Stephen Kampa

September 25, 2019

“To Keep the Day” by Stephen KampaPosted by

Stephen Kampa

TO KEEP THE DAY

What can we say? It took so little time
There at the end: we watched a record earthquake
Bury schoolhouses full of silent children,
Three hurricanes demolish our vacation
Spots—hectares of trees flattened like slicked hair,
Cities in the Atlantic half-Atlantised—
And epic wildfires conflagrate a state
To slideshow pics of slag-gray parks on Slate,
And those were just the isolate disasters,
Ones we were glad weren’t happening to us.
Our autumn bottomed out at ninety-plus
Degrees that year; we died from eating lettuce
And spinach, apples, cheese, and milk; we shot
Each other with our stockpiled guns for reasons
As elemental as inclement seasons;
We even had an asteroid near-miss—
“It Could Impact Next Year!”—as though all this
Were not enough, as though we didn’t know
What this all meant when emptily we watched
A paper bag elected president.

But there were things to do: diverting apps,
Web recipes for perfect Caesar wraps,
Hot singles trends on iTunes and on Tinder,
A Netflix mail-bomb flick (Return to Cinder)
Rotten Tomatoes called “both dull and tasteless,”
Bevies of beauties—clotheless, witless, waistless—
To aid in masturbation, and our regnant
Divas so publicly, divinely pregnant …
Is it a shock with so much on our hands—
The flash mobs to promote our favorite brands,
The BOGO drinks at joints with open mics—
We flailed? So little life, so many likes.
We googled “moon like blood.” We skimmed the hits.
Our search results had strange prerequisites,
And though we double-clicked on “The End of the Age,”
We only made it partway down the page.
We saw it all—that was our paradigm—
But we saw everything, and all the time.

What else was there to do? The night before,
We toggled our alarm clocks from the news
To triplicated beeps, popped one more beer,
Made sure to bolt the door, and went to bed
When we no longer could resist the yawning.
We’d get the gist by reading the reviews.
When that day came, to keep that day from dawning,
We stirred and chose the last thing we could choose,
Glad—grateful, even—someone had designed
A be-all, end-all button. Groan. Stretch. Snooze.

—from Rattle #64, Summer 2019

__________

Stephen Kampa: “Lately I have been very aware that poetry is one way we tell the future what it felt like to be in the present. The past two years in particular have felt decidedly apocalyptic to me, and I have been wondering what explanation we might offer the future for the way we chose to conduct ourselves during a difficult, perhaps even crucial, epoch. I suspect none of our explanations will comfort them.” (web)

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April 22, 2015

“How to Meet the Love of Your Life: A Basic Guide” by Stephen KampaPosted by

Stephen Kampa

HOW TO MEET THE LOVE OF YOUR LIFE: A BASIC GUIDE

There are many ways to meet the love of your life, and no one
way will be the right way for everyone. This handy guide
will provide examples of some of the ways
you could meet the love of your life.

Chapter 1: Thinking About Personality

One way to meet the love
of your life is suddenly to find yourself in a deserted
research facility specializing in robotics
just as a sentient fungus interested in robotics has infiltrated
the facility and begun to create theriomorphic fungobots
to take over the world. If you meet anyone
at this facility who is not a robot, and both of you survive
your escape from the facility amidst the explosions,
the person you escape with will be the love
of your life. BONUS TIP: Your fellow escapee also should not
be a fungus.

Chapter 2: Thinking About Values

Another way to meet the love of your life
is to hang around well-dressed people
who look like they might be carrying guns. Odds are someone is
a spy, and if you hang around long enough, this someone
will start to do spy things such as shoot lots
of expendable people, drink lots of expensive beverages, explode
lots of mainframes, power stations, and/or mountainsides,
and because you were hanging around, this spy
will either feel compelled to protect you, push you to the ground
before explosions, and touch your excitables after it
is all over, or shoot you. If your new interest
does not shoot you, this is a spy for the forces of good and the love
of your life. BONUS TIP: The easiest way to distinguish
good spies from evil spies is that good spies
hit everyone they shoot at.

