G.M. Palmer's Blog, page 9

Literature is about the past

Here's the money shot from an interesting article by a fellow named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It appears in full on Salon which is dreadfully cluttered with advertisements. Go there at your own aesthetic peril.


Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically-minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past — properly handled — is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need techno-autistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.
Since our friend NNT is pretty good at discussing the importance of unlikely outcomes, I wonder what specifically he would say about our American poverty of poetry.

NNT does give us (in Antifragile ) about the best definition of mythology there is:

Mythology is "the expression of historical intelligence through potent metaphors."

Reddit post about The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Come join the discussion! Reddit user StevenStevenson says:


After numerous re-readings of the poem, there are still some aspects of its literal content that I'm not sure I understand.Is he (perhaps hypothetically) in bed with the woman who says, "That is not what I meant, all" (97, 109)? In line 96, she's "settling a pillow by her head".I initially imagined the speaker as an old man in a stale sexless marriage, trying to be bold and bring their sex-lives back from the dead. But he's single (alone), right?Also, I have no idea what to make of the final stanza; It seems to come out of nowhere.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

My impression is that he's imagining these beautiful mythical women, and is interrupted by someone, a human, a woman, maybe. But why do "we drown"?I apologize; I feel pretty lame asking someone to explain this to me, but I think It's such a wonderful poem and it bothers me that I'm unsure about these critical points.
This is the sort of thing I live for! Come participate!

Literary magazines--who reads 'em?

Apart from assuming that the folks at Tin House and Poetry aren't terribly pleased with me or at least my work, I'm rather intrigued by the idea of literary journals.

Here's a lovely list of "The Top 50"

from "Every Writer's Resource" which totally sounds legit, right?

Anyway, it's not a bad list of the big, bad boys in literary magazineing.

But

Who reads that stuff? I mean, a lot of folks read The New Yorker or The Atlantic Monthly but do they read the poems? The short stories?

How many of the 80,000 people with a subscription to Poetry AREN'T poets? I tried to read and review it cover to cover for a few months but it was terribly tedious.

Which probably says more about me than the magazine but as a critic I shouldn't admit that, right?

Do you read literary mags? I do--at least the four that are on the links bar.

But what's the purpose? There's a real question to be asked about what the presentation of and access to literature is doing here in these United States. I suppose the ideal situation would be to convince Disney/Pixar that there should be poems at the start of each film. Anyone have John Lasseter's email handy?

James Franco is supposed to be the modern savior of poetry, right? USC student? Actor-Poet-Heartthrob? Do more people read poetry because of him?

Where are people reading these days? Maybe we can stick poems at the beginning of Fifty Shades of Grey or buy them as Amazon's "Special Offers" for the Kindle. That, of course, would take money--where's the money in poetry?

Was it ever there?

Anyway, the idea of Litmags is/ought (Hume, please) to be to shepherd poetry (and prose) to a wider than the average coffee house audience. If that's true, why don't we call them "reading mags"?

Why isn't poetry better than a movie?

I mean really that's an unfair question.

A movie is a "total work" in all that Wagnerian sense (especially, I would guess a musical specifically but isn't that what a soundtrack does without subjecting us to singing actors?) and a poem isn't.

But do poets even try? Who is writing poetry and who is writing Poetry?

Who is writing because they want to write and who is writing because they want to change the world?

Which is better?

Moreover, what motivated, say, Tennyson?

Here's a fellow that was so damaged by reaction to his second book of poetry that he didn't publish anything for nearly a decade.

I don't think I'll say we should haggle over the "is there a problem with poetry" question. There is. Teaching for 13 years now, I can say for an absolute certainty that there is a problem, in America, with poetry.

Hardly anyone teaches it and children simply fear it--they're not interested in engaging with it at all because they believe it's either some secret language they're not privy to or it's a meaningless drivel of "I think it means XYZ and who are you to tell me my opinion is wrong?"

At any rate they don't read poetry in the main. There are a precious handful of them who do--but most of their appreciation for verse has been withdrawn to lyrics.

I don't doubt that in the 18th century students wrote down the lyrics to hymns and drinking songs and other popular tunes--why wouldn't they? But did they not also commit the lyrics of poems to their memory and graffitos?

So why the stop? What's the problem?

