Stallings in Poetry
 

I'm a bit stumped as to where to post this. It's a recently published villanelle by Alicia Stallings. I like it muchly. Can anyone tell me what the metre might be? I'm stumped there too.

I'm less stumped by the epigraph. L3 would seem to be a paraphrase/translation.

Duncan

I think she read that one at West Chester last summer. I think the meter is basically fourteeners but she's clearly not counting, as one of the refrains is a hexameter. I wouldn't have noticed though if you hadn't asked the question--this is what happens when someone masters the rules and then stops worrying about them. It works.

Chris

It seems deceptively simple, doesn't it? Sigh.

Thanks, Duncan! (And Chris and Janice too...) It's at sixes and sevens... as it were. A variation of Poulter's Measure, perhaps?

This one really hits home, so to speak. Good poem, Alicia.

Have you ever seen any of the films of Theo Angelopoulos, Alicia? He's traditionally cited as the greatest filmmaker to come out of Greece, and one of the greatest in the world in the last 30-or-so years. I ask because there are several lines in this piece that remind me of a combination of his two masterpieces, The Traveling Players (the moving, the importance of meals, the impermanence/fluidity of time), and The Hunters (the crossing of the water, the "stashing bones in a closet"). All that's lacking is the mythological reference, but I wonder if that isn't somewhat implicit in the meter, which reminds me a lot of Lattimore's free-hexameter renderings of Homer.

"But there are always boxes that you never do unpack." Isn't that the truth!
Fine poem, Alicia!

Wonderful poem, Aliki.

there are two other poems as well, all online
 

"Epic Simile" and "First Miracle" are more stunning though--Congratulations, Alicia!

You are a poet of the primal, and that's where you've really got it going. I mean who has ever approached anything like this:

...Her unstartled gaze
Beads on him like a sniper’s sites, until
At the clean report of a cracking poplar branch,
She leaps away like luck, over rapid water,
And snowfall scrims the scene like a mist of tears,
Like a migraine, like sweat or blood streaming into your eyes.

--from "Epic Simile"

or this:

She can’t change water into wine; instead
She fashions sweet milk out of her own blood.


It's almost frightening. Frighteningly primal, archetypal--those things so many poets make no attempt to confront these days. But then that's what life is when you strip away the pop culture, the bullshit, the trivial. Thanks so much, Alicia.