Archaic Objects

Discussing her humanitarian work with refugees in Greece, where she has lived since 1999, the American poet A. E. Stallings said, “While the situation is often squalid or depressing, there is still somehow the resilience of joy even in the midst of the waiting. A necessity maybe of being in the moment, as people are caught between the past and the future.” This suspension between past and future, home and exile, infuses This Afterlife (FSG, 2022), a career-spanning selection that draws from Stallings’s four previous books of poetry—Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), and Like (2018)—along with uncollected poems and translations.

Stallings’s poems often begin with a kind of casual revelation: something catches the attention, creates a pause in dailiness, and reveals an enduring truth. In “A Postcard From Greece,” a sonnet from Archaic Smile that opens This Afterlife, the poem’s speaker apparently dozed off while driving and was on the verge of plunging into the sea on a hairpin turn; by sheer luck, “we struck an olive tree instead.” After their near-death experience, the occupants of the car clung to each other, “shade to pagan shade,” awakened to the proximity of death and the fragility of life. Hapax also opens with the aftermath of near disaster: an earthquake. “Aftershocks” stalls readers in “the moment [that] keeps on happening.” The earth shakes, or some other violence leaves cracks in the plaster, and “we fall mute.” In such moments, time seems to stop, and recognition—a moment of unveiling called anagnorisis in Greek drama—emerges, often through a collision with the stubborn materiality of objects.

It’s an ancient effect, apparent in the “object biographies” found in epic, as Stallings explains: “Kings will be talking and suddenly—there’s this wonderful bronze cheese grater, and where did Nestor get that from, and who gave this chair, and who made the chair, and how was the chair inherited?” One of her own object biographies, “The Doll House,” was prompted by the discovery of the eponymous toy in an attic. The poem itemizes the dollhouse’s contents, including a “cherry pie baked in a bottle cap” and other “resin food.” Finally, memory yields its proverb: “Not realizing then how lives accrue, / With interest, the smallest things we do.” It’s a formula found across Stallings’s poems: personal event leads to detailed description leads to motto. Consider the structure of “Telephonophobia”: The first lines introduce the tenor (reluctance to answer the telephone); middle lines elaborate it through concrete particulars, vividly imagined (the phone line as a leash); and the ending extracts a metaphysical truth: “at any hour, the future or the past / Can dial into the room and change our lives.”

As a heuristic, attention to objects has much in common with epic simile, several examples of which appear throughout This Afterlife (including a poem titled "Epic Simile"). The epic simile is a digression that interrupts and amplifies the narrative. Details proliferate, and the poem swells. Stallings’s examples liken a hunter to an archaic hero; something else (we don’t know what because the simile begins in medias res) is likened to a “faded blonde / On the brink of middle age,” and soldiers attacking Troy in the Iliad are likened to an ant colony in collapse. Stallings has said that epic simile invites the domestic into the public action of epic:

Often you have this mythic legendary action, like arrows hitting a shield, compared to something quotidian, black beans hitting a bowl. Suddenly you’re taken from the battlefield into the kitchen. … The domestic world is largely a woman’s world. Even though the epics are vast and masculine, the similes, which are these lyric moments, tend to be domestic and feminine.

Epic similes also offer opportunities for what rhetoricians called copia—abundance. Once a poet decides a suitor is like a bat, as Stallings does in “Similes, Suitors,” the poet is off, doling out all they know of bat lore. Here’s a chance to use speleothem and chiropterophily!

Objects can be harvested for revelations because they both embody and resist time. Ancient dog collars, dead languages, ghost ships, extinct silences, dried thyme, old arrowheads, forgotten treasures in museum drawers—all accumulate like relics in Stallings’s poems. Through these things, she explores temporality, mortality, and loss, themes that mark her work as quintessentially lyric. As Matthew Bevis explains, the word lyric originated in the third century BCE, “when scholars of the Alexandrian library sought to preserve poems on the page whose musical settings had been lost.” The scholar Virginia Jackson reflects that history in her definition of lyric as “a music that could no longer be heard, an idea of poetry characterized by a lost collective experience.” Lyric is a form in which lost presence, song, communality, exile, and primitive or infantile states are remembered and grieved.