I've explained before that it's twofold: one, we don't teach it and two, poets don't write it.

Now, there *are* poets who are thinking about writing the sort of poetry that would get people interested again in poetry in a general way.

There's work by Rebecca Lindenberg, Jill Alexander Essbaum, A.E. Stallings, Ernest Hilbert, Kelli Anne Noftle, and myself that *point* in that direction--the idea of an openness and accessibility. Hell, the glossary in the back of With Rough Gods is there explicitly because people no longer know their mythology.

But

That ain't it. Rebecca waxed on her facebook the other day about the Victorians having an idea that we as moderns find quaint but is, indeed, of a power. I've discussed this in short with Annie Finch but we've not gotten the chance to sit down and work out an idea.

But I think I'm beginning to see the light as it were. One criticism (?) of my work, especially WRG, is that I'm writing for a very specific audience of intelligent people who love both poetry and mythology and, for those people, WRG is an indispensable work.

Color me shocked but I thought I'd written it for everyone. 9 months into its publication life, however, with a hundred or so books sold and two dozen ebooks ordered, I think my critic was on to something--she is a brand specialist after all. Perhaps I wasn't as accessible as I thought.

I think, maybe, that even us poets who are writing (or think we might be writing or who I think might be thinking they're writing--there's only so much conversation I can start about why folks write poetry and what they intend to do before the other half of the discussion walks away for a different drink--sorry for being such a nerd, guys) for the common man don't have any idea what the hell we're doing.

Which is, in part, why I'm tinkering with children's literature. I think if you can't write a good poem for kids, maybe you're not doing it right. I've written (and written about?) a couple of fairy tales in my beloved Blues-Beowulf meter (4 beat caesura American) but I don't know if that cuts the mustard. Narrative with meter and rhyme might be the order of the day. If it's good enough for Poe and Tennyson why isn't it good enough for us?

Which leads to the next question--at who should we be aiming? Like Jesus says, your measures measure you--who is the paragon we must either Newtonianly stand upon or Bloomianly kick down? It's worth noting that the scientist says we build upon the past and the lit crit guy says we kill it. Who is doing better these days?

So I started this blog with a call to narrative. I keep up the call. But I add: make it for kids and make it rhyme. Let's hook them while they're young.

What's in a blog?

Back when I started Strong Verse (the blog), as a response to a need for a more "soapboxy" forum from Strong Verse (the poetry magazine) I worked on defining and describing poetry worth reading and writing.

Then I started writing some reviews about that, which got me into some pretty lovely places with regards to houses for my work.

It also has been a good exercise in reading.

Several times I've fallen off the wagon into politics and social commentary.

I think I'd like now to try posting daily. If anyone's still reading (folks are on RSS, yes?) then perhaps we'll get a lively conversation going.

Perhaps not.

Harriet (the Poetry foundation) responds to my Dickman/Mayakovsky review.

Well, it seems like my negative review has garnered a bit of notice over at Harriet.

While I'd prefer my several positive reviews to get more traction, it looks like folks only care about controversy. Ah well.

Enjoy!

Review at CPR: Maykovsky's Revolver

Hello all!

I have a new review up at the Contemporary Poetry Review:

All Messed Up: G.M. Palmer on Matthew Dickman('s book Mayakovsky's Revolver).

I hope you enjoy it.

With Rough Gods now on the Kindle!

Hello and happy fall to everyone (or happy spring to our austral friends)!

With Rough Gods is now available for only $0.99 on the Kindle! 
DRM free and share-enabled--spread the news and download the book!

Much love to you all,
GMP

The folks running the London 2012 Olympics are Fascist Ninnies!

N.B.: The following is a bit of a political post, spurred on by the previous actions of the London Olympics folks and this post by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. I mean, really, folks--learn how the internet works and, moreover, respect your customers--that is, your fellow humans.

Hey, 2012 Olympics Schultzstaffel! I'm linking to you RIGHT HERE! You suck and your policies suck and you should feel bad!

Note: I hope the individual athletes do well. I love swimming & gymnastics. But the committee and all those in charge can sod right off.

P.S. Now in September, I can say, sadly, I only got to see water polo. It wasn't a very good summer.

