Faculty Profile Stephen Stepanchev

“Nothing happens here except for the wind that blows…”

That sentence from Stephen Stepanchev’s poem “In Our Village” isn’t quite right. In Hastings-on-Hudson, he is happening. In fact, he just happens, on his 100th birthday, to have published his 13th book, River Reveries.

It’s 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).

Stepanchev’s poems begin as jottings on paper scraps, typed up on his Phillips typewriter. He deftly handles haikus, villanelles, and free verse “in a world where no one writes in hexameters,” as he observes in “Fire Island.” His lyrical loveliness, immigrant empathy, and sympathetic narrative voice emerge whether the image evoked is his niece’s cat, diced galaxies, lilacs, cops, a shoe-box theatre in Flushing, or the loves of a lifelong bachelor.

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 “the proper way of looking at the world,” of “making it come alive,” metaphor by “beautiful metaphor.” He makes it sound easy: “You link them and it becomes a poem.”

In River Reveries there are more life-affirming lines than “death’s opening door” thoughts, though certainly any centenarian has earned the right to reflect on those, and he does. In “Upturn,” he upends a death cliché:

But this is the season of the resurrected bulb,
When the dumb awake, stretch, and speak in color.
Someone is pushing up tulips.

One poem in River Reveries recalls his “dream-swept years” in the Serbian village of Mokrin, from which he and his mother emigrated to Chicago when he was seven. “I didn’t know a word of English,” 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’s degree. Drafted during World War II, he served in the Army’s Adjutant General’s Office, returning from Europe with a Bronze Star, then earning his PhD at New York University.

For QC’s 50th anniversary in 1987, Stepanchev edited The People’s College on the Hill. He found it marvelous that Walt Whitman “had such a close connection” 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 “Words for Queens College,” he summoned his kindred spirit:

Walt 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.

Stepanchev recalls of his 36 years teaching at QC that “the students were very bright, very able. I taught them how to write poetry and a course in the history of American literature.” Joseph Caruso comes often to visit his former teacher. “We talk about his poetry and my poetry, and world events,” says Stepanchev.

Very little deters Stepanchev from rising well before dawn to read and to write. It’s not insomnia, he explains, but that love of light. He clearly foresees a 14th volume. “I just feel it’s necessary, because I want to make a really complete oeuvre to leave behind about things I’ve experienced. There isn’t much that I haven’t experienced.”