Loss infuses many of Stallings’s poems. Several refer to Alice in Wonderland: Alice is her own namesake, echoing “alias, alas, / A lass alike alone and at a loss.” Alice also tumbles into the underworld, a realm to which Stallings obsessively returns, as an analogy for depression or an arena for imagination: here the poet can invent punishments or invite dead heroes to tell their stories. The underworld also evokes a process that gradually strips away the specificity of personality. It is a place of stasis where “the weather is always the same. Nothing happens.” That makes it like poetry, which Auden famously claimed makes “nothing happen,” a realm of “idleness” and reflection, where the dead gradually come to resemble objects, and objects speak.

Many of Stallings’s poems take the form of a modern katabasis, a journey to the underworld. In “Hades Welcomes His Bride,” the solicitous god offers a tour of the home improvements he made for his new wife: “These thrones I have commissioned to be made / Are unlike any you imagined; they glow / Of deep-black diamonds and lead, subtler / And in better taste than gold.” It is a dramatic monologue without the menace of Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (Stallings’s debts to Victorian poetry are considerable). In succeeding poems, Persephone writes a newsy letter to her mother in blood, complaining that “The dead are just as dull as you would imagine” and “My husband, bored with their babbling, neither listens nor speaks.” Eurydice addresses Orpheus’s decision at “the critical moment / When nothing was so difficult as you had wanted” to turn his head to look at her; a tour guide in Nymphaion notes the asphodel—“the flower native to the plains of hell”—beneath their hooves. Stallings also delves into aboveground memorial culture, haunting cemeteries and lingering over grave goods. In “The Cenotaph,” the speaker pokes around “among the rude democracy of bone”; in “Memorial (Mnemosyno),” the speaker’s husband searches for the grave of his father, the dead like “so many loaves of bread / Tucked in their oblong pans.” The dead, and the histories they inter, are all around.

Hapax, by contrast, ends with poems focused on the future. “Prelude” describes an ecstatic moment listening to music, in which “something … / That suddenly falls / Upon me” is “the vertigo of possibility.” The final poem, “Ultrasound,” locates the rhythm of futurity within the uncertainty of pregnancy: “Listen, here’s / Another ticker / Counting under / Mine, and quicker.” Ticker/quicker—the twee rhyme distracts readers from darker undercurrents, the quickening fetus, the ticking of a bomb. Here, the speaker’s body is “the room / The future owns, / The darkness where / It grows its bones.” The pregnant body is an inversion of Hades; gestation provides a fertile ground for the future, and the dead languish in the dark where nothing grows.

But the promises heard in the rhythms of an ultrasound are equivocal. In “The Catch,” from Olives, the infant is an impersonal it: “Every night it rises like a fish” (recall the visage of the old woman in Plath’s “Mirror”). “Three Poems for Psyche” focus on the princess’s pregnancy and descent to hell to secure a casket of beauty. The next poem, “Fairy-tale Logic,” dwells on infant care and nursery rhymes. The parallel between Psyche’s impossible labors and the tedium of reproductive labor transforms domestic life into a kind of underworld.

Stallings, who has referred to herself self-deprecatingly as “a housewife poet,” complains in the uncollected poem “The Arsenic Hour” about the evening as a time for “the husbandry that falls to wives.” Many poems in Like, her most recent collection, are weary. Reality invades myth: bedbugs in the marital bed, lice in the children’s hair, a cast-iron skillet ruined with soap. In “First Miracle,” the baby “breaks the spell / Of the ancient, numbered hours with his yell.” The child’s cry is an abrupt intrusion in the prosody of history as well as the mother’s intellectual work.

Yet, in Like, Stallings moved into longer forms. These include prose translations from Herodotus’s Histories; a psalm modeled on Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno; the long poem “Cyprian Variations”; and “Lost and Found,” a dream poem in ottava rima, included in the Selected. There, a female figure, like the lady Philosophy who lectures Boethius, guides the speaker on a tour of the valleys of the moon. They converse about the lost things gathered there—objects, intentions, baby teeth. I regret that “Cyprian Variations” is excluded from the Selected. In this sequence, Stallings’s heavily end-stopped lines and brisk Imagism show a figure staggering in the blinding light of insomniac morning:

Rising from the sea
As on a foot-worn stair,
Rose-fingered dawn is scrubbing the light
Till it is raw and bare,
Sluicing away the night,
Calling us to prayer.