A Review: Olives by A.E. Stallings

(N.B.: my apologies for rescuing another review from development hell. I hope it still makes an impact.
Olives is a great book)
Reviewed:  Olives  by A.E. Stallings. TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern Press, 2012. $16.95
Olives opens at its end, with an eponymous anagrammatic poem:
Is loveso evil?Is Eve? Lo,love vies,evolves....I love soI solve.
More than a collection of great poems, Olives is a book. In Kevin Kelly’s “What Will Books Become,” a book is “a self-contained story, argument, or body of knowledge . . . it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.” Frost declared that from a collection of twenty-four poems the book should become the twenty-fifth. Few books of poetry live up to these ideals. A.E. Stallings’ third book of poetry, Olives, exceeds them, “full of the golden past and steeped in brine.”
“Olives” is also the title of the book’s opening poem:
Sometimes a craving comes for salt, not sweet,For fruits that you can eatOnly if pickled in a vat of tears—A rich and dark and indehiscent meatClinging tightly to the pit—on spears
Of toothpicks maybe,...Paradigmatic summers that declineLike singular archaic nouns, the troopsOf hours in retreat. These fruits are mine—Small bitter drupesFull of the golden past and cured in brine.
Like every poem in the book, “Olives” is both immediately rewarding and able to be endlessly mined. This hymn to “dark and indehiscent meat” is, by its name, a hymn to the book, the collection, and poetry. Olives is an ambitious collection; not merely a smattering of poems published in the last decade or so but a whole built from distinct parts. Its integrity as a book is, in Stallings’ sublime way, a subtle answer to found poetry and flarf. If your idea of poetry is to build something from disparate, tangential parts then Olives is truly “the twenty-fifth poem.” The speaker says “these fruits are mine” and the reader responds—these fruits, these olive-poems, are ours. Craving to be drowned beneath the tide of Stallings’ verse we are submerged “in a vat of tears” as she packs us in a treasury of poetry.
“Jigsaw Puzzle,” reimagines the indehiscent olive-poem as a puzzle unable to shed its “lost borders” and “dizzy ledges.” It should live prominently in every English literature classroom as, like a jigsaw puzzle, it dances between chaos and completion:
First the four corners,Then the flat edges.Assemble the lost borders,Walk the dizzy ledges,
Hoard one color—tryTo make it all connected—The water and the deep skyAnd the sky reflected.
Absences alignAnd lock shapes into place,And random shapes combineTo make a tree, a face.Slowly you restoreThe fractured world and startTo re-create an afternoon beforeIt fell apart:
Here is summer, here is blue,Here two lovers kissing,And here the nothingness shows throughWhere one piece is missing.
The missing piece, of course, is the puzzle, the journey to completion that is our substantive search. The missing piece is what we crave.
By “Recitative,” a story begins to emerge—there is a couple at the center of Olives, “frayed like ravelled sleeves” when faced with the world, but together:
“. . .we were young, did not need muchTo make us laugh instead, and touch,And could not hear ourselves aboveThe arias of death and love.”
As the story progresses, the young lovers of Olives are engulfed “beneath the tide” of “arias of death and love,” emerging after death, hell, and birth.
“Sublunary” is indispensible in three ways. First it cements Stallings as having, among living poets, the greatest command of and fluency with the power of the sound of English. The conflicting consonance and assonance in the first two lines alone and its reflection of the conflict between the speaker and her lover is staggering:
Midsentence, we remembered the eclipse,Arguing home through our scant patch of park. . .
More than anyone else now writing, Stallings’ work sounds good in the way poetry should. Clearly this is a bold statement. Since realizing (some time in between being told so by Michael Hofmann and William Logan and writing for my blog Strong Verse) that my knowledge of contemporary poetry was narrow to negligible, I have increased the scope of my reading, from Christian Bök to Timothy Murphy, from the new avant garde to what Silliman calls “the school of quietude,” from the children of Language Poetry to the Neo-Formalists. 
What I have looked for is not simply writing that “makes me feel as if the top of my head were taken off,” not only writing that is “the best words in the best order,” but writing that successfully juggles sound, image, and form, where each “person of the trinity” informs and enhances the other.
