Stallings interview in LitHub
 

There's a lovely interview with Alicia Stallings on LitHub today -- here's the link. She speaks so eloquently -- e.g. "Rhyme is a sort of echolocation—you speak out into the world, and it answers back to you." And also: "Inspiration is a state of receptiveness to things larger than or other than oneself, a kind of empathy not necessarily with people but with objects, slants of light, shadows, and the sounds of things."

Enjoy,
Nausheen

Mme de Stael somewhat similarly called rhyme "The image of hope and memory," in I think Corinne ou l'Italie (1807).

Cheers,
John

Thanks for that link, Nausheen. That rhyme as echolocation quote recalls Stallings' sonnet "Explaining an Affinity for Bats", which finds a metaphor for a poet's navigation through life and art when it celebrates winged mammals as creatures

Who find their way by calling into darkness
To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things.

What a lovely couplet.

Cheers,
John

Thanks for the link, Nausheen. I certainly feel this way: "I think many poets, myself included, are struggling with how to keep writing in the face of the environmental degradation that is looming over us and our children..." And I was glad to read this: "Poetry is extremely hardy—it was around before the alphabet and will outlast many kinds of human technology. I am robustly optimistic about poetry, but that is maybe the only thing I am optimistic about."

Thanks you Nausheen,

What a great interview. I really need to read more of her, I liked everything she said. I loved her ruminations on rhyme. Made me think of Heaney's 'Personal Helicon'


As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Yes, Alicia always gives great interviews about poetry, and this one is no exception. They are little classics on the subject, full of memorable statements.

Susan