The traditional epithet was subtly recast so that dawn gets its pink fingers from hard domestic work: the sun rises with effort, the daily labor of washing gradually wears away stone.

Across Stallings’s work, myth and allusion intensify the mundane. “Consolation for Tamar (on the occasion of her breaking an ancient pot)” imagines that the object, “emboldened by your blood,” had tried “to unfold for you” like a rosebud and so broke. This is a love poem in the Augustan tradition, and that tradition lends the poem its diction. The speaker muses: “I wonder if it had not waited. …” The tone of hesitation strikes a false note. I’m reminded of Alexander Pope’s satirical guide to the “art of sinking in poetry” or bathos: “whoever would excel therein, must studiously avoid, detest, and turn his head from all the ideas, ways, and workings of that pestilent foe to wit, and destroyer of fine figures, which is known by the name of common sense.”

Stallings’s poems never sink into absolute bathos. She roughens her verse, draws in a colloquialism, or uses irony to balance out fine figures such as the metaphysical pot. In “Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses,” the sun god is demoted to middle management, his nine female muses dejected office help; in “Three Poems for Psyche,” Persephone and Psyche drown their sorrows over cocktails. I like Stallings’s occasionally harder edge: “Descend in murk and pitch,” she advises “the Women Poets,” “Double-talk the ferryman / And three-throated bitch.” The setting is archaic, but the language is fierce, and Persephone “weeps kerosene” rather than snuffling pomegranates.

Much of Stallings’s critical reception has focussed on her facility for rhyming verse and traditional forms. She is drawn to rhyme for its “strange dream-logic” and fun: as she told the Cortland Review, “people love rhyme. Rhyme and meter make things memorable. And that’s a physical thing—they work differently upon the brain, I'm sure of it.” Dislike of rhyme is “at some level puritanical, a distrust of pleasure and the rhetoric of pleasure,” she has argued elsewhere. Her rhymes are subtle and various; there’s a certain audacity in rhyming warlock, door-lock, and Porlock, or undone and legion, that depends on the refinement of her other pairings. At their best, her rhymes provide an architecture and an itinerary, a sense of aesthetic stability in contrast to the vagaries of fortune. Though people’s emotional lives are confusing and ragged, poems are built on the delightful felicities of likeness.

In her translations, Stallings has worked Lucretius’s De rerum natura into fourteeners and Hesiod’s Works and Days into “not-strictly-heroic couplets.” She describes Hesiod as an ancient Robert Frost: “both are more sophisticated than they appear, wearing their considerable learning lightly … both emphasize self-sufficiency, and take a dim view of the fallen modern world.” Both are models of “the middle style,” combining the vernacular with “archaism and the odd quaint or regional turn of phrase as well as highfalutin’ pronouncement.” Highfalutin, a word Stallings uses often, refers to literary elitism she associates with Modernism, free verse, and the avant-garde—strictly opposed to common sense and to the democratizing pleasures of rhyme. Stallings is herself partial to a “middle style.” In “Glitter,” after assembling a collection of domestic details—an epigraph from Vogue magazine, references to glue and chickenpox—she meditates on “The broken mirror Time will not restore.” “Pop Music” reflects on a parent’s antipathy to a son’s taste in music: the singer’s “outlandish dress or lack of dress / Or excess hair or lack of hair, tattoos” will “appall you,” but the music is like “the light of some Chaldean star,” and the poem ends with an allusion to Keats: “you weep, or nearly weep / For all you knew of beauty, or of truth.”

Stallings chose rhyme for her Hesiod because it “gives the English the flavour of aphorism.” But aphorism can be a closed form of thinking: common sense, what everyone knows and no one questions. Stallings does acknowledge a risk of “sterility if you were working in traditional forms and writing about high-falutin’ subjects in elevated language. You’d just be regurgitating Victorian literature.” Modern referents can tether lofty subjects. Form elevates; the vernacular grounds.