Where I found that was not in the work of Rae Armantrout or K. Silem Mohammed. Indeed, it is only in those whose work is sneered off as belonging to “quietude” that I, perhaps ironically, found good sound. Every poet is interested in “saying something.” Current poets’ experimentation with forms of all kind is perhaps unparalleled in the history of writing. No poet since Ezra Pound walked the earth has dared to ignore image. But since the birth of Rock & Roll whole troops of poets have seen fit to ignore poetry’s sonic nature. Stallings’ work is not just “the best words in the best order” but the best sounding words. Stallings is not only “saying something” with her poetry but saying it in the best way.
The second is that it introduces the concept of “arguing home” that is seminal to the growth ofOlives’ speaker and her lover in the first section, “The Argument.” Set importantly against an eclipse, “Sublunary” demonstrates that these two may be cleaved from their family, past, and home, but will always cleave together.
The third is that in “Sublunary” we are introduced to the dominant symbol of Olives, the shadow. The importance of shades and shadows in the book peaks in the third section, wherein the speaker is revealed as Psyche, who is herself a soul and shadow. Throughout the book, shadows play consciously against the ripeness and fleshiness of by the olive.
On first reading, “The Compost Heap” seems out of place. Lovely, certainly, and, with its line “we left the garden in the fall” it naturally follows “Four Fibs,” a poem about Adam and Eve. Once you have read Olives in its entirety, however, the poem’s place within the greater narrative is solidified. It was upon reading this poem during my second read-through that Stallings made me aware this was no mere collection of verse. Not only does the poem work much better once you know the entire collection, it even points to its own quiet importance as “latent in its heart,” a subtlety of placement not seen since Ariel, which is perhaps the only American book of poetry in the last fifty years that can match the integrity and quality of Olives.
Understanding the deft construction of Olives as a whole, we should all be allowed to grin that the first sonnet in a collection of a poet known for her facility with formal poetry is titled “Deus Ex Machina.” As with “Four Fibs,” “The Compost Heap,” and “The Dress of One Occasion,” “Deus Ex Machina” continues to catalog the stresses that surround the now married young couple:
Because we were good at entanglements, but notResolution, and made a mess of plot,Because there was no other way to fulfillThe ancient prophecy, because the willOf the gods demanded punishment, becauseNeither recognized who the other was,Because there was no difference betweenA tragic ending and a comic scene,Because the play was running out of time,Because the mechanism of the sublimeTo stay in working order needed using,Because it was a script not of our choosing,Because we were actors, because we knew for a factWe were only actors, because we could not act
The lack of punctuation at the end is no typo. Not only does Stallings here channel Eliot, notable opposite her previous channeling of Dickenson in “The Dress of One Occasion” but she leaves the scene incomplete. The titled god never appears from the machine. The actors—the lovers—are left waiting, unable to act, at this point in their life unable to distinguish “between / a tragic ending and a comic scene” which both foreshadows the next section’s dealing with death and the important symbolism of intrusion which will figure in the speaker’s future pregnancy and birth, summed up in “Telephonophobia”:
At any hour, the future or the pastCan dial into the room and change our lives
to which “The Argument,” “Burned,” and “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia” reply, leaving the speaker and her lover with the uncertainty of “Burned”: 
You cannot unburn what is burned.
...
You longed for home, but while you yearned,The black ships smoldered on the coast;You can’t go back. It’s time you learned
That even if you had returned,You’d only be a kind of ghost.You can’t go back. It’s time you learnedThat what is burned is burned is burned.
The final poem of the first section, “On Visiting a Borrowed Country House in Arcadia” not only necessitated an immediate read-aloud to my wife of the first stanza:
To leave the cityAlways takes a quarrel. Without warning,Rancors that have gathered half the morningLike things to pack, or a migrane, or a cloud,Are suddenly allowedTo strike. They strike the same place twice.We start by straining to be nice,Then say something shitty.
But steals Penelope’s false dream of “the unseen ivory gates,” revealing the gulf of the “immense / ancient indifference / that does not sleep or dream” as a pitiless strain that tears at the edges of all love. Here Stallings leaves her lovers spent with the night cold between them.
