I S S U E 9

The Poem’s Apprentice

Camille Ralphs speaks to A. E. Stallings about the development of her craft 

Since the publication of her first collection of poems, Archaic Smile (University of Evansville Press, 1999), A. E. Stallings has sustained a reputation for formal breadth and depth of knowledge, and for finding the mythical in the domestic and bringing the epic home. (Even William Logan has appreciated ‘the multitudinous sea of her vocabulary, the tracery of her meter and laciness of her rhymes’, in the New Criterion in 2019.) As an American poet, classicist, critic, and educator currently based in Athens, she is perhaps ideally placed to write about presiding communal anxieties—her work has also turned its careful, caring eye on the refugee crisis as the poet has seen it unfold in Greece—as well as residual personal guilts: in spite of its erudition, her work is never alienating. There can be no doubt as to her seriousness and loyalty to her aesthetic commitments; her career is an affirmation of both the intrinsic value and the positive consequences of doing something well and in line with one’s own inclinations. Her books include the Pulitzer Prize-shortlisted Like (FSG, 2019) and a translation of Lucretius. Her selected poems, This Afterlife, will be published by Carcanet in the UK and FSG in the US this winter. 

How has your knowledge of classical languages influenced the way you write in, and think about writing in, modern English?

I suspect it mostly shows up in my interest in etymology and the roots of words. In a way, my desire to learn classical languages came from my interest in English (Anglophone) poetry—learning them seemed like it might be a good way to train to become a poet, and I have always had an interest in ‘Classical reception’, even before I knew that term. I had an epiphany as an undergraduate reading Catullus that you could sound very modern while working in strict meter. I like the physical structure of a stanza and the tensile strength of a metrical line, and how you can pour contemporary English into these strong, flexible vessels (to mix several metaphors). And my interest in ancient Greek has contributed to an interest in modern Greek and modern Greek literature, which I think also somewhat contribute to what I feel are the possibilities of the poem.

In one of her A Don’s Life blog posts, Mary Beard quotes a Cambridge Classics paper from 1993: ‘Dryads, Hyads, Naiads, Oreads, Pleiads . . . Does “classical influence” in modern poetry always come down to snobbery and elitism?’ Perhaps ‘always’ is a bit strong, but does it?

No! I completely reject that idea. Classical myth and culture, for instance, are immensely popular and part of popular culture in a lot of ways—from Percy Jackson to Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Kids love the stories and my sense is that mythology units in school are always, again, very popular. Perhaps coming at this as an American makes a difference—there is less of a sense of class privilege in, say, taking Latin in high school? (Which, by the way, I did not do—I had the opportunity to, and my dad wanted me to, but I took Spanish instead, and started Latin from scratch in college.) Philip Larkin’s remark on dipping into the myth-kitty has sometimes given me pause—there is a certain kind of easy Classical mythology persona poem one doesn’t want to do too much of, and I am sure I have occasionally been guilty of—but I also feel as though there are infinite ways to make it fresh, and even to make it raw. When I first read Valzhyna Mort’s terrific (in both senses) ‘To Antigone, A Dispatch’ in the New Yorker I think I must have actually gasped. 

I think a lot about how Elizabethan poets acquired their skills. At school, they’d have learnt rhetorical techniques and worked through the fourteen steps of the progymnasmata. How important do you think rhetoric is, or should be, in poetry today?

I think it could be more important. When contemporary poems fail, it is often for lack of rhetoric. There is a lot of the performance of sincerity, and a kind of ‘here, see, I am very sensitive and I suffer’ (the poetry version of the ‘trauma plot’ perhaps). I mean, sometimes this works and is effective, especially with some attention to language, but I like to see poems using a variety of strategies. I suppose there is a general idea among writers that skill and technique is somehow antithetical to feeling and authenticity. Imagine if musicians thought this. I think of the joy and passion and sparkle—the wit and invention—of something like Herbert’s ‘Prayer (I)’, and how its depth is part of its height. 

