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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 love

so evil?

Is Eve? Lo,

love vies,

evolves.

...

I love so

I 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 eat

Only if pickled in a vat of tears—

A rich and dark and indehiscent meat

Clinging tightly to the pit—on spears

Of toothpicks maybe,

...

Paradigmatic summers that decline

Like singular archaic nouns, the troops

Of hours in retreat. These fruits are mine—

Small bitter drupes

Full 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—try

To make it all connected—

The water and the deep sky

And the sky reflected.

Absences align

And lock shapes into place,

And random shapes combine

To make a tree, a face.

Slowly you restore

The fractured world and start

To re-create an afternoon before

It fell apart:

Here is summer, here is blue,

Here two lovers kissing,

And here the nothingness shows through

Where 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 much

To make us laugh instead, and touch,

And could not hear ourselves above

The 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 of Olives’ 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 not

Resolution, and made a mess of plot,

Because there was no other way to fulfill

The ancient prophecy, because the will

Of the gods demanded punishment, because

Neither recognized who the other was,

Because there was no difference between

A tragic ending and a comic scene,

Because the play was running out of time,

Because the mechanism of the sublime

To stay in working order needed using,

Because it was a script not of our choosing,

Because we were actors, because we knew for a fact

We 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 past

Can 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 learned

That 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 city

Always takes a quarrel. Without warning,

Rancors that have gathered half the morning

Like things to pack, or a migrane, or a cloud,

Are suddenly allowed

To 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 wood

From a torn-down church’s pew,

The Devil’s instrument

Wrenched from the house of God.

It answered merrily and clear

Though 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 maple

And 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 World

Was 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 hands

To 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 in Olives 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 freight

Upon 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 stand

The marble dead on either hand:

Each seated formally on a chair

In 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 Cemetery

Looking for famous graves, the sky was blue

As wild irises in February

And there were mourners walking two by two

And gravediggers who had folk to bury

Along the cypress-vaulted avenue:

Priests and florists, all that’s understood

In 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 sure

I’d come upon them if I wandered long

Among the plaques and formal portraiture,

The rows of marble headstones hundreds strong,

Eponymous mausoleums with their claim

To immortality, at least in name.

Then in the lesser alleys of the dead

Among 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 read

Aloud was too loud, as if she might toss

Her 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 smile

To find herself and someone else alone

Sharing a secret for a little while,

Though I could walk away and she was stone.

I could not find among the rank and file

Among the rude democracy of bone

Any of the famous men I sought

Although I scanned the legends plot by plot.

But I found widows bent over the task

Of tending shrines, and women washing the grime

Patiently from angels who wore a mask

Where 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 rose

Upon 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 tombs

Who sifted stories for the golden dust

Of 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 dove

In cypress boughs, and plastic flowers bought

To be the token of undying love

Some twenty years ago—they could not rot

But faded to a kind of garish mauve

Just like the fading afternoon—while I

Wandered between two dates, and earth and sky.

More than any poem in Olives, 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 not

without warning:

If she gives you a wooden box

Yea big—scarcely big enough for an infant—

Don’t open it, though you crave

A 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 worn

By 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 above

When I was a girl with a girl’s treasure.

The story went, Soul married Love

And they conceived, and called her Pleasure.

In Anhedonia we take

Our bitters with hypnotic waters.

The dawn’s always about to break

But 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 who

never 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 fish

Out 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 teeth

That 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 shoulder

To watch them get a little older

And 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 in

to 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 “Alice in 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 body

While 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 is

imbuing 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 bored

Clutching your

Umbilical cord

will ultimately forget her as they forget the balloon “on the ceiling” and that the balloon

itself will:

. . .float like happiness

To the sun,

Untethered afternoon,

Unkind,

Marooning all

You’ve left behind?

Where a hundred familial fears play themselves out at the end of a

. . .loose bloom

With 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 instead

Of 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 head

Of 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 gingerbread

In 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 dread

Of 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.

With Rough Gods: The Album

Hello everyone!

After I recorded (but not yet publishing) a traditional audiobook, I got a sneak preview of the audiobook album for Ernest Hilbert's Sixty Sonnets and was blown away--live band, orchestra, all sorts of stuff.

So I rethought the audiobook for With Rough Gods. Collaborating with a few friends (calling themselves Girl Scout Fight Club), I produced With Rough Gods: The Album which is available to download for only 99 cents from Bandcamp.

