STEPHENS, Alan (Archer)

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Nationality: American. Born: Greeley, Colorado, 19 December 1925. Education: University of Colorado, Boulder, 1946–48; University of Denver, Colorado, A.B., M.A. 1950; Stanford University, California; University of Missouri, Columbia, Ph.D. 1954. Military Service: U.S. Army Air Force, 1943–45. Family: Married Frances Jones in 1948; three sons. Career: Assistant professor of English, Arizona State University, Tempe, 1954–58; assistant professor, 1959–63, associate professor, 1963–67, and then professor of English, University of California, Santa Barbara. Awards: Swallow Press New Poetry Series award, 1957. Address: Department of English, University of California, Santa Barbara, California 93106, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

The Sum. Denver, Swallow, 1958.

Between Matter and Principle. Denver, Swallow, 1963.

The Heat Lightning. Brunswick, Maine, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 1967.

Tree Meditation and Others. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1970.

White River Poems. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1975.

In Plain Air: Poems 1958–1980. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1982.

Goodbye Matilija. Albuquerque, New Mexico, Living Batch Press, 1992.

The White Boat and Some Other Poems. Kalamazoo, Michigan, TheBuckner Press, 1995.

Away from the Road: Poems. Albuquerque, New Mexico, LivingBatch Press, 1998.

Other

Editor, Selected Poems, by Barnabe Googe. Denver, Swallow, 1961.

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Critical Study: "Matthew Flamm Praises Alan Stephens's Tree Meditation and Others, " in Poetry East (Chicago), 34, fall 1992.

Alan Stephens comments:

The longer one goes on writing poems the more clear it becomes that the best work is done only with the help of a stroke or two of good luck.

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Alan Stephens is a nature poet. His main interest has been to render nature faithfully, but as a realization of a meditative response that answers to the sensibility in natural objects. He seeks an effect similar to that of Wordsworth's early "Influence of Natural Objects." Stephens has remarked about his own poems that they are "descriptive meditations rather than meditative descriptions …" To this end he wishes his poetry naked, the form invariably open, the expression spare. His utterances are, however, either clipped directions, like a dramatist's for the setting of scenes, or discursive meanderings, too often simple only for being denuded of figurative speech. An example is the following stanza from "A Breath":

A quiet, cool, spring morning—
the sun up, and its light
crossing things without emphasis,
merely bringing out the pale colors.

Of course, the limitations of this manner are sometimes quite successfully accommodated to a larger context, as in "Home Rock."

While society and socially conscious or sophisticated speech are almost entirely absent from Stephens's quiet poetry, his work is effective in those instances in which domestic man is projected against a natural backdrop. In such cases he usually works with a motif of black and white, of darkness and tenuously comforting light. Meditating on the omnivorous incursion of dark space even into his own beard, the speaker of "To Fran" achieves this minimal consolation:

it must be we belong in it—at once remotely
and intimately; the way a sheepherder's fire at night belongs
in the distance on a desert upland.

And returning from the moonlit night and "the black shadow of the house," the speaker of "Sounds" reports that "I go back in, and hunch over / The familiar hiss of my pencil tip / Racing across the lighted page."

—David M. Heaton