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Not to jinx it, but it's pretty obvious that Michelle Yeoh is going to take home the top prize for best actress at the Oscars tonight, right? Since its release, the dazzling and dimension-hopping film Everything Everywhere All At Once has garnered nothing but positive reviews and attention. — Read the rest
When teaching formal forms to my poetry students, at some point I inevitably turn their attention to A.E. Stallings’ poems that never fail to delight, challenge, and surprise with their dexterity of craft and unexpected, revelatory results. “The ancients taught me how to sound modern” says Stallings, a feat so paradoxical, yet one she continues, unequivocally, to accomplish. The poet and scholar of mythological and classical studies draws us into the intimate and grandly epic, and with a taut, formalist hand and gifted musical ear, converges sound and meaning in lines that maintain a lustrous tension in addressing the everyday, the mythic, marriage, mothering, and the urgently political. Her re-examinations of iconic female figures from antiquity, coupled with often witty, complex explorations of domestic life are testament to her impressive imagination and facility with language—all earning her, to my mind, a rightful place in the feminist authorial pantheon.
Stallings lives in Athens, Greece, and has been a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, a winner of the Poets’ Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Benjamin H. Danks Award, and Richard Wilbur Award. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, United States Artist Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow, and has translated Lucretius’s The Nature of Things and Hesiod’s Works and Days.
I jumped at the opportunity to spend time with her recently published collection, This Afterlife: Selected Poems that reflects her prolific career. At the start of 2023 I emailed her questions about life and work.
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The Rumpus: In the past you’ve stated, “I like rhyme partly for the way it draws me through a poem, often towards something surprising,” and also that “form is not the enemy of urgency, but its instrument.” I could not agree more. And yet, while formal constraints amp up pressure on the confines of the page and in the poet’s mind, and that pressure can force language and imagery in marvelous, mysterious ways, it can, potentially, feel limiting. Any thoughts on that?
A.E. Stallings: I need limits. Limiting for me is a positive thing. Unlimited freedom for me would lead to creative paralysis. I don’t feel hemmed in by rhyme as a rule, maybe because I am just very practiced and adept in it. But if I have painted myself into a corner, or into too much tidiness or patness, with a rhyme scheme or with a particular pair (or trio) of rhymes, I am willing to toss them out and start afresh. (When having trouble with a rhyme, it is always important to look at the rhymes as a unit and both under consideration: Think of them as entangled particles, a kind of unit.) If any part of a poem is becoming a problem rather than an aid—number of lines (sonnet), syllable count, meter, rhyme—and I am still interested in what I am tackling, I’m willing to tear it down and start from scratch. Sometimes this happens over months or years. But the “scratch” will most of the time be a different recipe of constraints, perhaps with more free or random elements. That said, I do dabble in free verse and even the odd prose poem.
Rumpus: I’ve noticed that even when you don’t employ an elaborate, recognizable form such as the sonnet, villanelle, pantoum, ghazal etc., you often keep to a five-beat line. So, I wondered about that as a cadence you naturally lean into. Also, is there a form you love best? I know that may be an unfair question, and one that changes over time and may be dependent upon subject matter at hand.
Stallings: Yes, I suppose blank verse is also one of my default modes, and a loose iambic pentameter line. It is such a good unit for the breath, and for parsing out sentences of thought, and often has a feeling of “rightness” if it comes at the conclusion of a piece. I am really fond of shorter and hymn meters, which are more songlike, but they aren’t as good for pieces that are meant to sound like utterances instead of songs, and also tend to want to rhyme more. I find syllabics really exciting to work with, and when I can get a syllabic poem off the ground, I am always a little giddy about it. It’s a different way of thinking about rhythm—the contrast not between syntax and meter or how a word falls into a foot or across a foot, but how to fill up the syllable real estate—will this be (in a five-syllable line) five chunky monosyllables that stomp along, or one sweeping five-syllable word? And, so on.