I hope you enjoy the album as much as we enjoyed making it.

Recent Publications

I'd like to thank the good folks Ernest Hilbert of E-Verse Radio, Rusty Barnes of Fried Chicken and Coffee, and Jeni Stewart of Burlesque Press for publishing these works in the last two months. Not only are they awesome for publishing my work, they're just plain awesome. If you're not reading their magazines, you should be.

"Now is the Winter's End" and "Wedding Spring" at Burlesque Press

"Translated from the Greek (for Alicia Stallings)", "On the Sixth Day", and "This Fond Imprisonment" at Burlesque Press

"September" and "Rawhide" at Fried Chicken and Coffee

"Catullus 16 (Pedicabo)" (translation) at Burlesque Press

"Hemiplegia", "The Long Defeat", "Pushing the Muse", "The Wind & the Willow", "Winemaking", and "Contemporary Poetry" at E-Verse Radio

Enjoy and give these folks your love!

A Declaration on the Revision of Poetry

Dear poets,

Modern poetry is sick. It's dying in its hospice bed and we should walk away from its cranky carcass before the stench of colostomy and muscle rub leaves us brainless. It's not like we're in the will anyway.

From the image of its corpse I propose a new direction for poetry. For the last century we've been tied into a strangulating mode of creating, producing, and promoting poetry. To wit: Artsy poets write impenetrable crap; Artsy journals with tiny circulations publish it (Poetry has a circulation of 30,000 – why do we want our work in it? Not because we want readers), no one reads the publications or the poems in them, and the publication line on a CV gets artsy poets jobs where they teach impressionable others that accessible poetry is evil and their excrement is the only rose worth smelling.

I propose, instead, the following solution:

To change how poetry is made, consumed, and thought of. This means altering the production, distribution, and acceptance of modern poetry. I will deal with each aspect of the solution individually.

1: Production

To change production of poetry we need to shift toward narrative verse. This is an easy task, as nearly all poetry published today is lyric poetry. Almost no one is writing or publishing narrative verse. This alone can explain the marginal state of modern poetry because people love stories. They crave them. They pay billions of dollars a year on movies, cable bills, novels, and video games just to experience stories. But they don’t turn to poetry. Why? Poetry can tell a story with such power that the reader or listener's body chemistry alters to fit the rhythm of the line. Nothing else can do this. But people don’t think of poetry because poetry no longer tells stories; it no longer entertains; it has become art for a dying art’s sake. When we ignore narrative verse in favor of the lyric we are depriving poetry of its natural audience.

Part of the reason has to do with today’s imbalance of lyric and narrative poetry. Lyric poetry is poetry that describes objects, feelings, and abstract concepts. Examples range from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet CXXX” to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” to Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around.” Narrative verse is poetry that tells a story – from Poe's “Annabel Lee” to Jarrell's “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” to Forche’s “The Colonel” to Homer's Odyssey.

Poetry traditionally has had its greatest and widest appeal when there was a balance between lyric and narrative verse. No such balance exists today. In the pages of the major poetry journals you will find many pretty words and almost no stories. Month after month, quarter after quarter, publications print variations on the same ideas and wonder why their circulations remain insignificant. Readers are drawn to stories in a way that descriptions and ponderings can never match. The power of narrative verse keeps them reading and teaches them how to read poetry, so that they may enjoy both narrative and lyric verse. When there is no substantial volume of narrative verse to entice readers, interest in poetry subsides.

While an overemphasis on lyric verse is not the sole problem of contemporary poetry, it has allowed poets to ignore not only the structure of narrative but any structure at all. In writing narrative verse, we must never fall into the trap set by modernists and sprung by language========= poets and new formalists – that how the poem is saying something is more important that what it says. It is this emphasis on form and formlessness at the expense of content that drives away the lay reader of poetry. We can avoid this trap by committing our narrative verse to five points:

Our verse must:
be clear
be timely
be memorable
be in the common tongue
bring us together.

For our verse to be clear it must be fathomable on the first read. This does not mean that our verse cannot be complex. Indeed, it must be unless we wish to be some soulless versifier. But complexity is only a part of the picture. If no one can possibly understand our poems without a decoder ring, we’re doing it wrong. Most readers don't want to decode poetry – they just want a good story. If a good story is there, they will read it. If it can be peeled and peeled, revealing layers like Eliot's multifoliate rose, then we have done a good job.

