Stephen Meats
Kansas "Shoptalk" Poetry Series

Featuring Kansas’ First Poet Laureate
-- Jonathan Holden -- Distinguished Professor of English, 
Kansas State University

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Stephen Meats was born in LeRoy, Kansas, and raised in Concordia, Kansas.  He graduated from Concordia High School in 1962 and attended Kansas State University for three years before transferring to the University of South Carolina in 1965, where he earned his bachelor’s (1966), master’s (1968), and doctoral degrees in English (1972). 

He has taught at the U. S. Air Force Academy (1968-1972), the University of Tampa (1972-1979), and Pittsburg State University (1979-present), where he is currently University Professor and Chairperson of the Department of English.  Besides scholarly articles, editions, and reviews, Meats has published one book of poems, Looking for the Pale Eagle (Topeka: Woodley Press, 1993). 

L-R ... moderator Jerry Reeck, Stephen Meats, Jonathan Holden

His poems and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, including Kansas Quarterly, The Little Balkans Review, Albatross, The Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Blue Unicorn, Tampa Review, Arete: A Journal of Sports Literature, Hurakan, Flint Hills Review, Prairie Poetry, Dos Passos Review, Angel Face, and The Laughing Dog, and in the anthologies, A White Voice Rides a Horse (1979) and Kansas Stories (1989).  Since 1985, he has been poetry editor of The Midwest Quarterly.

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Kansas Poet Laureate Jonathan Holden on Stephen Meats

Back in the early nineteen seventies, there was a poetic movement started by Robert Bly entitled Deep Image poetry.  This poetry was indebted heavily to the psychology of C. G. Jung and to Jung's theory of archetypes -- "archetypal images which recur in dreams."  In Jungian terms, images of birds symbolize rebirth.  Meats' title poem for his volume, published in 1993, is about this:

Looking for the Pale Eagle

The world is winking
at us all the time.

Take for example
that red-winged blackbird
we have admired and
grown tired of admiring
poised on the up-curve
of cat-tail stems
in every watery ditch
from Idaho to Florida.
One day on a drive to Wichita
I saw that thousandth
or ten thousandth blackbird.

From below its crimson epaulet
a glint of yellow winked at me.

Sunlight sang
across ditch water.
I remembered the polished turning
of plowed ground near Dyersburg,
the light-edged scales
of a moccasin sunning
on a cypress log
in the  Combahee,
the pale eagle rising
in the moon's face.

Wind through the car
window laughed at me.
See--it was always there.
All you had to do
was look--and look--
and keep on looking.

This beautiful poem seems almost tailor-made to carry out the Jungian plan for art to provide archetypal experience and healing insight.  Perhaps the most healing poem in the book is,

Seeing My Father Again:
 
I've seen my father once
in the ten years since
he turned on his side
that bright October morning
and died without a sound.

I heard his muffled call
from somewhere in the house
and went to find him.
. . . He had lost
his glasses, he told me,
and needed me to find them.
And besides, it's lonely here,
he said . . .
I did the only thing
that I could think to do.
Even though the bed was narrow
and I had on coat and tie and shoes,
I climbed under the cover
and held him till we fell asleep.

A spooky poem, poignant in its authenticity.  But Looking for the Pale Eagle is filled with such poems, validating C. G. Jung's metaphysical system, his "religion," his [Jung's] belief in typological synchronicity.
       
   -- Jonathan Holden