Searching for Mr. Stevens

SEARCHING FOR MR. STEVENS is a quest to understand the art and mind of the brilliant but enigmatic Wallace Stevens. An utterly unique figure in 20th century letters, and possibly the only American poet to have a Friends and Enemies Society named for him, Stevens wrote some of the most haunting verse in the English language— as well as some of the most maddeningly obscure. His paradoxical personal and professional life has come to loom almost as large as his poetic achievement, and this book gives ample attention to all these elements. Any lover of Stevens’ work will find in these poems fresh angles from which to explore this dazzling American Master.

General Profile

After studying with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2005-06) at the University of Michigan, Ken Lauter has published poems in a number of journals and several books, including: The Other Side, Before the Light (both from BkMk Press, University of Missouri at Kansas City), The Ghosts - Notes from a Field Study, Songs from Walnut Canyon, and Grand Canyon Days (all from Xlibris). He has also completed more than twenty additional collections. His early work has been compared to Robert Lowell's, and distinguished poet William Meredith (US Poet Laureate 1978-80) has said that Ken's poetry displays "a splendid and various gift."

His awards include a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship, and he has also written several plays, including The Dancing Apsárás - or Captain Willard's Blues, a prequel/sequel to Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Ken has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and worked as a mayor's aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist.

Ken and his wife, Dr. Judy Lauter- a neuroscientist and author of How Is Your Brain Like a Zebra? A New Human Neurotypology (Xlibris) - currently live in Nacogdoches, Texas.

A Micro-Autobiography

ars longa, vita brevis - Horace

My life raft on time's torrents (genetics, sex, love, rock 'n roll, cars, real estate, politics, war, the Third World, global warming, etc.) has been built from words. As a middle-class American, I don't have a story as richly mysterious as the one Nabokov described in Speak, Memory, but as a child I received something I suspect he lacked- unconditional love- and I have taken as my mission, both as a poet and a man, to be worthy of that blessing.

CHILDHOOD

Born on a freezing night in 1943, three months after Pearl Harbor, I grew up in a comfortable two-bedroom, one-bath h