[A. E. Stallings]

It's funny how Barbies come up in nearly all the backstories!

I hope Julie won't mind my posting another poem. I love to teach syllabics and haiku stanzas--I think they are really underused by "formalists"--and my class this year on Spetses just adored this one:


Egrets

You have to love them
for the way they make takeoff
look improbable:

jogging a few steps,
then heaving themselves like sacks
of nickels into

the air. Make them wear
mikes and they’d be grunting
like McEnroe lobbing

a Wimbledon serve.
Then there’s the matter of their
feet, which don’t retract

like landing gear nor
tuck up neatly as drumsticks
on a dinner bird,

but instead hang down
like a deb’s size tens from
the hem of her gown.

Once launched, they don’t so
much actively fly as blow
like paper napkins,

so that, seeing white
flare in a roadside ditch, you
think, trash or egret?—

and chances are it’s
not the great or snowy type,
nearly wiped out by

hat plume hunters in
the nineteenth century, but
a common cattle

egret, down from its
usual perch on a cow’s
rump, where it stabs bugs.

Whoever named them
got it right, coming just one
r short of regret.

I love how it gets those very uniambic rhythms in there, and odd words like nickles and McEnroe, great monosyllables with heft like "rump" and "bugs"--how this measures a lot of its syllables out by the interesting monosyllable (our first disyllable is "takeoff"), so that words like "improbable" and "regret" come to the fore. I just love it, and my students were enchanted reading it aloud, everyone bursting into laughter at "trash or egret", which became an instant byword in the class...

I think I read somewhere that Margaret Atwood, who started as a poet, was interviewed as a young poet and actually asked not if but when she was going to commit suicide--which was apparently expected of an ambitious young woman poet--at which point I guess she switched her focus to fiction. Thank goodness that no longer applies, but I can't imagine what impact Sexton's suicide would have had on her students--it sounds devastating. I love your portrait of her as a teacher. Do you think her death affected the female students any differently, in terms of going into poetry? As a role model, I mean?