In “Extinction of Silence,” Olives' second section, elegies and other funeral poems are introduced with the painfully named “Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Ascribed to Martin Luther.” Its questioning refrain summarizes the death to come:
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,The booze and the neon and Saturday night?
The next poem, “Two Violins,” with its Frostian choice and critique of artistic influence arguably belongs to the opening ofOlives. It serves here, however, as an introduction to the deaths of the speaker’s teachers and mentors, reinforcing their deaths and “sad notes” on which she has built her life.
One was fire-red,Hand-carved and new—The local maker pried the woodFrom a torn-down church’s pew,
The Devil’s instrumentWrenched from the house of God.It answered merrily and clearThough my fingering was flawed;
Bright and sharp as a young wine,They said, but it would mellow,And that I would grow into it.The other one was yellow
And nicked down at the chin,A varnish of Baltic amber,A one-piece back of tiger mapleAnd a low, dark timbre.
A century old, they said,Its sound will never change.Rich and deep on G and D,Thin on the upper range—
And how it came from the Old WorldWas anybody’s guess—Light as an exile’s suitcase,A belly of emptiness:
That was the one I chose—Not the one of flame—And teachers turned in their practiced handsTo see whence the sad notes came.
The next five poems, “Country Song,” “Sabbatical,” “The Ghost Ship,” “Handbook of the Foley Artist,” and “Extinction of Silence” explore not just metaphors for death but for rebirth as well, signaling the change that is to come, both inOlives and the life of its speaker. This is perhaps made most clear in “The Ghost Ship,” which:
. . . flies no flag,
Has no allegiance to a state,No registry, no harbor berth,Nowhere to discharge her freightUpon the earth.
Two graveyard poems, “Funereal Stelae: Kerameikos, Athens” and “The Cenotaph: First Cemetery of Athens” close out the section. It is hardly surprising that at the physical center of Olives should be a poem about an empty tomb, a pit, “the grave of nobody.” It is in these two poems where the musicality of Stallings’ verse, and especially her rhymes, is at its most lovely. “Funereal Stelae” is delivered with a hint of Coleridge and Tennyson:
In the Museum of Sorrow standThe marble dead on either hand:Each seated formally on a chairIn profile, with a mild, blank stare.
Here Stallings bends the boundaries of a funereal ruin into fragments by which verse is shored. Conversely, in “The Cenotaph” (which is what Robert Lowell likely wanted to sound like), Stallings’ speaker realizes, like H.D.’s speaker in Trilogy, that what she seeks is not to be found among the dead:
The day I went to the First CemeteryLooking for famous graves, the sky was blueAs wild irises in FebruaryAnd there were mourners walking two by twoAnd gravediggers who had folk to buryAlong the cypress-vaulted avenue:Priests and florists, all that’s understoodIn the solemn bustle of death’s livelihood.
I came there seeking the adventurer,The poet, the novelist, composer of song,And though I had no map, yet I was sureI’d come upon them if I wandered longAmong the plaques and formal portraiture,The rows of marble headstones hundreds strong,Eponymous mausoleums with their claimTo immortality, at least in name.
Then in the lesser alleys of the deadAmong the graven years mumbled with moss,I felt somebody watching and turned my head,And there a small girl stood, as at a loss,And looked at me, as if something I’d readAloud was too loud, as if she might tossHer curls and put her hands upon her hips,But pressed instead a finger to her lips
To say, “Don’t wake them,” and she seemed to smileTo find herself and someone else aloneSharing a secret for a little while,Though I could walk away and she was stone.I could not find among the rank and fileAmong the rude democracy of boneAny of the famous men I soughtAlthough I scanned the legends plot by plot.
But I found widows bent over the taskOf tending shrines, and women washing the grimePatiently from angels who wore a maskWhere acid rain turned marble into lime.A woman stopped me on the path to ask—As someone asks a stranger for the time—Where she could find the Sleeper, to lay a roseUpon that breathless beauty’s long repose.
But roaming lost amidst death’s anterooms,I did not find the exile or his bust,Nor the swashbuckling ransacker of tombsWho sifted stories for the golden dustOf kings and queenly ladies at their looms,All that was not devoured by moth or rust;Nor the composer, nor the novelist.The more I looked for them, the more I missed—
It was the grave of nobody I sought—It was the purling of the ash-gray doveIn cypress boughs, and plastic flowers boughtTo be the token of undying loveSome twenty years ago—they could not rotBut faded to a kind of garish mauveJust like the fading afternoon—while IWandered between two dates, and earth and sky.