You currently run a workshop for migrant women in Athens. Presumably this is very different to working with students at a university, but are there any similarities? Or does this workshop have entirely different goals?

In some ways the goals are very different. Most of the women in the workshop at the Melissa Network for Migrant Women (who are from a range of places: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Congo, Cameroon, etc.) are not aiming to be writers. So it’s perhaps more therapeutic in its aims, a break from more ‘practical’ courses. (Asylum seekers are forced to tell their life narrative over and over again in a certain way as part of asylum interviews, and are not viewed as three-dimensional people—so this workshop is a way to explore all aspects of life, joy as well as fear, humour as well as sorrow, to explore good as well as bad memories.) When I work with students in the US—or in workshops like the one I used to run in Greece with the Athens Centre—my focus is more on forms and technique, as well as analysing poems and seeing what makes them tick. Although, that said, one of the activities that has worked very well at Melissa is group pantoums. Many women are from cultures where poetry is more respected than it is in the Anglophone world, and have a good bit of poetry memorised, so even while not aiming to be poets, they often surprise me with their poetic sense. There is also the poetry that is found in translation—an everyday Persian idiom, for instance, translated directly into English can have its own poetry. Some of my favourite moments in the class occur when we are all stumped about a translation or women discuss among themselves differences between dialects.

You’re known for being an expert formalist, and you use a huge range of poetic structures in your new Selected Poems (including the more experimental approaches employed in ‘First Love: A Quiz’, ‘Four Fibs’ and ‘OLIVES’). How did you go about developing this aptitude?

I love trying out new techniques or forms. I like testing their strengths and possibilities. But I think it is also about trying to trick my conscious brain with some sort of intellectual problem so that it is engaged in that puzzle and frees up the subconscious to do other kinds of work. It is possible to set problems that are too elaborate and simply become exercises. 

Was that a concerted effort, a deliberate development of a set of skills, or did you get to this level just by following your inclinations and (as they say) ‘loving the process’? 

Yes, I think I did make a concerted effort to develop skills. (Also, I am not even sure I ‘love the process’ . . . I almost find writing poems gets harder and harder—maybe, rather, I like the challenge?) I didn’t go the MFA route, which, at any rate, was not the obvious one when I was starting out—I think I had only heard of Iowa. So I went about this in a haphazard, idiosyncratic, intense way, lacking other guidance. I treasured essays by poets when I stumbled on them. For a time I was obsessed with Robert Graves’s The Crowning Privilege; I happened on John Crowe Ransom’s essays at a used bookstore (and later lived in the basement apartment of John Crowe Ransom’s niece’s house!); I read T. S. Eliot’s essays, the ones I could find. I sometimes set myself deliberate exercises in, say, alliteration or assonance or enjambment or meter. I imitated. I memorised poems. I wrote a fair amount of light verse (which is, of course, unforgiving as regards rhyme or rhythm). 

From the time I was fifteen I was sending out poems for publication (and sometimes they were accepted), and was studying, for better or worse, the poems that were being published in the major and minor journals of the time. Early on, I took to heart a suggestion by Dana Gioia that contemporary poets writing in form needed to explore rhythms other than the iambic; I was lucky as a baby poet in Atlanta to be accepted as part of a group of older poets who ran readings at the Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, and among these was Turner Cassity, whom I had written a fan letter to early on when I came across his poems at the local library, and who showed me you could still write in meter and rhyme and be modern. He also showed me, with his poem about the Fox Theater in Atlanta, that the epichoric could be poetic. Maybe because I spent a lot of time in elementary and high school as a fairly serious music student, I thought practice, scales, and etudes were important. I should add that my English teacher in high school, Mary Mecom, who was terrifying and strict, but who could also be very kind and encouraging, had us write proper sonnets and taught us to analyse poetry for ‘sound and sense’—the title of our excellent textbook by Laurence Perrine, which I still own. I do think that the poems featured in that textbook probably form some kind of ur-anthology at the core of my own personal collection of favourite or critical poems.

Is writing in rhyme, meter, and form easier or harder than writing in free verse? Why?

