River Reveries<\/em>.<\/p>\nIt\u2019s been three decades since the professor emeritus of English retired from Queens College, where he inspired creative writers for more than a third of his life. The Borough of Queens took note of January 30 as well, proclaiming his 100th birthday Stephan Stepanchev Day to honor its first poet laureate (1997 to 2000).<\/p>\n
Stepanchev\u2019s poems begin as jottings on paper scraps, typed up on his Phillips typewriter. He deftly handles haikus, villanelles, and free verse \u201cin a world where no one writes in hexameters,\u201d as he observes in \u201cFire Island.\u201d His lyrical loveliness, immigrant empathy, and sympathetic narrative voice emerge whether the image evoked is his niece\u2019s cat, diced galaxies, lilacs, cops, a shoe-box theatre in Flushing, or the loves of a lifelong bachelor.<\/p>\n
Just as he delighted in dim sum and Russian pastries while living in Flushing, Stepanchev likes to take a daily walk in Hastings-on-Hudson. Poetry, he says, becomes \u201cthe proper way of looking at the world,\u201d of \u201cmaking it come alive,\u201d metaphor by \u201cbeautiful metaphor.\u201d He makes it sound easy: \u201cYou link them and it becomes a poem.\u201d<\/p>\n
In River Reveries <\/em>there are more life-affirming lines than \u201cdeath\u2019s opening door\u201d thoughts, though certainly any centenarian has earned the right to reflect on those, and he does. In \u201cUpturn,\u201d he upends a death clich\u00e9:<\/p>\nBut this is the season of the resurrected bulb,
When the dumb awake, stretch, and speak in color.
Someone is pushing up tulips<\/em>.<\/p>\nOne poem in River Reveries <\/em>recalls his \u201cdream-swept years\u201d in the Serbian village of Mokrin, from which he and his mother emigrated to Chicago when he was seven. \u201cI didn\u2019t know a word of English,\u201d he notes, but ensconced in poetry and the public library, soon he knew thousands. On a scholarship, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Chicago and stayed for a master\u2019s degree. Drafted during World War II, he served in the Army\u2019s Adjutant General\u2019s Office, returning from Europe with a Bronze Star, then earning his PhD at New York University.<\/p>\nFor QC\u2019s 50th anniversary in 1987, Stepanchev edited The People\u2019s College on the Hill<\/em>. He found it marvelous that Walt Whitman \u201chad such a close connection\u201d to QC. In 2005, the college dedicated a plaque on the spot where the 19th-century poet-journalist-humanist had taught in a one-room schoolhouse. Stepanchev took part in the ceremony. In \u201cWords for Queens College,\u201d he summoned his kindred spirit:<\/p>\nWalt Whitman rises from my boot-soles, takes
My hand, and shows me waves of immigrants
Come to renew the land. . . .
He shows me that life, not death, is permanent<\/em>.<\/p>\nStepanchev recalls of his 36 years teaching at QC that \u201cthe students were very bright, very able. I taught them how to write poetry and a course in the history of American literature.\u201d Joseph Caruso comes often to visit his former teacher. \u201cWe talk about his poetry and my poetry, and world events,\u201d says Stepanchev.<\/p>\n
Very little deters Stepanchev from rising well before dawn to read and to write. It\u2019s not insomnia, he explains, but that love of light. He clearly foresees a 14th volume. \u201cI just feel it\u2019s necessary, because I want to make a really complete oeuvre to leave behind about things I\u2019ve experienced. There isn\u2019t much that I haven\u2019t experienced.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Name: Stephen StepanchevTitle:Professor EmeritusDepartment: EnglishDegree(s): MA, University of Chicago; PhD, New York University “Poetry is \u201cthe proper way of looking at the world, [of] making it come alive.\u201d- Stephen Stepanchev Student Profiles Alumni Profiles Faculty Profiles Staff Profiles\u201cNothing happens here except for the wind that blows\u2026\u201d That sentence from Stephen Stepanchev\u2019s poem \u201cIn Our Village\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"on","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"page_category":[],"wf_page_folders":[137],"class_list":["post-1299","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1299"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1900,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1299\/revisions\/1900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"page_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/page_category?post=1299"},{"taxonomy":"wf_page_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qc.cuny.edu\/communications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_page_folders?post=1299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}