More than any poem inOlives, this one at the dead center of the book lays bare the seeking speaker with subtleties word-by-word (“I scanned the legends plot by plot”), construction-by-construction (there is a page break that is nearly baffling between lines three and four of the third stanza—until you realize that line four is where you discover the girl is a statue), and omission-by-omission (of all the people she is unable to find, a poet is not one of them).
“The Cenotaph” ought to be the final poem in “Extinction of Silence” but it is followed by “Pop Music,” a poem that on first reading seems to belong in Section IV, “Fairy-Tale Logic.” Once read a few times, however, it is clear that “Pop Music” is a riff on “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” suggesting that unheard music will, instead of being sweet, be “the music that your son will listen to / to drive you mad,” making “Pop Music’s” place in the book not just sensible but integral. “Extinction of Silence” becomes not simply a section of poems about death. Coming after the relationship-building “arguing home” of “The Argument,” the “Extinction of Silence” is not just the intrusion of the past that changes lives but the intrusion of the future as well. Silence will be extinguished not through death but because a child is coming into the life of the speaker and her husband. “Pop Music” serves as an elegy to what was once hip, a hymn to the unwilling passing of the torch of “cool.”
The next section, “Three Poems for Psyche,” is “a bold and reckless light” following the elegies of “Extinction of Silence.” Here our speaker becomes Psyche, Life, Breath, Spirit, Soul, the Shade, the solitary female hero of antiquity.
The first poem of the triad, “The Eldest Sister to Psyche” is a line palindrome (the 16th line is the 17th and so until the last is also the first) in which the “ugly sister’s” envious advice gets turned on its head so, as in all good stories, the complications, doubts, and dangers she warns of are eclipsed by the majesty and mystery of “this palace, those invisible hands.”
The central poem of the triad, “The Boatman to Psyche, on the River Styx,” is a terza rima style-check to Dante with Olivian shadows in full swing. A pregnant Psyche (“a double tug upon / the earth, and twice the trouble”) weighs down Charon’s scow not only with “the thing itself” but also weight
Out of the queasy future, ticking and ticking
Like a kind of bomb,An X-ray developing in your chemical bath,Your dark room.
Psyche has come with her weighted womb to seek Persephone. Charon delivers her, but notwithout warning:
If she gives you a wooden box
Yea big—scarcely big enough for an infant—Don’t open it, though you craveA peek, a free sample. You say you won’t,
But the living have a flair for narrative.What if I tell you all the beauty ever wornBy loveliness was borrowed from the grave
And belongs to the unborn?
Here Stallings taps into emotion and fear at its naked core. This is the emotional center of Olives. Stallings has led us through love and death into hell—but it is a hell not of fire but of waiting and advice. Every expectant mother is both terrified and thrilled at the change of life her child will wreak. Charon, with his own “flair for narrative” can’t help but pile fear on trepidation, like so many “helpful” mothers and their own horror stories.
The third section’s third and final poem, “Persephone to Psyche” is as stunning and devastating as Persephone’s stolen beauty. Here Stallings’ fearlessness of English rhyme and her deftness with multiple meanings give birth to a poem as tragic as it is catchy. Here the voice of ancient, lovely, childless wealth speaks to the young heroine, who possesses the only gift the queen cannot have:
Come sit with me here at the bar.Another Lethe for the bride.You’re pregnant? Well, of course you are!Make that a Virgin Suicide.
Me and my man, we tried a spell,A pharmacopeia of charms,
And yet… When I am lonesome, well,I rock the stillborns in my arms.
This place is dead—a real dive.We’re past all twists, rewards and perils.But what the hell. We all arrive.Here, have some pomegranate arils.
I heard an old wives’ tale aboveWhen I was a girl with a girl’s treasure.The story went, Soul married LoveAnd they conceived, and called her Pleasure.
In Anhedonia we takeOur bitters with hypnotic waters.The dawn’s always about to breakBut never does. We dream of daughters.
In the two lines “and yet. . . When I am lonesome, well, / I rock the stillborns in my arms” I find everything that is excellent in Stallings’ work. There is the deft control of sound; as “When” becomes “well” and “-borns” becomes “arms” we see the connection between time and health, between death and life. The double meaning of “well” reminds us that Persephone is a creature of dual nature—she literally lives in two places. The image of the queen of the dead whose desire for children can only be assuaged by rocking those whonever lived is both heartbreaking and beautiful. I stand at the abyss of these two lines and know I am in the presence of poetry.