Rumpus: In your earlier poems—in Archaic Smile, for instance, you conjure such striking “re-tellings” or “re-voicings” of female archetypes—Persephone, Medea, Penelope, Daphne, Eurydice—among others. In entering their personas, donning their skins, so to speak, the resulting narrative feels importantly feminist. In later works, the speaker’s current concerns and reality feel front and center with the ancient veils, and threads echoing through in less obvious, overt ways, as if the mythic personas and sensibilities subtly resonate up from underneath into the poet’s present after all those years of marinating in them.
Stallings: At a certain point a poet becomes one of their own influences to confront. One feels one cannot keep doing the same thing in the same way. But I still remain fascinated with these myths. I suppose my engagement with them now is more mitigated, and often also more inter-textual. Possibly the first method is more powerful, but I do find myself coming at the myths from different angles now. Perhaps living in Greece has been a factor, and being older, more of a mother than a daughter. (One thinks of Eavan Boland’s being able to enter the myth of Demeter/Persephone “anywhere.”) I do continue to write the odd persona poem, though, as for instance a couple of recent (still uncollected) poems from the vantage point of the fiftieth Danaid, and I’m always grateful for these convenient masks. (“Mask,” after all, is the meaning of “persona.”)
Rumpus: In relation to the above question, has your decades-long dwelling in Greece affected how the myth tropes enter or are entered into?
Stallings: Ah! I see I leaped ahead. Yes, living in Greece affects my reading of myth. You know people named Daphne, and Antigone, and Eurydice for one. And there is a different understanding of the layers of history and the diachronic life of places. I certainly read The Iliad and The Odyssey and the plays differently, with an awareness of geography, for instance, and how more current events overlay ancient and legendary ones, refugees, for instance, crossing the same stretch of water from the mainland to Lesbos that features in Achilles’ raids in The Iliad. And then there is living in Greek, a language I am both at home and at sea in.
Rumpus: Your poems that address the quotidian, the domestic, and what might seem, at first, to be trifling abstractions, have a way of expanding into unexpectedly grand and revelatory terrain. There are plenty of plays on words and turns of phrase to delight the reader’s mind, but this elevation of everyday matters concerning the raising of children, the maintenance of marriage, and embrace of the mundane is laudable and ultimately, feminist and humanitarian in my estimation. Nothing’s to be taken for granted. Thoughts?
Stallings: That’s very good to hear! The Greek poet Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke used to talk about poetry being for her, a state of mind, a sort of altered state of consciousness, one you are either in at the time or not. At any given moment everything is poetic or nothing is, and I somewhat buy into that. That is to say, there are times when even—or especially—everyday objects or events vibrate with meaning. Our lives may seem to be lived on the small scale of the everyday but, because we are mortal, because ultimately everything is at stake, also play out against something universal and important. Words themselves are part of that, and wordplay, even or again especially the humble pun, sometimes seem to me a kind of sympathetic magic. To me, Greek myths themselves are often domestic (so often about families, for instance, and romantic relationships), and for me intersect in the mytho-domestic sphere. But mostly I am pleased to hear that this embrace of the mundane strikes you as laudable, feminist, and humanitarian!
Rumpus: So much has transpired politically, economically, culturally across the globe, and certainly there in your part of the world and surrounding countries. The crisis in Syria; the displacement of whole populations of people. This becomes more evident in your later poems, specifically selections from Like. How have the events around you and here in the United States affected the direction of your work?
Stallings: From the moment we moved to Greece, we have been living in interesting times here. Being on the front line of several global crises has meant, I think, wanting to be more of a witness in my writing. I wanted the tear gas to be able to roll into the poems, and to address things that were of current concern in my life. I started thinking of some of the refugee populations entering Greece—from the Levant, from Afghanistan even—as belonging in some ways to Cavafy’s world, and historically connected to Greece since ancient times. A lot of what has happened in the US, especially since 2016, I have found distressing, but I am not sure much of that gets into the poems. I still lead a weekly poetry workshop, which started in 2015, with refugee women, from Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. One perspective this has given me is the importance of poetry and the arts to our collective humanity, how it isn’t luxury but necessity. The cultures these women come from invariably prize poetry—and poets—higher than we do in Western Anglophone cultures. So, it is always inspiring, humbling, and grounding, to work with them.