Stallings’s poems tend to mythologize the present and debunk the past. This alternation introduces some reactionary figurations. In “The Machines Mourn the Passing of People,” rusting machines reminisce about their lost operators, full of regret that “the lovely work” is over. The machines are “reluctant” and bereft lovers; the people were angry and frustrated because the machines sometimes broke, not because capitalism turned them into machines. Industrial labor is just another lyrical instance of loss. In “The Rosehead Nail,” a demonstration of labor at a historic blacksmith site provokes nostalgic musing on how the blacksmith “was a god” once “before the tasks / That had been craft were jobbed out to machine”; apparently, we pine for those preindustrial days, when “Work was wed / To Loveliness.”

Stallings’s poetry doesn’t cope well with political critique. Her preferred mode is the personal lyric: intimate, reflective moments within the nuclear family. Occasionally the circumference widens to include a friend who breaks a pot or flies a kite. The poet’s calling is “to speak to the human condition, to what is timeless rather than to current events,” she claims, though her essays on austerity and migration show she is paying attention. In a 2016 interview, she described an ordinary day in Athens: accompanying her husband, a journalist, as he covers the financial crisis; spending a morning at a refugee squat; helping a refugee mother and child to a metro stop; taxi strikes, protest marches, stun grenades. Such rich and varied political, social, and sonic encounters are excluded from her verse. Instead, there is a reversion to idyll. “Sea urchins star / the seafloor like sunken mines / from a rust-smirched war,” and piles of lost things in a dream of the moon are “Like bombed-out cities black against the skies.” War is a simile. “Poetry, like the poor, will always be with us,” she told the Valparaiso Review. The timelessness of art gathers war and poverty into its inevitability. As she writes in her introduction to Charles Martin’s 2019 translation of Medea, “a pregnant woman fleeing war in a flimsy boat and going into labor from the stress is not an uncommon story in the news in recent years in the eastern Mediterranean. Stranger things have happened.” For Stallings, history rhymes; literature doesn’t progress but goes in circles.

The risk is that this perspective effaces the specificity of recent history, naturalizing it as part of the long and predictable story of “the eastern Mediterranean.” Greece has been a geopolitical pivot in migration struggles, offering both generous hospitality and engaging (with EU support) in murderous pushbacks. Stallings’s solidarity work with refugees inspired two poems in this Selected: “Appendix A” (from the longer poem “Refugee Fugue”) and “Empathy.” In the complete version published in Like, “Refugee Fugue” opens with a ditty, “Aegean Blues,” that draws the expected analogy between modern and ancient seas: “Charon don’t take Mastercard, you have to pay him cash.” “Part Two” consists of Juvenalian epigrams, brutally concise and satirical poems whose form provides the “aesthetic distance to handle material that is in fact unbearable.” The final section of “Refugee Fugue,” “Appendix A”—the only excerpt included in the Selected—assembles “useful phrases in Arabic, Farsi/Darsi, and Greek.” The stock phrases acknowledge desperation: “stay calm,” “one line, please,” “are you wet/cold?” They show the effort to reach across linguistic divides and offer kindness and support. But these functional expressions also contrast with the rich detail and deeply felt personhood that constitutes Stallings’s usual poetics. The second of these explicitly political poems is “Empathy.” Set again within the intimate frame of the home, it addresses its gratitude to “my love” that the speaker isn’t a migrant, that her children aren’t trafficked or adrift in a perilous raft. The poem recognizes the pull of identification—it could have been us—while also refusing equivalences made from the safety of its own subject position.

In her writing on the Black Mediterranean, the poet and scholar S.A. Smythe proposes an orientation to the cultural histories of the Mediterranean not as a “wet cemetery” but as “a variegated site of Black knowledge production, Black resistance, and possibilities of new consciousness.” The idea of the Black Mediterranean challenges the European construction of whiteness, which used Greek classicism to create its own origin story. In several published discussions, Stallings emphasizes the creative capacity, energy, and hospitality of the migrants she works with in Greece. Her polyglot phrase book points toward new poetic possibilities that might extend from these encounters and an awakening to the urgencies of the present that call people to return from misty underworlds filled with dead objects.