Chapter 3: Thinking About Baggage

Yet another way to meet the love
of your life is to travel through time. Whether you
travel through time with the love of your life
or in search of the love of your life, time travel guarantees you
will find the love of your life, not least because certain
varieties of time travel only allow you
to arrive at your destination naked. Blazing naked into the past
amidst a host of electrical disturbances, explosions,
and spatial displacements that sometimes
destroy whatever was occupying that particular part of the space-
time continuum before you blazed naked into it leaves
an indelible impression on whoever wasn’t
spatially displaced and sees you naked. If you travel through time
and manage not to write yourself and the world you left
completely out of existence by introducing
into a previous position on the timeline a new variable, even
the slightest of which can irrevocably alter a timeline
the way an insurance agent in Slippery Rock
can sneeze a tsunami into being from halfway around the world,
then whoever joins you during your time travel will be
the love of your life. BONUS TIP: If you travel
into the future, you will have much less to worry about since
you will only be writing the future of the future
out of existence.

Chapter 4: Thinking About Little Surprises Along the Way

As you can see, there are
many ways to meet the love of your life, more than we have
time to examine. Let us look at one last example.
Suppose you are a lifelong telepath
with the power not only to read minds but also to predict events,
and you meet a person whose mind you cannot read
and whose future you cannot see. You will be
nonplused, then, since you will not know what that person is
thinking and will not be able to tell if that person’s
future is a happy one and involves you
or is an unhappy one but involves you or is an unhappy one
and does not involve you or, worst, is a happy one
but does not involve you, and since
you will be unused to such imprecisions, such precariousness,
you will be mightily interested in this mysterious person.
You will imagine hundreds of futures together
because you cannot see the one that awaits, and you will make
a game of trying to guess what that person is thinking—
like, when you go out for ice cream, you’ll think,
half the time this inscrutable cutie pie orders pistachio gelato,
and the other half this miraculous cryptolectician orders
chocolate-coated almond and vanilla, um, uh,
and you’ll feel it’s pretty much a crapshoot and say, “You want
some pistachio gelato?” and your new interest will say,
“Actually, I’m going to have butter pecan,”
­­­and you’ll think, scorch my back porch and call me Stan DeLott,
I sure didn’t see that one coming! At this point, you are
sure to have more questions, but since this is
only a guide for meeting the love of your life, we cannot tell you
what to do after you have met that non-robot, non-fungal,
not-shooting-you-in-the-face, not-causing-you-
to-write-yourself-out-of-the-timeline, unsusceptible-to-your-ESP
love of your life; you will have to figure out the next part,
and what to do about it, by yourself. BONUS TIP:
There is always the chance the one whose future you cannot see
and whose mind you still cannot read will turn to you
beneath the spilled gypsophila of the stars
and say, “You know, I can see the future. Ever since I was a child.
It’s like stumbling into a room whose door you don’t know
how to close, a room and a door you didn’t know
were there, a room full of objects you wish you could obliterate
from your memory. After a while, you stop asking
whether the future you see happens
because you saw it and did something to try to change it,
or whether it happens because you saw it and did
nothing. Yours is so happy. I am not in it.”

—from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Stephen Kampa: “Sometimes one writes to find a way of saying that becomes a way of seeing, to better understand the world, to remember the lost or to hope out loud or to beat back the darkness, and sometimes one writes because one has just seen yet another movie in which a sweaty fathead hunk improbably ends up with a witty, intelligent bombshell because they both escaped from an alien invasion, and one thinks, ‘All right, that’s enough. This is not how people fall in love.’ This poem certainly began as a result of the latter impulse, but I wonder if it didn’t turn into something else, not least because—not being a lifelong telepath with the power not only to read minds but also to predict events—I never saw the end coming until I was there.” (website)

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December 9, 2014

“Cardiac Concussion with Delay” by Stephen KampaPosted by

Stephen Kampa

CARDIAC CONCUSSION WITH DELAY (HEARTS AND POLAROIDS, PLAYLISTS AND TIME)

1

According to Witness Protection
Program copy, they’ve never lost one
participant (who followed the rules),

but they have to say that—who’d accept
protection from a proven failure?
It’s all in the parentheticals:

a sure shortcut to bad behavior
is telling someone how to behave.
I’ve heard a superb urban legend

about a crook who relocated
and was almost immediately
gunned down when he got to town because

he disdained his bland new alias
and picked another, which was also
the name of a famous local snitch—

first henchman he met followed him home,
plugged him in the chest, and blew apart
the new life he’d failed to learn by heart.

