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07-30-2019, 05:19 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2011
Location: Boston, MA
Posts: 651
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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
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07-30-2019, 06:06 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2017
Location: TX
Posts: 6,630
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Mme de Stael somewhat similarly called rhyme "The image of hope and memory," in I think Corinne ou l'Italie (1807).
Cheers,
John
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07-31-2019, 08:57 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2002
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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.
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07-31-2019, 09:20 AM
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Join Date: Mar 2017
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What a lovely couplet.
Cheers,
John
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08-01-2019, 07:45 PM
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Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: usa
Posts: 7,645
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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."
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08-06-2019, 06:32 AM
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Join Date: May 2016
Location: Staffordshire, England
Posts: 4,420
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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.
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08-06-2019, 08:11 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Iowa City, IA, USA
Posts: 10,090
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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
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