Stallings Biography

The Poetry

Reception

From the beginning of her career, Stallings’s work has been met with broad acclaim. Her first book, Archaic Smile (1999), won the Richard Wilbur Award. Poet X. J. Kennedy praised it for:

...poems, charged with so much energy that it practically kicks the reader in the teeth… A high degree of metrical skill informs her work, and a rare ability to retell classical myths in lively style” (Kennedy).

4 First book, Archaic Smile

As one might expect of a classicist, Stallings, indeed, shows an inherent and frequently exercised capability with form and Greek mythology. But her poetic choices and subjects are also multitudinous:

Despite the familiar themes, it is hard to generalize about the subject matters, tones or voices in Stallings’s poem[s]. She can pretty much do it all, and she does. She can write about mundane topics, but her poems are never trivial. She has written light verse but none of her poetry is slight. She has poems about children and childhood, but she writes for adults... Although she writes in form, Stallings invents new stanza forms with great facility. The resulting verse is disciplined yet unconstrained (Telman).

These traits seem always true of Stallings’s poetry such that the arc of her work – from Archaic Smile (1999) to Like (2018) - is subtle. There is less shift in direction then there is a deepening, enlarging, and refining. She tells what she sees through the caring prism of her poetry, embracing the curious rituals, tender flesh, and careless shrapnel she encounters. While there is obvious evolution in form, depth of insight, and a savant’s ability with language, her poetic voice and concerns remain satisfyingly recognizable. Interestingly, she has noted that her, “process or methods don’t change much, even if the results do.” She adds, “I just set about writing individual poems, not books of poems… That they are divided up into “books” is arbitrary…” (Byrne).

Overview

Most striking about the poetry of A.E. Stallings is its currency of emotional and intellectual discoveries. Her fearless observations and provoking visions embody a nearly dangerous awareness and an acute poetic sensitivity that fissions moments or articles or histories into a place or thing or figure of expanded meaning. Through her poetic sensibility she is able to realize an essence for herself and for us—an essence without which we would otherwise be left only with that sense of the world and ourselves as obdurately functioning.

Stallings lifts us out of our acid-flushed existence as exemplified in her poem “Homecoming” which appears to be a scene fashioned around Odysseus’ return to his wife Penelope. Its searing beauty in music, form, and language finds and penetrates us, but its underlying advocacy for the sincerity of minor works woven into warm purpose birth hope:

He loved to watch her at the loom:

The fluent wrists, the liquid motion

Of small tasks not thought about,

The shuttle leaping in and out,

Dolphins sewing the torn ocean. (8-12)

“Homecoming” (Archaic Smile)

“Dolphins sewing the torn ocean” is a heartbreakingly beautiful image. It seems to capture the small, artful, evanescent elegance of the small tasks that imply a principled life while they are fatefully, beautifully fading. This image may owe a nod to Yeats (“…That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea” – “Byzantium”) but it is hers in its fearless swell. It is an example of the luminous, but grounded poetics readily mined throughout her published works.

With an armed, well-machined intellect, and from a galaxy of, and contortionist’s flexibility with, language, she seems unbounded in finding and completing valuable poems. Consequently, the lanes and tributaries of her work are many: the indelicacies of marriage, the risk and love of children (her own and those caught in the world’s political teeth), and a cache of mirrors, trains, and cemeteries. In addition, there are three recurrent concerns throughout her poetry: Greek Mythology, insomnia, and the intruding magic of things lost and found.

Lost and Found

The seemingly talismanic meaning of objects – obscure or common – attracts Stallings’s focus frequently. It’s as though she functions with the managed gluttony of a combined curator-hoarder who knows – in the locus of this urge toward objects – meaning and purpose lurk in their underlying state: if we can just learn their language.

This inclination may first arise in her poem “For the Losers of Things” (Archaic Smile) where the losing, shedding of both common and vital objects is important to the, necessarily risky, maturing into a new life, a breaking through of the chrysalis to a place where the speaker’s life likely (hopefully) belongs:

She is shedding belongings wherever she goes—

Necklaces, combs, virginity, lovers,

Bus-money, phone numbers, gifts and their givers,

In the laundry, perhaps, in the pockets of clothes, (1-4)

…..

She is ranging abroad in her new skin. (16)

But these objects being shed still need to be housed in a personal museum of the personal past like this poem. Well curated museums are important for access to understanding. This nearly unbidden preoccupation with the museuming of objects is reflected in her poem “Ubi Sunt Lament for the Eccentric Museums of My Childhood” (Hapax):

Orphaned oddments crammed

in university base-

ments, in corridors

of state capitols,

identified by jaundiced

index cards, I think

about you now— (1-7)

This poem embodies the poet’s broad urge toward peculiar pieces and their collection, pieces that exert a gravitational pull and seem, foundationally, important to her impulse to puzzle meaning.

This instinct advances in “The Erstwhile Archivist” (Like) where she begins to realize herself as an archivist, as an incipient finder, examiner, chronicler:

The summer that I turned nineteen

And felt grown-up in love,

I took a job as an archivist

Sifting through a trove

Of photographic negatives

From old insurance claims

And portrait studios: a million

Faces sans the names, (1-8)

…..