I do occasionally write a free verse poem—I wish I were able to do more of it. Often something that starts as free verse ends up as blank verse. Even the free verse poems flirt with iambic pentameter. I guess I just generally find that I need the pressure or resistance that form gives to jog my brain into the unexpected, into the surprise. So for me I would say writing good free verse is harder.

Similarly, in ‘Presto Manifesto!’, you write that ‘Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say’, which reminds me of something Auden once said: ‘Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self’. But are there any merits to Ginsberg’s ‘first thought best thought’ as an idea?

Yes, both impulses have their place, and one of the things about maturing as a poet, perhaps, is to know when to trust which. There are poems that arrive nearly complete, out of the blue, that should not be much tinkered with. And there are poems that can be wrested out of passable mediocrity into something greater by effort and restless experiment and revision. Revision is sometimes my favourite part: there is very little in poetry writing as satisfying as changing a word or a rhyme and having the poem suddenly come to life. But there is maybe nothing more thrilling than having a perfect line or ending come from out of nowhere and be right as it is.

In ‘The Freedom of Amateurs’, you write that ‘Writing for any audience is the wrong way to win one’. What’s the right way to win one?

Once you have been writing about poetry for a long time and giving interviews and so on, you realise you have a lot of statements out there on the internet or in print that you are not sure you can stand by! I guess what I meant is that you have to write for your ideal audience—which might be your own circle of friends, or maybe it is your favourite dead poets—but that by doing so you will ensure that your poems will find their readers. If you are trying to make your poems accessible by dumbing down your vocabulary or references, you are missing out on exactly that (quirky?) readership that will appreciate those very things. You can write to please certain editors or workshop leaders or critics, you can write in the mannerisms of your time (in a way, of course, we can’t help being of our time) and the award-winning poets of the day, but that is ultimately limiting. I sometimes think about Sappho and wonder what her ‘readership’ or audience would have reasonably been, composing in her dialect of Greek on an island. A couple of thousand at most? And yet we are still reading her, and she somehow speaks directly to us. But for all that I say these things I also do feel a kind of responsibility to an audience, to entertain, to move, to honour their intelligence.

You, like many notable contemporary poets, have received a few mixed or negative reviews. What’s a good way to respond to a bad review?

Any review is time and attention that someone has spent on the work. To even get the column space, as a poet, is a kind of honour and should not be dismissed. That said, I have had some doozies. I got a very negative review of my first book from Robert Mezey, a poet I admire (he has since died) and later became friends with, at least online. I was not formal enough, I think, was the gist! But a lot of friends wrote to me indignantly, and there were a number of letters to the editor of the magazine that printed the review defending the book, so I guess the book generated a mild frisson of controversy in that circle, which ultimately is a plus. Very occasionally a mixed review will simply get something wrong—like complaining that some prose poems started to scan and rhyme too much like sonnets—when the poems were in fact regular sonnets that had been unlineated into prose. (The Mehigan sonnet, as I call it.) In those cases, one isn’t too concerned. We all miss the odd trick. I don’t have a thick skin exactly; I allow myself a day of wallowing self-pity after a rejection or a few days (or a week) after a negative review, but I have a stubborn streak. So a negative review might inspire me to be defiant and write more or submit something, or, if deep down I feel the criticism is touching on something I am myself not happy about, I try to write better. I almost feel there is nothing a reviewer could write about my work I have not thought myself at some point, but you write the poems you can write and try to publish the ones you are happy with. With the selected, This Afterlife, perhaps more is at stake. One feels more exposed. It’s a lifetime’s worth of work so far rather than a debut, so perhaps there will inevitably be a desire on the part of the occasional critic to take one down a peg? But you do always hope for that astute review that not only sees and appreciates what you are consciously doing, but shows you something about your own work that you hadn’t known, that teaches you something about yourself. There is nothing more gratifying than that, and it is truly encouraging—it gives you the courage to recommit yourself to the project, to remember the joy of discovery and setting out.

Camille Ralphs is poetry editor at the TLS.