For our verse to be timely, it must be relevant to people working and paying and living and dying right now. It must depend on neither allusions from mythology, nor private experiences but be firmly secured in the present. Personal demons and classical gods may be important and relevant to the poem-at-hand but they are without meaning if they cannot be made relevant to the reader.

For our verse to be memorable, it must be beautiful, both in sound and image. If we aren't writing our poetry with an ear for how it sounds out loud, we aren't writing poetry. Furthermore, if our beautiful word symphony doesn't make any sense, we're writing music, not poetry. Poetry is the syzygy of image, sound, and form – all three must be in balance to have a poem. We must also strive to make our poems ring in the ears of our audience. We should ask ourselves and our first readers “what lines from this poem are memorable?” Then we should work our words until its lines stick in our readers’ heads like hooks in a pop song.

For our verse to be in the common tongue, it must be written the way we speak. Why do we eschew contractions in poetry? Why do we embrace archaic reversals or literary paper language? No one speaks that way – and as poetry is in many ways a perfection of speech, we must reflect and perfect current speech patterns. Listeners should hear our poetry and tell themselves "this is the way I would speak."

For our verse to bring us together, it must be uplifting. This is not to say that that we can't tackle difficult or deep or depressing subjects, quite the contrary. What poetry should do is present difficult subjects in such a way that hope is offered to the world. Remember that “The Waste Land,” for all its bleak obtuseness, ends with a prayer that all will be well. Poetry cannot be uplifting if it is engaged in self-referential navel-gazing. Solipsistic, pretentious, and inscrutable poems serve only to confuse, confound, and drive away readers.

2: Distribution

Print is not dead. It is, however, brainwashed. Less than three million books of poetry sold last year. Mainstream publishers rightly ignore it. Moreover, small poetry presses are entirely subsidized by universities, endowments, and/or contests. This means they are beholden to the establishment and to publishing arcane academic poems. They don't care about accessibility, the public, or promoting what they publish because their survival doesn't depend upon these things.

Luckily, we are left with the internet, a largely maligned section of publishing with the academy – but we aren't trying to get tenure; we are trying to change poetry. The internet affords us a much easier way to distribute poetry in its natural form – as audio. We can create videos with text to accompany readings, embed .mp3s of readings into web pages – there are nearly limitless ways online to bring poetry back to what it should be – something that both sounds and means good.

If you worry that internet publishing means we won't be getting paid for our poetry or able to control our copyrights, then you need only to look at homestarrunner.com, xkcd.com, or giantitp.com. These websites wholly support their creators through distributing creative content. People will pay for good content. Just like Radiohead's In Rainbows, distributing content for free only means that more people will come in contact with your work. If it is good, they will find some way to reward you – buying shirts, hitting a paypal donation button, etc. Any of these nontraditional forms of payment far exceed payments by poetry publications. Strong Verse is perhaps the only online publication that pays its authors ($10 a poem) and The New Yorker, the highest paying poetry publication pays only $150 per poem. Allowing our audience to pay us directly for our work will, even with a handful of readers, easily outstrip these token payments. But don't worry about money – worry about your work and your readers.

There are five major internet outlets for distributing poetry:

Emails
YouTube
Blogs
Forums
Websites

Emails are a simple and effective way to get our poems out to people. How many forwards do we get a day? Though we don't read most of them, what if one of them was the opening lines of "The Charge of the Light Brigade"? Would we keep reading? Would we pass it on? A great poem is certainly better than a story about how Barack Obama doesn't say the pledge or how someone’s cousin made money by forwarding “this very same email!” If we make a list of our contacts and send them a poem, they can keep it or not, but we may delight our friends and relatives with our words. We shouldn’t deny them the chance to love what we say.

YouTube is its valuable because we can harness its unique power to distribute poetry in its primal, aural form. The accompanying visuals can be anything – us reading, a background with text, a "poetry video" – it doesn't matter. What does matter is that YouTube allows us to get great poems into the public mind. If people will watch a father singing about his kids to the tune of "Canon in D", they will listen to a well-written, body-moving poem – and forward it to their friends.

We should each have a blog (I have two). We should comment and post on our blogs and forward them to others, digg them, etc. We should also find other poetry blogs and comment on them, contact their authors, and present our ideas. If we are not communicating with the world of poets, we cannot change poetry – and if we are not communicating with the reading public, we will never convince them that poetry has changed.