The summer I turned archivist,

And filed the past away

For some frown-lined researcher

On some far winter day. (33-36)

Whether this is literal or metaphoric autobiography, the urge toward the archival – to find, catalogue, and ponder – seems real, and even practical, for the poet’s work. And it is not untoward to posit, at the poem’s end, that this is the poet herself who now is the “frown-lined researcher” attempting to weave meaning with words through the implications and emanations of objects and our personal channeling of all that is found and felt as so much drifts by us.

This preternatural archiving and careful examining by Stallings crescendos – mythically – in the aptly titled poem “Lost and Found”, a long, precisely orchestrated, intriguingly proceeding poem of thirty-six octaves. The poem engages slowly but soon builds narrative and sumptuously imagistic momentum. There are points in the poem where one is drawn hungrily to the next verse to find what will be revealed or to revel in the self-reliant portent of its exciting imagery. “Lost and Found” conveys a story arcing from the real but commonplace domestic trial of a child’s lost Lego piece – fraught with a child’s unchecked crying – then elevates into a panoramic, rich, mystery-ridden dreamscape to conclude at an earnest acceptance of spare passing sweetness and a re-commitment to a poetic credo (found again).

Unable to find the Lego piece - “I crawled all morning on my hands and knees” (I.1) - and she cannot stop: “That night I was still seeking in my dreams” (VI. 1). Here the poem enters a fantastic place:

It seemed I searched, though, in a dusty place

Beneath a black sky thrilled with stars, ground strewn

With stones whose blotting shade seemed to erase

The land’s gleam (like a tarnished silver spoon);

A figure neared, with adumbrated face,

Who said, “This is the valley on the moon

Where everything misplaced on earth accrues,

And here all things are gathered that you lose. (VIII. 1-8)

A place where “all things are gathered that you lose” is a place at the heart of the archivist’s desire. Some of the lost artifacts gathered here include elements as broad as misspent time about which the stranger admonishes – sounding at times like the spirit of Christmas Past – “’With scything hands you hasten through the week/…Haste…is Violence in Greek…/’Minutes are not lost…but spent’” (XXI. 3, 4, 8). We learn also that a woman’s lost beauty may resurface in a daughter’s countenance – “Some things fetch up on the bright shores of the world,/Once more, under a slightly different guise” (XXIII. 3-4). But then, most seriously, we must confront tragically differentiated piles of baby teeth – mounded by macabre tooth fairies:

“Each baby tooth, deciduous but bright,

Stands for a childhood rooted in delight,” (XXV. 7-8)

“But those that come here stained, starting to rot,

Are childhoods that are eaten up with sorrow,

Eroded by the acids of their lot,

And others’ sins they are compelled to borrow.” (XXVI. 1-4)

This is an important find for the archivist, learning that all in the land of the lost is not exclusively about losing. There are implied choices that bifurcate the fate of these children. And choice is the determining aspect of this embracing poem. The realities of daily frustration – remember how the poem opens – and this seemingly ineluctable sorrow for the terrible destiny of huge quadrants of children brings the poet-archivist to a choice, an inevitable “to be or not to be” place: “At last our path came to a spring whose gleam/Provoked my thirst” (XXVII. 1-2). While our poet, frankly, appears to have already made the affirming choice, other kindred, historical artists have not, and the stranger warns:

…”Many are taken in,

Some poets seek it, thinking that they fear it,

The reflectionless fountain of Oblivion.

By sex, by pills, by leap of doubt, by gas,

Or at the bottom of a tilting glass. (XXIX. 4-8)

“But you, you must remember, and return,” (XXX. 1)

Her choice, of course, is to continue to be an attendant archivist, poem-writer. As the morning alarm pierces – “I heard a distant siren pulsing, shrill” (XXXIV. 4) - she returns to the tedious, frequently disappointing and threatening, real world. She returns from this visitation cautiously, but purposefully, renewed, seeking to spend her minutes properly:

I saw the aorist moment as it went—

The light on my children’s hair, my face in the glass

Neither old nor young; but bare, intelligent.

I was a sieve—I felt the moment pass

Right through me, currency as it was spent

That bright, loose change, like falling leaves, that mass

Of decadent gold leaf, now turning brown—

I could not keep it; I could write it down. (XXXVI. 1-8)

She will write it down. And there is no more important archivist than the poet who valiantly looks, finds, collects, and then writes it down, accepting our lives’ inconclusiveness, misery, death, and moments of bejeweled light. Of course, she does this at a personal cost, collecting more painful than abiding experiences as the loose change of moments pass through her, which she transmutes into the marvelous, steady museum of her poetry with poems elegant and brave in their clarified uncertainty.

Conclusion

We are fortunate that A.E. Stallings and her poetry grace the world. Stallings does the work of the poet by entering and participating in the world with a vulnerable receptivity and honesty and, through the alchemy of her extraordinary talent, produces poetry that touches, hurts, informs, and invades beautifully with the purest tactics of real human literature. While it is an academic desire to do so, her poetry should not be assigned or confined to nomenclature (a formalist poet; not formalist enough). There is no doubting her credentialed education, powerful intellect, work ethic, and her obvious and varied inventive ability with poetic form (and that form’s additive contribution to the power of her poetry), but it is how she intrudes on herself and on us with her caring, sometimes inflamed, vital poetic findings that are the important nuclei of her work.