Author Archive
A.E. Stallings
Happy Birthday, E.A. Robinson
I actually had a couple of other posts brewing (or gestating, as Annie Finch put it), but the twin prompts of Ange’s Malice of the Sonnet post and a timely reminder via Writer’s Almanac, made me realize a short post on Edwin Arlington Robinson was in order today.
A.E. Stallings
The Owl
We’ll be spending Christmas in Greece this year, about which I have mixed feelings. Christmas is not a big holiday in Greece or the Eastern church generally, which has its upside (a little less commercialism, though that is changing every year). Easter is what Greeks do best. So I guess I am more inclined to homesickness of a sort. There are things I miss about Western Christmas—mostly the carols. I’ll definitely be getting down to St. Paul’s Anglican church Christmas Eve for the carol service. Meanwhile, I have been cracking open my ancient book of carols from piano lessons of Christmas Past. It was always of course the melancholy ones that appealed to me, the minor keys and the modal tunes. I used to love “We Three Kings” (perfume/gloom/tomb), “God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman” (which never really sounded merry, and which I suppose I associate in some way with the black & white version of A Christmas Carol that used to frighten me a little as a child), and best of all the Coventry Carol, which always gets me (whether it is the lilting lullaby or the slaughter of the innocents I’m not sure… but what a combination.) Likewise with Christmas poems, it is the poems that explore the juxtapositions of the season—pagan and Christian, birth and winter, darkness and starlight, hope and doubt—that attract me, “the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor,” “I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different,” “I should go with him in the gloom/ Hoping it might be so.”
A.E. Stallings
Interview with the Sonnet
Our special guest today is the sonnet. No stranger to controversy, gender bending, political debate, the tug-of-war between the avant garde and the retrograde, the sonnet again finds herself a topic of discussion.
Her Sophia Loren Italian incarnation is top-heavy and wasp-waisted. When showing her English-rose side, she can seem a little more logical and four-square, her Barbour jacket and wellies obscuring her shapeliness (not to mention the Elizabethan ruff). On closer look, though, her graceful measurements, approaching the Golden Ratio, put you in mind of the human face or the Parthenon. The sonnet takes some time out of her busy schedule (she is in the midst of a revival, with talks of a movie deal, hot on the heels of Epic) to speak with Harriet blogger, A.E. Stallings.
A.E. Stallings
Feeling Guilty
I’m guilty—because I quoted Wendy Cope.
I’d wanted something apropos and light—
Now suddenly I’m feeling like a dope.
I thought a credit was sufficient—nope;
I hadn’t asked permission. Now I hope
I haven’t trampled on her copyright!
I’m guilty—because I quoted Wendy Cope.
(I’d wanted something apropos and light.)
A.E. Stallings
Sonnetude
Maybe some people do want to be New Formalists after all. (I’m suddenly feeling better about the label myself!) At any rate everyone, it seems, has an opinion on form. And the poster child of form has to be the sonnet. We are in the midst of a sonnet explosion arguably on a par with the great 19th century revival. (The form had fallen into a rare desuetude during the previous century.) And yes, as in any age, there are slews of bad or boring or in-competent or merely-competent sonnets being written, but many that are exciting, powerful, new. I don’t mean 17-line free verse poems that title themselves Sonnet (that’s another discussion), but the garden 14-line variety, many of which even rhyme, sometimes, yes, even going ABBA or ABAB.
A.E. Stallings
Harvest
Over the weekend we managed to abstract ourselves from the Concrete City, and drive down into the Peloponnese to Sparta. Outside of Sparta, heading up into the foothills of Taygetus, our friend, poet Mark Sargent, has a house with spectacular views of the mountain range (famed as a spot for exposing less-than-perfect Spartan infants in ancient times), and some fine groves of olive trees. We were there to help with the harvest. I’m not sure we were much help in the end (it was probably more help to us not-exactly-new Athenians to get out of town)–we could only stay one full day, Monday, and while Mark was up in the trees cutting out the dead wood, and my husband was raking the olives into nets, I was entertaining a toddler. And also musing on a host of things, of course, including year-end harvests of poems.