We should be promoting accessible, narrative verse on poetry forums. But we must be careful in a world of flame wars not to engage or defend ourselves against the blind and the stupid. We can’t get caught up in pointless arguments – if it is clear that the people in the forum don't care what we have to say, it is time to move on without looking back.


"Websites" covers a lot of ground. This category can be broken into networking websites – like myspace.com, meetup.org, and facebook.com; publishing websites – everything from strongverse.org to nytimes.com; filter websites like digg.com and reddit.com; and personal websites.

With networking websites like myspace.com, we can find like-minded good writers and show them the world is not wholly against them. We can also distribute our poems to friends who will, especially with encouragement, forward them on to their friends. If we can just make a poem as interesting as a survey, we will have hit gold.

Publishing websites as a category is best divided into new and established sites. We should create our own publishing websites in order to directly control the distribution and promotion of our work. Established poetry sites, like Strong Verse and Loch Raven Review may be responsive to our work and reviews. Large media sites like nytimes.com and National Review Online will be interested in any content that will bring new users to their advertisers.

Digg.com, reddit.com, and del.icio.us are websites that allow users to popularize web content by sharing and voting up interesting sites. These filter websites are a great tool for spreading the word. If you have a personal website or edit a publishing website, adding digg and reddit buttons to your site will help increase your visibility. A concentrated effort by even a few dozen readers will get our poems linked on these pages – and every time someone clicks that link and finds a beautiful, clear, narrative poem, we will have gained another reader.

Personal websites are, of course, your website with your name – gmpalmer.com (not that I've done anything with it. . .). These should be biographic with links and texts of poems we've already published (we should distribute new content through the above channels). These are best suited for disseminating information and philosophies – controlling what we say and believe before others can do it for us.

3: Acceptance

Once our work has begun to take hold in the world of readers and writers, we can begin to work toward canonization, that is, formal acceptance of clear, narrative verse. This will be a difficult process, as a great part of the Modernist ethos was the denigration of accessible, narrative poetry.

Canonization is achieved through two different ways. The first is textual – reviews, scholarly papers, etc. The second is positional – faculty postings, leading workshops, etc.

Written canonization begins with simple praise of our work and distributing it to as wide a readership as possible. After this begins, we can write and elicit reviews of our work. Reviews should be seen two ways. First we should make an effort to review each others work in online and print journals. This has been a core tactic of all literary movements. We should also work to get our poems reviewed by established critics. This will increase both our work’s legitimacy and visibility. After reviews come scholarly papers. These range from informal college essays to theses, dissertations, and books of critical theory. Though we may not have much control over this last category, we may be able to influence friends currently in school to look our way for research material.

Parallel to these written forms of canonization are inclusion in conferences and workshops, positions on the faculty of universities and textbook selection committees, and inclusion on textbook and anthology creation committees. Here we can directly influence both writers and readers in a much more direct way. Canonization is a far-away goal, to be sure, but any steps we can take – from writing reviews to teaching others to getting on textbook committees will be invaluable.

This will all be a lot of work, I know. But if you're dissatisfied with the empty poems you see touted as fresh and new – if you want to work to make poetry relevant to the two hundred million Americans who read, email me and let's get started discussing how to do what needs to be done.

On Narrative Verse and no Poetry Love

So I was talking with an intelligent fellow yesterday about ye olde blogg.

He asked whether I believed that lyric poetry was a hindrance to the wider readership of poetry or there was something else there.

I answered both -- first of all, people love stories. Secondly, they love being able to actually read and understand what is written, unlike much of what passes for poetry these days. Now, I have some proof of this, as black urban poetry (also known as spoken word) has a hell of a following, at least from where I'm sitting. This is due to a) the nature of BU poetry to involve a lot of storytelling and b) its general nature to eschew, if not disdain, the academic.

These poets write for and understand their audience and continually seek to both broaden their audience and their audience's mind -- all for profit, mind you. When I try to suggest to other (white, academic poets, generally) that we should do the same thing, I get the cold shoulder?

Why?

My pal's position, as is the position of other, more feared and famous writers is that since "the public" doesn't give a shit about poetry, we shouldn't give a shit about them. J-dog likened my desire for wider poetic readership to the misguided faith in Nader, Paul, et al -- the "untapped masses" aren't going to be tapped because they don't want to be.

But I am NOT talking about the untapped masses. I am well aware that there are 100 million Ammurikans who don't read. I don't care much about them. I do care, however, about the 100 million Ammurikans (on the other end of the triad) that read more than 5 books a year. It's not that these people don't like poetry.