2

I sat at a bar once with a girl
who’d been unceremoniously
dumped after a long affiancement,

and she described it as being kicked
in the chest by a horse. A heartthrob’s
the forerunner to a heartbreaker,

she said, and I forgave her her self-
pity, even though I was drinking
a beer right there beside her. I knew

about survival: she was lucky
not to have died from that blunt trauma.
(So much for her young German dreamboat.)

I thought to comfort her with Carruth’s
lines about the million abuses
hearts survive; I chose a science fact.

The best candidate for replacing
the human heart is the pig heart. For
some of us, this will be an upgrade.

3

I’d like to double-click on a new
life but know it wouldn’t overwrite
the old one. Maybe you think I’m just

joking as you imagine scrolling
through the titillating checkbox lists
of personal attributes you could,

through the miracles of an extreme
makeover and cheap gene therapy,
select—at last, the hair you’ve always

envied, the hazel eyes, the dream-job
or -wife, the childhood you never had,
and better yet, the fine character:

the patience, the grace, the selflessness—
of course, you can admit how absurd
this is … absurd, yes, but am I wrong?

Memory’s the chief mechanism
of providing us with a lifelong
sense of humility: as soon as

you’ve congratulated yourself on
your tasteful solo, you remember
all the times you overplayed, and right

as you acknowledge the lucent depths
of your compassion, you bump open
that heavy psychic drawer of trifled

hearts, your collection of amorous
gaffes, miscellaneous erotic
misdeeds—an arsenal of shameful

quasi-romantic panty antics!—
and charitable failures. Tell me
you wouldn’t want to pick a new life,

as you’d pick a mail-order bride or
genetically engineered baby,
when faced with the person your child-self

never imagined becoming yet
somehow became. You’re your own double—
convincing, sure, in the externals,

but fundamentally flawed in more
important respects, the ones that would
distinguish you from doppelganger

impostors with good improv lessons
and thick files of sure-fire you-isms—
you’re disguised as your better self,

and worst of all, you know why, without
thinking twice about it, you are not
who you meant on your best days to be:

With practice, anyone can master
sin, and most of us practice. I find
inattentiveness the easiest

place to start: you don’t try to sink to
new depths of peccancy, you simply
drift off on a little paper boat.

4

She said, He may not have invented
carelessness, but he perfected it.
Me, too: Carruth said the word survives,

not heart, although broken hearts do take
their sweet time killing you. Except when
it comes to cardiac concussions—

a kid gets hit with a hard line drive
to the chest, walks ten feet, collapses;
an amateur boxer takes one punch

perfectly placed, drops dead in seconds.
How telling that when I remembered
these incidents, I thought death could be

delayed by days or months: I pictured
a guy walking around aimlessly,
buying a gallon of milk, lost in

the familiar rooms of his life, not
thinking his ticker would give out. Like
a judge or gun, the heart has chambers.

5

And like a paper boat, the heart sinks,
for reasons of which, they say, reason
knows nothing—except the construction

best loved of logicians is the best
one for explaining why, bottom line,
the Witness Protection Program does

lose people: it follows. Given hearts
and Polaroids, playlists and enough
time, participants finally break

the rules: they talk to goons from back home,
they reconnect with lost loves, they’re found
floating face-down in scummy fishponds.

New names, new vocations, new front doors—
none of it matters when confronted
with that urge to escape their escape.

Call their longing an exit wound: it
follows. The hired gun will shoot the same
old man by shooting through the new one.

—from Rattle #44, Summer 2014

__________

Stephen Kampa: “The seed for this poem was a strange phenomenon I once read about known as a cardiac concussion, which I somehow misremembered as involving a substantial lag between a sharp blow to the chest and the victim’s subsequent heart failure. My misremembered version led me into a meditation about the way our heartbreak (and indeed all of our experience) follows us into whatever lives we try to lead thereafter, and these ideas dovetailed nicely with another piece of trivia: that the Witness Protection Program has never lost a participant—according to them—but with that one major caveat of participants having followed all the rules. From there, the poem accreted its layers of strange fact and memory and misinformation. I think that if the poem comes to a conclusion (and it may not be a poem’s job to do so), it has to do with what really follows us throughout our lives: not heartbreak, but our way of responding to it—in a word, our character.” (website)