Section IV, “Fairy Tale Logic,” finds our protagonist now a mother. The section begins with an eponymous poem which by virtue of its leading off the section tells us that parenthood is “full of impossible tasks” and “the will to do whatever must be done.” The difficulties in parenting are continued in “The Catch,” a poem that recalls Plath’s “Mirror”: “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish,” though here the “terrible fish” is not the speaker but her child:
Something has come between us—It will not sleep.Every night it rises like a fishOut of the deep.
It is hardly surprising that Stallings should recall Plath. Apart from trivial parallels about expatriate female poets who write about their children, Plath (or perhaps Heaney) is the only poet to whom it seems fair to compare Stallings, all others resting in her shadow. Stallings, of course, has the distinct advantage of being alive and well.
The next two poems, originally published separately, “Lullaby for a Colicky Baby” and “Baby Talk” are here printed on the same page as “Two Nursery Rhymes: Lullaby and Rebuttal.” Though I give Stallings wide berth when it comes to her artistry, I find these poems in need of polish, especially the ending of “Baby Talk”:
Now there is a sorrow you call teethThat gnaws at me, that’s cutting its way through.You cannot comfort me. I used to weep,But now I keen: I sharpen and I cry.
Here is where Stallings verse should fall “in the gray zone between free and blank verse” (Mike Juster, writing for Able Muse) but instead falls short, disserving her verse. The lines scan in iambic pentameter (with a headless first line):
  /        x   x  x   /   x     /     /    /Now there is a sorrow you call teeth  x       /      x    /     x        /  x    x    /        /That gnaws at me, that’s cutting its way through. x     /    x      /    x     /   x   /    x    /You cannot comfort me. I used to weep,  x     /   x    /    x    /   x    x   / /But now I keen: I sharpen and I cry.
While the sentiment expressed is excellent--appearing to be the very height of what a teething baby feels (and I applaud the pyrrhic feet) the end falls clunky. The awkwardness begins with the second line’s superfluous second “that” and ends with the doubly awkward italics and repeated “I”s of the final line. I see no reason other than metrics why the ending phrase should not be “I sharpen and cry.” One could make a fine argument that the baby’s only frame of reference is the I; indeed this is a well-worn psychological path. It doesn’t, however, make the third “I” necessary unless there is a very bad mystical pun I am missing. Moreover, the italics feel like a hamfisted (or babyfisted?) reminder that we are being given split definitions of “keen.” Thank God it’s not a footnote but its on the nose nature is just as disruptive and it is also a bit insulting that the reader is not trusted here.
The next olive-poem is the sonnet “Containment,” tying the reader and the speaker back to Charon and a concern about how the past and the future’s intrusion upon the present creates a “harmonizing doubt from many ifs.” “Accident Waiting To Happen” (in which Plath’s “thumb stump” or Heaney’s “snug as a gun” would not be out of place) harmonizes that doubt by having the Psyche-Mother-Speaker and her child occupy the same poetic space. By the the end of the poem:
And my aim is steady.You’re falling for me,I feel it. I’m
Ready.
One is aware that you, the reader, along with Stallings’ Psyche, are “ready” for the plenitude of parenthood, having been so prepared by the first half of the poems in “Fairy Tale Logic.”
In the remaining poems we are inhabiting fully a world of parents and children--a world far richer than the sterile promontories of most poetries. It is here that Stallings plays with language as a child plays with blocks, that is to say to her and our delight, even dusting off the old gem “hirple” to find a rhyme with purple in “Dinosaur Fever.”
“Tulips” at first appears to be exactly as lighthearted as “Dinosaur Fever.” In the context of the remainder of the book, however, deeper meanings can be seen in the poem’s last few lines:
The tulips make the other me(The backwards one who’s in the mirror,
The one who can’t tell left from right),Glance now over the wrong shoulderTo watch them get a little olderAnd give themselves up to the light.