A.E. Stallings
Ear Drums
So (as Seamus Heaney might begin this). My husband and I actually went to a concert last night, which we have not done in an age. He had managed to swing tickets to a sold-out Alfred Brendel concert at the Megaron Mousikis, an evening of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart. But we almost didn’t go, because it meant leaving our toddler at home with a raging fever. In the end, his grandmother came over and looked after him, and we guiltily fled for the concert.
Greek audiences are not quiet audiences. They are lively and engaged, even the rather aged, mink-clad dripping-in-Chanel set that is likely to attend a pricey classical concert. Greeks aren’t quiet even in church on the holiest night of the year—there is fidgeting, whispering, the inevitable chirping of cell phones. Still, at a classical concert people know better. Nonetheless, during the first movement of the Haydn, I was actually thinking to myself, you know, this is a pretty fidgety audience (everyone in there seemed to be muffling emphysemic coughs) when Alfred Brendel abruptly stopped playing and announced to the audience that if there was not complete silence, he would not continue.
A.E. Stallings
Why No One Wants to be a New Formalist
Some of the lively discussion at Harriet has alerted me to the fact that people debate over who gets to be in the church of the Avant Garde—who gets to be among the Elect, who gets to be in the Canon Outside the Canon. It is clearly a privilege, a badge of honor. (Maybe humans can’t even join—maybe you have to be a machine!) The rules are necessarily arcane and known only to a few. Odi profanum vulgus et arceo!
Well, New Formalism is exactly the opposite. Anybody can join—you just have to write a sonnet or three, and the rules for that are easier to get off the Internet than directions for making a fertilizer bomb. (No one says the sonnet has to be good.) The club which anyone can join though is the club of which no one wants to be a member. Nobody but nobody wants to be known as a New—or even worse–Neo- Formalist.
A.E. Stallings
Poetry and Prophecy
Poetry and Prophecy
For the ancients, the two were very much intertwined—prophecies were given in verse, and one word for poet in Latin is “vates”—prophet. Both poets and prophets were supposed to be enthused—en-god-ed—inspired by forces outside themselves. (Virgil’s works were even used in the Middle Ages for prophesy by the picking out of verses at random.) This notion now strikes us as pretty quaint. A poet is someone who struggles on his computer with ornery lines, sometimes making a living by teaching others how to wrestle with the same blank screen. The contemporary poet has largely eschewed any claim to the “vatic,” a mantle many poets a generation or three ago aspired to.
A.E. Stallings
No Contest
I, as probably several of my fellow-bloggers here, published my first book as the result of a contest. In fact, the manuscript had been making the rounds for years, ever a finalist, never a bride. By the time it did win, and the $1000 check arrived, I had probably spent–who knows–twice? that on entry fees, copying, and postage. But what to do? It seemed the only way to publish a first book.
That appears to be changing…
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
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RECENT COMMENTS
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Gary Geddes has offered us some amazing anthologies, among other things. Thanks for the reminder. MORE »
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WARNING. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY. DO NOT READ. MENTALLY ILL FAILURE AT WORK. ALERT. ALERT.
Do you know ... MORE »
Eric Landon | 03.18.10 -
I like what Patrick Kavanagh wrote, thanks Don.
Poets don't have careers. That's what everybody ... MORE »
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Hopelessly old-fashioned, yes, but perennially radical. MORE »
pam lu | 03.18.10 -
Gwynn,
You are perfectly right. I should have thought of that. I apologize for that comparison. ... MORE »
Ron Silliman | 03.18.10
Who or what is a poet critic and why is the... (27)
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IN THIS ISSUE: March 2010
A selection of new work from Dorothea Grossman; new poems by Lavinia Greenlaw, David Yezzi, A.E. Stallings, Gerald Stern, and Dan Gerber; translations of Carlo Betocchi, and Mahmoud Darwish; an Editorial on Ruth Lilly; an exchange between Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch; an essay by Chen Li; and a review by Daisy Fried.
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Poetry Off the Shelf: David Baker
Fri, March 26th, 6:00 PM
Open Books
213 West Institute Place
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