Guest Post: A.E. Stallings, a Review by Christine Swint

A.E. Stallings, poet, translator, and classics scholar, has released her third collection of poetry, Olives (Triquarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 2012). Her previous collections include Archaic Smile of Apollo (1999), Hapax (2006) and The Nature of Things (2007), a translation of the works of Lucretius. She has won major poetry prizes for all of her books.

Olives follows on the heels of Stallingsʼs 2011 awards: a Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

In a video clip on the MacArthur Foundation website, Stallings gives the viewer a glimpse into her life as a poet and translator. She explains how she came to be involved with poetry, and she goes on to describe some of the themes she explores in her poems: love, time, mortality, and childhood.

A large part of Stallingsʼs gifts as a poet and writer stem from her ability to marry sound and form with the stuff of everyday life and myth. She writes primarily in traditional, received forms such as blank verse, sonnets and villanelles, among others.

For example, in “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther” (originally published in Poetry), she playfully asks, “Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,/the booze and the neon, the Saturday nights?”

Through the three repetitions of the first line that the triolet requires, Stallings creates a wistful question that ends up equating the Devilʼs songs with an average personʼs idle singing. Any of us might “hum them to while away sad afternoons” (23). The reader is not only similar to the Devil–we also feel empathy for him.

The current issue of Five Points (14.3) features an interview with A.E. Stallings by poet, literary scholar, and creative writing professor Beth Gylys.

At the end of the interview, referring to Olives, Gylys asks, “Are there any poem titles or poem subjects you might mention as a way of priming us for the collection itself?” (40).

Stallings gives an enlightening reply: “There are two title poems to the collection. In the one on the back of the book, I play around with the sounds and letters of Olives, which ends up containing so much.”

She goes on to say that “Olives” both as a poem and as a title for the book, is “anagrammatic” and refers to both “O Lives” and the fruit, olives (41).

In the interview, she explains that the book is about her life in Greece, where she lives with her husband, journalist John Psaropoulos and their children. The poems, ripe with imagery of the Greek countryside, explore marriage, childhood, and the land where these familial relationships unfold.

Although there are fewer poems in Olives dealing directly with myth than in Stallingsʼs previous collections, she does offer the reader “Three Poems for Psyche” (41–45), persona poems in three different voices, each persona giving Psyche advice: “The Eldest Sister to Psyche,” “The Boatman to Psyche on the River Styx,” and “Persephone to Psyche.”

As with all of Stallingsʼs poems based on myth, she is able to make the characters come alive. We feel connected to Psyche through these other voices–she gains relevance as an emblem of our own lives. We put ourselves in Persephoneʼs place when she dryly remarks to Psyche about Hades:

This place is dead–a real dive,
Weʼre past all twists, rewards, and perils.
But what the hell. We all arrive.
Here, have some pomegranate arils.

Another of Stallingsʼs gifts is her wit. Of course we feel the poignancy of Persephoneʼs plight, but the humor adds an ironic tone that makes the myth and the poem sound contemporary and fresh.

A.E. Stallingsʼs poems first in appeared in Five Points Spring/Summer 1999, when she won the James Dickey Award for “Clean Monday” and “Airing.” As Stallings states in a note about the poem, “Clean Monday marks the beginning of Greek Orthodox Lent. Children celebrate this holiday by flying kites” (79).

Paired with this poem is “Airing,” four quatrains in which the wind causes the drying laundry to take the shape of shrugs, hugs, an argument, and then at the end, as the door slams shut, peace, the surrender of a white flag–from the start of her career, Stallings has created the magic of sound and metaphor.

For more reviews of Olives, read Abigail Deutschʼs remarks on The Poetry Foundation website or Jeremy Telmanʼs review in Valparaiso Poetry Review.

Guest Post: Christine Swint Reviews Natasha Trethewey’s “Thrall”

Coinciding with Natasha Trethewey’s appointment as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States is the launch of her fourth collection of poetry, Thrall (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

In a June 7 press release from the Library of Congress announcing Trethewey’s appointment, librarian James H. Billington describes Trethewey as an “outstanding poet/historian in the mold of Robert Penn Warren, our first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry.”

Trethewey, who has named Warren as an important poetic influence on her work, introduces her collection with an epigraph from Warren’s poem Audubon: “What is love?/ One name for it is knowledge.”