It's that they feel that they don't "get poetry." There are a lot of reasons for this but the main one is that, unquestionably, the great majority of

MODERN POETRY SUCKS.

It's either a) impossible to read (see the above poets I linked to) or b) completely soulless. Even when it is fantastic, it's often only fantastic to those with English degrees. So when Mr. or Ms. 33&1/3% of Ammurika picks up a poetry book or sees a poem in the New Yorker/Nation/National Review he or she thinks "well, this shit still stinks to high heaven, thank Gott I've got stories to turn to."

I have already said that I find lyric poetry irrevocably broken at this point. We can fix it later, once more than 1% of the country is actually reading poetry again.

So yes, Justin -- to answer the question, I think that there are lots of problems with American/English Language poetry. I think that the fix is to write clear, excellent verse about something the average reader can understand (note, I did not say the average person -- the average reader is a bit more bright).

I think that this can most easily be done through narrative verse.

Get writing!

About Narrative Verse

So.

I've ranted about the uselessness of lyric poetry and suggested we all stop writing it.

So what of narrative verse? How should we tell a story in lines and stanzas?

Unfortunately, we've forgotten a little of how to do this. We've come to believe that storytelling is the domain of prose and that flowery crap is the domain of verse. We believe this so deeply that our instiutions generally split writers into storytellers and poets. This is such an ingrained belief that I had to snag a prose fiction writer to be on my thesis committee (my thesis was an epic poem about the American War of Independence) because the other two poets on it hadn't written much (anything) in the way of narrative and I needed someone who knew story structure "backards and fards."

Yes. So. What to do? Well, first we need to realize that writing an epic may not be within the grasp of everyone. Most poets are used to short pieces of crap and feel intimidated by anything that runs more than one printed page. That's okay. We can tell a story in one page. Let me quote from the emo kid himself:

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sighed full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep
And there I dreamed - Ah! woe betide! -
The latest dream I ever dreamt
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried - 'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

And I will quote from his American Cousin as well:

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Now. Apart from having rollicking rhythms in your head, you should be telling yourself "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is longer than that and "Is Annabel Lee really a narrative poem?"

To the second question, yes absolutely. The movement of the poem is the story of their love and her death -- notice I said story. As for the first, do you need the rest of LBDSM to "get it?" It's nice in its truncated form.

But the point is not I think Emo Kid is long-winded, but that a narrative can be brief. We don't need to go on for 100 or 100,000 lines, we just need to make a good story.

How do we do this?

The same as any story-teller: plot, character, and setting.

So what is the difference between Narrative Verse and Narrative Prose?

Well, nothing. Unless you count the idea that verse is supposed to appeal to the reader on a sonic and visceral level that prose can't approach. Or that verse is monovocal and prose is polyvocal (as much as I h8 Bakhtin, I agree with him on this idea). I very much count those two things. Prose is great for telling a certain kind of story. Verse is better for telling another kind.

Let us not worry about what kinds just yet.

Let us instead say, "yes, we will write a narrative poem today." Keep it short, interesting, and full of life. Make it, above all else, accessible and moving.

Peace,
M

Fark Lyric Poetry

Fuck lyric poetry.

Yes, that's right. For damn near a century and a half now, English verse in general and American verse in specific has been in the stranglehold of lyric verse.

When was the last time you read a narrative poem? Any of you read Omeros? When was the last time? When, in fact, was the last time you read a narrative poem written after Queen Victoria Died? One that wasn't a damn book?

Yeah. That's what I thought. And yet, where do all the great poetry quotes come from? Not from Sappho, that's for sure. From narrative poems (and verse drama -- thanks Nuncle), that's where. Sure, we may love us some T.S. Eliot and some Sylvia Plath, but those are mood setting pieces -- and besides, at least for Sylvia, she sells more when she's a'narratin' (Eliot does too, when his work is bastardized into a story-line).

So you sit reading through and writing terrible lyric poetry and you wonder why no one loves you.

Because lyric poetry is fucking useless.

Unless your entire life is based on being some pathetic emo kid, the lyric won't get you far (and even Keats wrote narratives, y'all). Sappho sucks, the reason we have western culture is named Homer, and we poets better wake up to that fact or we will be about as relevant as Jazz.

That's all.
Just a damn rant.
I'll come back later to rant some more.

Go think about politics and wars and write something that tells a story or get the hell off the pen.

Peas,
GMP