Author Archive
A.E. Stallings
Blog and Blat
The Blog has been my companion for six months, padding after me in the house, wanting his daily rations of nourishment and attention. His tail thumps on the bed when I wake up in the morning, and he happily guides me to my desk, where I feed him and give him a scratch behind the ears. Good Blog.
A.E. Stallings
Tsiknopempti
Today is… Tsiknopempti here in Greece! No, I don’t expect that to ring any bells for most of you. The word literally means, “the-smell-of-roasting-meat-Thursday” and, in the preparation for the fasting of Lent (the Eastern church is on a slightly different calendar), people all over Greece will fire up the coals and put slabs of meat on the grill, or join friends in crowded and overbooked tavernas for a raucous night of overindulgence. The sublime aroma will rise up to the heavens to be savored by God–or gods–and people get to dig in to the left-overs–that is the actual flesh. In other words, it sounds suspiciously like pagan sacrifices, when, again, the gods enjoyed the fragrant smoke from fat wrapped around thigh bones, while people got to enjoy the rest of the lamb or goat or calf. Though the Athens of Pericles seems infinitely far away in the mists of time–as difficult to envision as a technicolor Parthenon–somehow the Greece of Homer always seems to be right around the corner.
A.E. Stallings
Night Rhythm
Mention of “The Sheep Child” here has called to mind all kinds of recollections from the Atlanta of my youth, in which, among literary circles at least, James Dickey loomed large. Everyone had a tale, either of generous encouragement, or booze-infused arrogance and aggression–sometimes both. I myself had witnessed his (probably inebriate) overbearing on a literary panel (he insisted on answering every question from the audience, even if specifically addressed to another panel member), but also treasure a letter he typed (how quaint typing now seems!), addressed “Dear Mr. Stallings,” (sic) when my manuscript was a Yale finalist, encouraging me to keep at my work “for me, for poetry, and for Yale” as if he were Coach Dickey and I a quarterback…
A.E. Stallings
Lightning and Lightning Bug
I have been thinking about diction lately—the quandaries of word choice. Maybe it is partly to do with my 3-and-a-half–year old son’s vocabulary becoming richer and more sophisticated, and one finds oneself pushing him gently towards one word choice over another, though both might be more or less intelligible in context. Diction is often what makes or breaks a poem, though it can seem one of the least important of its mechanisms. Perhaps since John Ashbery made jarring registers of diction—from Elizabethan to contemporary slang and pop references–so much a part of his style, it has become a common-place of contemporary American poetry. Well-handled, mixed registers of diction can be playful, rousing, provocative; though it seems to me mixing registers is often adopted by poets as a postmodern tic, and that when it is applied glibly, the effect is of a poem channel-surfing, or too busy talking to itself to listen.
A.E. Stallings
Snow on the Parthenon
It has been snowing—yes, snowing!—the past two days in Athens, and the concrete city of horn honking and jack hammers, illegal parking, protest-marches and garbage collection strikes, has suddenly been transformed—briefly— into something nearly silent and pristine. The Parthenon, sugar-dusted, gleams against a bright blue sky. Youths normally dressed in black and sulking in cafes with cigarettes and cell-phones are out in the streets, grinning and hurling snowballs at one another. Small children are looking at the wondrous stuff often for the first time in their lives or short memories. (Northern Greece—an altogether wilder and woollier place—is quite used to being snowed in; but here in Attica it is a rarity.) It is laiki day—farmer’s market day—but only a few vendors have trundled in from the frozen countryside, bearing oranges and leeks and potatoes.
A.E. Stallings
Edward Lear
I’ve been thinking about a post on Lear, but a couple of entries have pushed it to the fore… Steve’s which mentions the ghazal, and Daisy’s on Rexroth in Rome. And I have been thinking too about poet-painters and painter-poets. And it ties in as well with some of my recent entries on children’s literature–Lewis Carroll, Dr. Seuss. One of the pleasures of having a small child is revisiting the literature of childhood in the presence of those fresh eyes and ears, remembering the intensity of childhood listening and reading, which is on a different, almost magical level, it seems to me, from adult reading–a complete lack of sense of divison from the narrative and the words, a total unity with it. The parent who takes the small amount of time required to memorize “The Owl and The Pussycat”–if it is not already lodged in the memory–so that it can be pulled out of a hat to calm or entertain or entrance, will never regret it.
A.E. Stallings
Didn’t-go-to-the-AWP blues…
As far as I can tell (apologies if I missed somebody), I am the ONLY current Harriet blogger not to have been at AWP in NY. What did I miss? Was there a secret meeting of Harrieteers? What did go on at all those parties? What was the most fabulous reading I missed?
So here’s a post for everyone who WASN’T there. What are your excuses? Your reasons?
A.E. Stallings
Dr. Seuss
Daisy’s post with its reference to Dr. Seuss’ The Foot Book reminds me of how important an influence Dr. Seuss is–acknowledged or not, consciously or unconsciously–to metrical poets of my generation. He gave us part of our ear for rhyme and our ear for rhythm. Sure, he is usually metrically quite regular, but the rhythms are highly varied–monosyllables and polysyllables, heavy and light nuggets of sound–as they are distributed over the metrical feet, in a breezily and distinctly American vernacular. All you need to do to appreciate Dr. Seuss’s nimble prosody is to pick up any other contemporary book of children’s verse. So much of it is so lackluster–full of clunky, predictable rhymes, barely scanning, and larded with filler. (Julia Donaldson, of Gruffalo fame, is a rare exception, though not quite in the same league.) When I try to read the books of plodding prosody to our toddler, he frowns a page or two in and announces, “The End.”
Of course, Seuss is subversive too–what could be more subversive in a Puritan society than to announce to kids that “Fun is good”? We romanticize childhood to the extent that we shun adulthood, but being a child is also to be helpless and in the power of others (as anyone with a toddler can tell you, this is extremely frustrating!). Yet “A person’s a person no matter how small.”
A.E. Stallings
Boredom and the Imagination
Boredom is the mother of imagination. How many of us began to be writers–even if it was telling stories to ourselves or other children–because of a lonesome childhood, or a childhood of sickness, or long afternoons in a house of grownups and grownup books, or later, endless tedious classes, where one’s own imagination was the only escape.
Boredom is endangered. We live in an age of passive entertainment, and the mind is seldom if ever allowed to wander in search of its own self-made pleasures.
A.E. Stallings
Seferis (more Greek Anthology…)
Have ya’ll had enough of Greek poets yet? Hmmm. Probably so—this is the last one, promise. I am working on a review of George Seferis’ A Levant Journal, translated and edited by Roderick Beaton, due… erm, in a week or so I think. One of the curiosities of being an ex-pat poet is that people assume I am an expert on Greek poetry. And I guess the result is that I am becoming one!
The question that keeps niggling in the back of my mind about Seferis (1900-1971), one of Greece’s two Nobel laureates (here, by the way is his Nobel speech) is—is Seferis a great poet? He is clearly a major poet and an important poet and a good poet, as well as a major critic. But is he a great poet? And what do I even mean by that? Frankly, can I, not a native speaker of Greek, even judge?
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