Peter Mishler Interviews A.E. Stallings, Author of Like

At Literary Hub, learn about A.E. Stallings, a poet and translator, and a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow and 2011 MacArthur Fellow (among many accolades) who lives in Athens, Greece. Mishler begins by asking about her childhood: "Could you talk about your upbringing, your childhood, and some aspect of it that you think speaks to your life as a poet now?" Picking up there: 

A.E. Stallings: My father was a professor at Georgia State University, my mother was a school librarian; one grandfather was in education, and the other was an Episcopal priest; both of my grandmothers were teachers at one point. So there were a lot of books around, for one thing. My father used to recite a lot of poetry—the usual things, like parts of “Hiawatha” or the opening of “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner,” or “Annabel Lee.” At my mother’s father’s house (the grandfather who was a priest), there were a lot of books, but not a lot of child-friendly books. I read and reread Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, and eventually ended up in the poetry section, which consisted mostly of T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot had some poems on cats—that was promising, and there was a lot of friendly white space on the page. Church itself was probably an influence—the rhyme and prosody of hymns, and the special rhythms and sentences and cadences and mysterious vocabulary.

I read promiscuously as a child, whatever I stumbled on, or whatever was put in my path. There were a few children’s poetry books that were important to me—I would memorize poems and (pompously, no doubt) recite them at lunch. Often they were by a Greek poet known as Anonymous. I liked that some poems were scary or creepy—Edgar Alan Poe existed side by side in that way with Riley’s Little Orphan Annie. In early high school I went through a phase where I had some old poetry anthology I would carry around, because it had a lot of sad and gloomy poems in it. It was from the latter half of the alphabet—the second or third volume—so it had people like Poe and Wordsworth and Tennyson.

I didn’t always understand what I was reading. I remember loving Tennyson’s “The long light shakes / Across the lakes / and the wild cataract leaps in glory” because there was a castle in the poem, and for a very, very long time I assumed a cataract was a kind of endangered highland mountain goat, something like an ibex; imagine my surprise when I learned it was a waterfall. Although I thought I would somehow make a living writing novels (and I have written a couple, which will never see the light of day!), I started publishing poetry early on—in Seventeen magazine and other places from the time I was 16—and I would get these checks in the mail, and it seemed easier in some ways than babysitting. I also had an excellent English teacher in high school, Ms. Mary Mecom. That is an assortment of very different things, but all I think somehow went into my being a poet.

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