned to all the news
    we’ll miss once
    the party’s over and everyone’s
    gone, but this:
    one bare, branchless tree, straight

    as the barrel
    of an enormous gun, stuck
    like a toothpick
    in the cakey, sun-warmed mud
    to see if
    finally the world is done.

    The Waywiser Press

Bachelor Pad
by Stephen Kampa
Pub: Apr. 3, 2014

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Where Kampa's first, prize-winning collection wrestled with silence (particularly the silence of God) and how to fill it, his eagerly-awaited second addresses solitude. The poems in it explore various permutations of intimacy and isolation in contemporary culture and juxtapose them with difficult models of intimacy and fruitful solitude widespread in the West. The hugely impressive collection includes three sections. "Around Town" focuses on relationships in the public sphere: bars, parties, restaurants, and the give-and-(more often)-take that happen in them. "Sleepless with Reruns" is a mixed suite of poems that deals with both the movies on late-night television and those private movies that loop through the poet's head when he lies awake in bed. "At Home" collects poems about home not only as a place, but also as an idea, laying particular emphasis not on the homes we come from but the ones we make. Throughout, poetic craft provides a vehicle for a transcendence that is part faith, part laughter.

  • “Rejoice! The young and frighteningly brilliant Stephen Kampa has already given us a stunning second volume of poems. The title Bachelor Pad offers a hint of the author’s winning modesty and wit, but hardly prepares us for the depths of his humanity. None of the perfectly-crafted poems here is funnier than ‘Homer at Home’ or more tragic than ‘Lana Turner’s Bosom: An Assay,’ and along the way are countless other subtly mixed moods. Here is a poet who looks into the existential abyss but sees love everywhere.” – Mary Jo Salter

    “Bachelor Pad is a gutsy and brilliant examination of a contemporary man’s single life. Love, lust, and loneliness tangle together, strengthening and warring with one another to form a complex and honest picture of desire in action. For the man who is looking for love in all the right places, ‘You’re yours to damn; / To find your sole reprieve / Takes someone else. That someone is inviting … / Now when the man I hope to be is writing / The man I am.’ But Stephen Kampa believes in love and so convincing is he that we too believe there is ‘A changeless love song hurrying to me, / Ecstatic in the static.’” – Andrew Hudgins

    “Stephen Kampa’s poetry features a rich variety of stanzaic forms and a wonderful wealth of verbal ingenuity – qualities that recall the work of fellow virtuosos from John Donne to Anthony Hecht. And in his love for and knowledge of music and movies, and in his bittersweet meditations on romantic love, Kampa may remind some readers of Woody Allen. A bounteous and resourceful writer, Kampa can also speak, as he does in such poems as ‘Wasted Time’ and ‘The Pocket Watch,’ with energetic concision. Bachelor Pad impresses from cover to cover.” – Timothy Steele

  • Florida Book Review, May 2014
    “What I found in the depths of Kampa’s poems was more than carefully crafted language or cleverly integrated meter. Instead, I found myself connecting with the expression of insatiable broken-heartedness.
    I admit I was skeptical at first about this book so boldly titled, Bachelor Pad. I braced myself, certain to find poems based on a slew of lusty exploits that would make me, a female reader, cringe. But for Kampa, a poet who won the 2010 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the 2011 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards, the Theodore Roethke Prize, and the River Styx International Poetry Contest, I knew there had to be something more. Indeed, there was. I found no sexy poems, no seductions or conquests, not even a heaving bosom. Instead, I discovered a mournful speaker unlucky in love. The second poem in the book, ‘Plenty to Him,’ starts out: ‘Already there were signs / That they would not have sex or something more –’ followed by poems in which the speaker recognizes what he’s lost upon seeing an ex-lover at a laundromat, or else comes to terms with his endlessly poor luck ‘After you’ve met / The wrong girl yet again.’ Kampa’s narrators are not all about lament and self-pity. Many poems have bright moments of revelation in which the speaker tries to make sense of his continuing single status: ‘That being full depends on who is filling.’ Or, that ‘crumb by crumb we find / Pain is the bread we eat,’ giving him hope to keep looking. Kampa uses the formal aspect of his poetry to do what Linda Gregg calls combining the tools of poetry "with the meaning to make us experience what we understand." Bachelor Pad is for anyone who has ever lost a lover – or more than one – and who seems fated to be alone. For anyone who has ever masked heartache with a shrug and a smile, who doesn’t give up hope, these are poems full of solace. This is a book for the bachelors – and bachelorettes – past and present." – Marci Calabretta

    To read the whole of this review, please click: Full Review of Bachelor Pad

  • Trying to Pick Up Women at the Craft Fair

    What’s more humiliating
    Than knowing you would fake
    A love of hand-carved dolls
    To score a chance at dating
    Some hottie? One mistake
    In terminology
    (They’re “figurines”) and she
    Will stop returning calls.

    Probably you can think
    Of worse scenarios
    Only because you’ve tried
    The “Pardon me (blink blink),
    You’ve such a chiseled nose,
    Are you a model?” ruse
    Too often when you cruise
    Car shows. Access denied.

    Then there’s the Roadside-Crouch-
    And-Clutch-Your-Guts routine.
    Maybe some cute chick stops,
    You end up on her couch,
    But there it ends: the scene
    Breaks when you ask to crash
    At her place. Your panache
    Gets you one stiff hug, tops.

    Still, here you play the part
    Of tchotchke connoisseur;
    You chat girls up, they let you
    Down. Somewhere near the heart
    Of Aisle Sixteen (a blur
    Of boxwood jesters, grooms,
    And tipplers), one broad booms
    She doesn’t really get you.

    Your last chance drives away.
    Your failures are a ton
    Of woodchips. And the deft
    Strokes of the knife? Each day
    That pares you down to one
    Less possibility
    For happiness. You see?
    Life whittles. You’re what’s left.

    The Waywiser Press

    Wasted Time

    You’d think that after New Year’s boozy kisses,
    Back-slapping, and effusions in confetti,
    The last hors-d’oeuvres and passes at the Mrs.
    Beneath the hanging cardboard amoretti,

    Time would relax, agree to stay a while,
    Hang up his sandals, lay aside his shift,
    And sleep it off until the chamomile
    Light has suffused the blinds; but Time’s too swift

    For that one, you palooka, look at how
    Steady he is, rock-solid, never mind
    The rocking on his feet, he’s sober now,
    He’s at the door, he says, You’ve been too kind,

    I’ll take the wheel, stop whining, fairest creatures,
    Been doing this since Remus founded Rome,
    And concentrates on hardening his features,
    Jangling his keys, ready to drive us home.

    The Waywiser Press