One of Trethewey’s great gifts as a writer is her ability to take her personal history and connect it to the histories and memories of a people. In a Five Points 11.3 interview published soon after her third collection, the Pulitzer Prize winning Native Guard, Southern literature scholar Pearl McHaney says to Trethewey:

You dedicate Native Guard to your mother, in memory, and the book is the elegies for your mother, the weaving together the personal and the public histories, the erasures and the monuments and the memorial. (101)

In a historically symmetrical manner, Thrall begins with “Elegy,” dedicated to her father. Because her father, poet Eric Trethewey, is still alive, the reader enters this poem as a meditation on the past and how we reconstruct our histories with language. She addresses her father, “I can tell you now that I tried to take it all in/ record it/ for an elegy I’d write–one day–” (4). The speaker admits that even in the midst of a fishing trip with her father she is thinking of the metaphorical possibilities that will later become her poem.

Miguel de Cabrera, De Español y Negra, Mulato

After this introductory elegy, the poems explore paintings and other historical documents pertaining to imperialism, and specifically, to the Casta paintings from colonial Mexico. These paintings depict a byzantine taxonomy of blood lines based on how close or how distant the subjects were from “pure” Spanish blood. Theoretically, the closer one was to Spain, the closer the relationship to the crown and by extension, to God.

“On Captivity,” which first appeared in Five Points 11.3, begins with an epigraph from the journal of Jonathan Dickinson, an English Quaker living in Jamaica who was taken captive by native people living in what is now Florida.

The first stanza again quotes from Dickinson’s journal, citing his term for his captors: “savages.” Indented cinquains wind down the page as if to imitate the hissing of this word as well as the Biblical serpent mentioned in the second stanza. The speaker questions the legitimacy of the word “savage” as the captives are stripped of their clothing, the thin veneer that distinguishes them from their captors, with only “the torn leaves of Genesis” to cover their “secret illicit hairs” (13).

“Geography” (45) and “Rotation” (55), both first published in Five Points 13.3, return the reader to the speaker’s personal history. As we progress through the collection, we understand more about the speaker’s relationship with her white father, who leaves the family in 1971, as written in “Geography.”

In each of the three parts of “Geography,” the speaker pinpoints a memory as if it were a photograph, describing the location and the circumstances surrounding a particular instance in time. But in each section, the father recedes from the daughter. The speaker characterizes him as a pretend hitchhiker, “a stranger/ passing through to somewhere else.”

Woven together with this mournful passing of their relationship are the ekphrastic interpretations of the Casta paintings. Through the juxtaposition of meditations on imperialism, the reader gains entrance into Trethewey’s personal history as well as the history of the colonies, and by extension, the emotional tenor of our contemporary times, in which we as a culture still discuss, or refuse to discuss, the effects of slavery and patriarchal, top-down histories.

In “Knowledge,” the speaker unites the two main threads of the collection, combining an ekphrastic contemplation of an 1864 chalk drawing by J.H. Hasselhorst with a quotation from her father. The poem is an emotional description of a dissection in which the speaker identifies with the woman on the table. She exclaims, “…how easily/ the anatomist’s blade opens a place in me” (29). She goes on to reveal her father’s words about her: “I study/ my crossbreed child” (30).

In an interview in Sycamore Review 24.1, Trethewey explains her process of writing “Knowledge,” stating, “I quote the line from a poem of his [her father’s], and later she says, “I’ve been hearing that poem all my life, but not until that moment did I realize why it’s always bothered me. It was both the Enlightenment thinking, and the idea of ‘crossbreed’ ” (33). In the poem, dissection becomes a metaphor for the father/daughter relationship that wounds the speaker. Like an anatomist who studies a specimen, the father has studied his daughter.

Thrall is an important book. Not only is it an example par excellence of Trethewey’s superb craftsmanship as a poet, but it also shows the relevance of poetry in how our truths are told, how important it is for poets and readers alike to re-examine the past in order to understand the present.

More Reading

For further interpretation of Thrall and more sample poems, read Elizabeth Lund’s review in The Washington Post.

Eric Trethewey’s essay “Combinations” in Five Points 12.3 is a memoir about the early years of his career, his family life, and his marriage to Natasha Trethewey’s mother Gwen.

 

Christine Swint is in her final year of the M.F.A program in poetry and creative writing at Georgia State University, where she also teaches first-year composition and introductory poetry writing. Her writing interests include modernism, Eastern philosophy, folktales, motherhood, and ekphrasis. Her poems have appeared most recently in Ekphrasis and Hot Metal Bridge. She is the winner of the 2012 Agnes Scott Writer’s Festival award in poetry, judged by Joy Harjo