10 Questions for Stephen Kampa
- By Marissa Perez
"Later he won't recollect who wore cardboard crowns--
as always, he stayed sober, the dork calling cabs
for lightweights who couldn't pace themselves till midnight."
—from "Size 12," Volume 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
As I child—was I in fifth grade?—I invested significant energy in writing a novel. It was full of dragons and dwarves and mountains, and I no longer remember if it was midway through the first draft or upon completing it that I realized I had tried to rewrite The Hobbit. In retrospect, I take satisfaction in knowing I was a character in a Borges story.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
I hope to steal a little something from everyone I read. More often than being aware of my influences, I am aware of the people I wish I could filch from more persuasively: Marianne Boruch, Robyn Schiff, Arthur Sze, James Tate, and Dean Young, for example, are all marvelous, but I cannot yet figure out how to steal licks from them without simply parroting them.
What other professions have you worked in?
I have worked as a front desk clerk in a timeshare resort, a bagger of bread and kneader of dough in a family bakery, a clueless temp, an administrative assistant at Chicago-Kent College of Law, a communications director in a midwestern Baptist church, an editorial assistant for a small non-profit press, and a college-level teacher, among others, but some of my favorite work has been as a musician. I have been playing for twenty years, and in addition to doing plenty of gigging and a bit of travel, I have appeared on several albums. I play harmonica, so most of the work I do is blues-centered, but I have also played with a top 40 cover band, fronted an eclectic quartet, and contributed to an Americana variety show. Once I did an island music gig even though I have never listened to any island music. Once I played a weekend in the Florida panhandle with a neo-soul outfit. In college, I played in a blues cover band that somehow ended up opening for Elliot Smith when he played a surprise gig at the 400 Bar in Minneapolis. (So, yes, I met Elliot Smith.) It has been a ride.
What inspired you to write this piece?
This poem is a dream poem. I do not work frequently with dream material, principally because I rarely remember my dreams; however, when I do remember one, I try to be swift and decisive about drawing from that dream-world, which strikes me as rich and idiosyncratic. Perhaps I also do not work frequently with dream material because I find dreams so saturated with feeling that it can be difficult to capture their emotional intensity in the waking world.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
In graduate school, one of my teachers, the brilliant John Irwin, told me there are two kinds of poets: poets who take a walk and can tell you everything they saw, and poets who take a walk and can tell you everything they thought about. We were discussing John Hollander, and Irwin identified Hollander as an everything-he-thought-about poet. I recognized, perhaps to my chagrin, that I, too, am usually far more attentive to headspace than to landscape. All of this is to say I do not find place a particularly generative element. I mean, I live in Florida. I would be limited to parody.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I find silence particularly helpful when writing, but when music is called for, I tend to choose wordless kinds. Classical and jazz are good. Recently, I was the poet in residence at the Amy Clampitt House in Lenox, MA, and I found Bach, Beethoven, Biber, and Boccherini the most enlivening. I guess I was bedazzled by the B’s.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I almost wish I did because rituals can be a means of harnessing power, and it might be nice to think one could harness the power of poetry. Alas, I am not sure I have found such a harness. I am mildly superstitious about pens—when I find a model I like, I buy a pack and use them as though I am on a hot streak—and generally I read when I am stuck on a poem, hoping the good words will filter into me. I like to have a cup of coffee or tea at hand. I like to look out a window. But these do not sound like rituals to me; they sound like ambiance or, perhaps more accurately, creature comforts.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I am going to leave music out of the equation here other than to note I have been practicing in that medium almost as long as I have been writing poetry. To be frank, if I were going to practice in another medium right now, I would like it to be cartooning. I grew up on "The Far Side" by Gary Larson, and I think "Calvin and Hobbes" can be as wise as (and perhaps wiser than) many poems. Political cartoons fascinate me. The cultural criticism of cartoons fascinates me. I think I could be quite happy, in one of my branching universes, as a cartoonist.
What are you working on currently?
I am working on my fifth book, which I am tentatively calling Please Leave Blank and which I believe wishes to celebrate epistemic humility. Having grown up in an evangelical tradition that stresses apologetics, I might not be an intuitive spokesperson for epistemic humility, but I have found a rich orthodox tradition that stresses apophatic theology, mysticism, and mystery, and I have come to find these sustaining in the same way that the wordlessness of music sustains me. The book includes a healthy selection of poems in counted verse, which is still fairly new to me. During my residency, I also started to take more seriously the possibilities of prose poems.
What are you reading right now?
I have the bad habit of reading too many books at once, but the three that jump out right now are The Gift by Lewis Hyde, The House of God by Samuel Shem, and Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. That last one—recommended by poet, translator, editor, and good friend Todd Portnowitz—begins with beautiful character sketches of mid-twentieth-century eccentrics in New York City. Having just returned from six months of keeping my library in storage, though, I am also excited to begin digging through my unread books and revisiting old favorites. I have missed you, Albert Goldbarth. You, too, Heather McHugh.
STEPHEN KAMPA is the author of three collections of poetry: Cracks in the Invisible, Bachelor Pad, and Articulate as Rain. He also appeared in Best American Poetry 2018 and Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. He teaches at Flagler College.
