Meet Our Late-Blooming Ekphrastic Poet, Bob Stephens.

Our long-standing tradition of giving a member the mic before our keynote speaker helps us get to know what our colleagues are working on. Our 5+5+5 guidelines (5 minutes of backstory, 5 minutes to read, and 5 minutes of Q&A) help emerging writers polish their professional skills.

Bob Stephens will take the Member Spotlight before our February speaker, Gala Russ. Get tickets here.

Bob Stephens is a late bloomer. A native of California, he has a Bachelor of Science in English (creative writing) from six years at the University of Wisconsin Madison, twenty- four seasons. He has had an unintended interesting life.  He wrote very little until his mid-fifties. He has been published in several anthologies of the Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Synchronized Chaos, and in several anthologies of the California Writing Club. He was the coordinator and moderator of a small writing group in the pandemic years. He is very curious and challenges himself with the haiku format and the ekphrastic process. He experiments with various forms, subjects, perspectives, and some introspective work. His photography is sometimes a muse. A thousand words my have been written of a place or thing, and still there is another story.

“Don’t write your angst of being alive, write your memories of being alive.” — Bob Stephens

Intsagram: @rwstephens1
FB: Bob Stephens
Bluesky: @PoetStephens

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Silhouettes and Rain

Sweetgums burn brightly, some slowly, 
Flutter, flit, float.
Resting crispy leaves
On concrete, cement 
The creamy gray of paint samplers, 
The kind you grab a few at a time for your child’s first grade art project in the spring.
Reds, burnt, brick, orange
Layered and singles,

An Autumn rain on the Pacific Coast
It is not heard on the roof or windows 
It is heard falling off edges
To reach its own level.
Damp misty spiting
Constant. 
Not fleeting supercell storms,
Sometimes day after day.

The glorified rain stopped 
A day or two of sun
Sweetgum leaves still cover
The gray putty, cleaned,
Except under the pieces of a sweetgum’s cloak
There, stained a brown rust, purple tar.
Silhouettes of the leaves in the rain.

Over time the stain
Dissolves, ghostly, and is gone.

— Bob Stephens

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And now a few questions:

What inspires your writing?

Anything. If I find it curious, things, places, and can find a connection, it might find that it is being used as a prompt. Subjects of my body of work are diverse. Some may say that it is random. In some way it is. I am a visual person. I write some nature inspired poetry. I write about unusual things I see, though they may not be to others, often the odd things, unexpected things, and banal things. Sometimes a line that flops out of my mouth or someone else’s.

Where do you write?

In a lot of places and environments, though most is written on my back deck on a tablet. Final edits and revisions are usually on a desktop computer. I have written in cafés, in my head at work, volunteering for the Bay Area Book Festival, on BART and Amtrak, even in a car (no I was not driving),then transcribed when I get home. I generally don’t write in very busy places, loud spaces, though I did write two decent ekphrastic haiku during an MRI scan of my brain.

What style do you prefer to write in?

I like writing ekphrastic poetry and free-form, though I would find it hard to do ekphrasis on a thought or ideas—that is not what the process of ekphrasis is about. Ekphrasis isn’t a form. It’s a process, how and what you see and what impact it might have on you, the writer. It is a process that can be expressed in many formats: sonnet, quatrain, limerick, haiku. The idea is sensory and visual, as old as Plato. Today, ekphrastic poetry has become primarily associated with visual art, paintings most often, though there is the famous urn… I have experimented writing ekphrastic poetry about a piece of music, found objects, M C Escher. Unlike Rocky Leplin, I do not write in rhyme. 

Meet Bob at our February ZOOM meeting with Gala Russ!