Apart from the fact that in my reading notes I wrote “Alice!” after the mirror line and the poem being followed by “Alice in the Looking Glass” (to which I noted “of course.”), one understands that while the tulips stand in for the children, there is also the fact that the tulips will not live forever; though the mortality of one’s children is not a popular or pleasant topic, it is one we publicly acknowledge all too scarcely in the 21st century West. Here the shades and shadows of Olives that had previously pointed to Hades, remind us, as parents, that there is always a shadow around our children. It is that shadow that makes us creep into their bedrooms at 2 am just to check their breathing. It is that shadow that so terrified Barrie's Mrs. Darling. Stallings’ Psyche, however, acknowledges the shadows of her children, accepting their power and thereby strengthening ours.
In “Alicein the Looking Glass,” “where everything reverses save for time,” where once the speaker could herself inhabit the world of shades and shadows and reflected images she can no longer return. “The time is past for going back” and her past exists only in memory, in reflection.
“Umbrage” and “Hide and Seek” close the direct usage of shade and shadow in Olives, with “Hide and Seek” seeing the importance of shadows coming into its fullness: 
My son was pretending. He said, “I am a shadow!”He did this simply by shutting his eyes:Inhabiting the same space as his bodyWhile keeping all the light from coming in.I laughed and kissed him, though it chilled me a little,How still he stood, giving darkness his shape.
This is an unconscious ars poetica that serves art far better than so many intentional manifestos. What is art but “giving darkness [our] shape,” letting it “inhabit the same space as [our] body”? We sublimate to language, risking losing ourselves to find great art, which even at its most uplifting leaves us “chilled a little.”.
At the point in Olives where one could nearly drown, “Sea Girls” come to the rescue. These are not the wreathed girls of Eliot, though, but mispronounced “gulls,” “some metamorphosis that Ovid missed,” changed by the child of Psyche who at first resists such “spellbound maidens” but in the end acquiesces: “it is I who am mistaken; / But you have changed them. You are the enchanter.” If we are to read Olives as a great book, one that speaks not only to us but through us, we ought to be struck by the power Stallings isimbuing us with; we “are the enchanters”; it is through our misreading and reading (or is it metamorphic reading?), in “the work[ing] at words” that we “watch the heavens’ flotsam” and glimpse that which is “almost human” in us all.
The final three poems engage, in a way reminiscent of the earlier poem “The Catch,” what is between the mother and the child--which is also what is between the artist and the art and the audience and the art. In “Listening to Peter and the Wolf with Jason, Aged Three,” “the wolf is in the music” and “the music’s in the room,” as is the poetry, released in speech. “The Mother’s Loathing of Balloons,” a screed against empty and false comforts, joys, and distractions, finds Stallings’ Psyche at her Plathiest, worried that her children who: 
. . .grow boredClutching yourUmbilical cord
will ultimately forget her as they forget the balloon “on the ceiling” and that the balloonitself will:
. . .float like happinessTo the sun,Untethered afternoon,
Unkind,Marooning allYou’ve left behind?
Where a hundred familial fears play themselves out at the end of a
. . .loose bloomWith no root
No seed.
Olives’ final poem is “Another Bedtime Story,” a Puck-like coda to “Fairy-Tale Logic” and the book itself, in which Olives are poems and fruit, shadows are Hades and children, and going to bed is lovemaking and death.
One day you realize it. It doesn’t need to be said--Just as you turn the page--the end--and close the cover--
All, all of the stories are about going to bed:
Goldilocks snug upstairs, the toothy wolf insteadOf grandmother tucked in the quilts, crooning closer, closer--One day you realize it. It hardly needs to be said:
The snow-pale princess sleeps--the pillow under her headOf rose petals or crystal--and dreams of a lost lover--All, all of the stories are about going to bed;
Even the one about the witches and ovens and gingerbreadIn the dark heart of Europe--can children save each other?--You start to doubt it a little. It doesn’t need to be said,
But I’ll say it, because it’s embedded in everything I’ve read,The tales that start with once and end with ever after,All, all of the stories are about going to bed,
About coming to terms with the night, alleviating the dreadOf laying the body down, of lying under a cover.That’s why our children resist it so. That’s why it mustn’t be said:All, all of the stories are about going to bed.
I know of no better collection of poetry than Olives. There are books to which it is equal but as a pure a work of poetry, as a gathering of scattered olive-poems into one jar (anecdotal or not), it is unsurpassed. Buy this book and buy it for everyone who loves and reads--not just poetry but words, the “bitter drupes” of meaning A.E. Stallings has here gathered into Olives.