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June 18, 2014

“What He Must Have Seen” by Stephen KampaPosted by

Stephen Kampa

WHAT HE MUST HAVE SEEN

He’s so old that a man has to stand on either side of him
to prop him up, but he gangles there on his own legs, climbing
the stairs slowly to the baptistery where the pastor waits,
 
youthful and brimming with a swift, practiced benevolence now
that the old codger has finally made up his mind for Christ,
and the man totters on the concrete edge of the pool before
 
he tremor-steps sideways down yet more stairs into the water,
where the standard words are spoken, and he goes under but can’t
come up by himself, so the two attendant men are rushing
 
over to help the pastor haul him to the surface, the prayer
gets said, a little orotund still despite the breathlessness
tugging at the pastor’s voice, then we watch the slow ascension
 
out of the water, and here the sopping man can’t hold himself
upright anymore, he has to put his hands down on the stairs
to steady himself, the other men surrounding him, their hands
 
at his scabbed, purplish elbows or against the small of his back
while we the congregation hold our one long bored breath, praying
that he won’t slip and fall, crack open his spotty pate and bleed
 
into the baptistery, and I think he must have seen this
the moment he decided to be baptized, he must have known
that he would have to clutch arms and rails and even the black edge
 
of the piano to help himself be hoisted out, and all
in front of this smarts-riddled crowd come of age in the age of
the body, the youthful body, the digital blink, the why
 
is he taking so long to get out, knew he would have to put
one knee on a step, a hand, another knee, another hand,
up and up, over and over, and he chose it, chose this path
 
we raced past, our pose his posture, our figures of speech his facts
as he crawls, in front of God and everybody, as he crawls
on his hands and knees into a new life, short but eternal.
 

—from Rattle #42, Winter 2013

__________

Stephen Kampa: “Often we’re taught that to be good, sophisticated readers, we must be aesthetic readers who weigh matters of form and style and ignore matters of fact or (shudder) truth, but I continue to think poetry—at least some of the time—must intersect with our lived lives and battle for wisdom if it’s to be worth our attention. Perhaps a good, sophisticated reader will not care that I saw a baptism much like the one described here, and that I was one of those congregants feeling the awkward discomfort of a very old man crawling out of a baptistery, and that it occurred to me that at some point in your life, you start thinking about the practical matters of weak joints and wet stairs and help at your elbows and how it will all look to a room with its fair share of able-bodied, youthful, impatient people; but I believe that even a good, sophisticated reader can recognize the bravery of an old man who, despite what he must have seen, chooses to be baptized anyway. I think the tacit question the title poses, then, is what else he must have seen to make him willing to undergo what saints and socialites alike might call ‘mortification.’”
www.stephenkampa.com

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September 15, 2013

2013 Rattle Poetry Prize WinnersPosted by

Rattle is proud to announce the winner of the 2013 Rattle Poetry Prize:

Roberto Ascalon

“The Fire This Time”
by
Roberto Ascalon
Seattle, WA

__________

Finalists:

“A Poem for Women Who Don’t Want Children”
Chanel Brenner
Santa Monica, CA

“My Mother Told Us Not to Have Children”
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Lubbock, TX

“Baby Love”
Courtney Kampa
New York, NY

“What He Must Have Seen”
Stephen Kampa
Daytona Beach, FL

“Man on Mad Anthony”
Bea Opengart
Cincinatti, OH

“Laundry List”
Michelle Ornat
Elma, NY

“Man on the Floor”
Jack Powers
Fairfield, CT

“Basic Standards Test”
Danez Smith
St. Paul, MN

“Who Breathed in Binders”
Patricia Smith
Howell, NJ

“Of You”
Wendy Videlock
Grand Junction, CO

 

These eleven poems will be published in the Winter issue of Rattle this December. Each of the Finalists are also eligible for the $1,000 Readers’ Choice Award, to be selected by entrant and subscriber vote (the voting period is December 1, 2013 – February 15, 2014).

Another nine poems were selected for standard publication, and offered a space in the open section of a future issue. These poets will be notified individually about details, but they are: Jacqueline Berger, Daniel Bohnhorst, Jackleen Holton, Sharon Kessler-Farchi, Michael Meyerhofer, Kathleen Nolan, Charlotte Pence, Sam Sax, and Timothy Schirmer.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the competition, which would not have been a success without your diverse and inspiring poems. We received a record 2,105 entries and well over 8,000 poems, and it was an honor to read each of them.

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