Rumpus: As your children grow up and your life changes, do you see your concerns and modes as an artist shifting?
Stallings: My son is off at college now, and my daughter is a teenager, so, yes, I would say that affects my concerns. Childhood—my own and theirs—is a poetic source for me, a time when the world again vibrates with mysterious meaning, and when language acquisition strips even cliched expressions back to their original force. One thing, since 2017 when I suddenly understood better what we are facing, I worry about the world they will face with the climate catastrophe that we seem to be unwilling to address or even attempt to avoid. That frankly can make it hard to write at all, when your concern is about the end of the world as you know it, species vanishing etc. But I also think it is important for the poets to keep doing what they do, however futile it might seem. It is a way of preserving a sort of biodiversity—verbo-diversity—of experience and language. It is important to wonder at and appreciate what we have now.
Rumpus: Thank you for the tasty lagniappe (and uncollected translations!) included at the end of This Afterlife. I wonder how those didn’t show up in previous collections?
Stallings: We decided not to do a “new and selected,” but I did want people to have some things that weren’t available in the other books, to have some added value to this. There were always a handful of poems I rather regretted not including—just as one sometimes regrets including the odd poem!—and this was a chance to put them back into context. In some cases, they didn’t fit well with the themes of a book, or there were already too many sonnets or poems about Halloween or what have you. In a couple of cases an uncollected poem was super popular at readings (the Edna St. Vincent Millay one, for instance) and people kept asking where to find it. So, I thought it might be fun to give these poems another chance at an audience.
Rumpus: Might there be a favorite place in Greece you find particularly sublime or a little sacred? That inspires you? And if you could go there and relish a certain food you deem divine, what would that be?
Stallings: The ancients were very good at selecting real estate for temples. Greece is full of sublime, sacred spots. A favorite place not far from Athens is the temple to Artemis at Brauron. It was the place for Athenian girls to put away their childish things—a favorite doll, for instance—as they commenced womanhood. It also served as a sort of convent school for some well-born Athenian girls. The girls on the cusp of womanhood were known as “Little Bears.” The temple is nestled among some hills near a river and amidst wetlands. Perfect for a temple to Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt and wild animals. I love the combination of ancient ruins and wildlife—belching frogs, and water snakes, sparrows nesting in gaps in the column capitals, and bright red dragonflies hovering over the ancient spring where women dropped gold jewelry to make their prayers and wishes to the goddess for all kinds of women’s complaints—miscarriages or infertility—or in thanks for successful childbirth. The place definitely has a mystical energy to it.
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Author photo courtesy of author
Learning about my own family’s history in the Indo-Caribbean diaspora has been a slow process, excavating one piece at a time. Author Kevin Jared Hosein’s latest book, Hungry Ghosts, is dedicated to “the ancestors and everything they grew.” The novel, set in Trinidad in the 1940’s, centers on the kinds of people in history whose stories only remain in fragments.
The novel begins with four boys sealing their bond in blood and milk, adopting the corbeau, or black vulture, as their mascot. The reader adopts this form in turn, bearing witness to the joys and misfortunes of the characters. The novel is a mystery that features a quasi-haunted house atop a hill full of eclectic oddities, prose to be savored, and deeply human characters.
Hosein has authored two other books that were published in the Caribbean. The Beast of Kukuyo is a young adult mystery, and The Repenters received the 2017 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. In addition to his work as a writer, Hosein is a science teacher living in Trinidad.
I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to speak with Hosein over Zoom about his forthcoming novel, his research process, and how the people, flora, and fauna of Trinidad are part of its landscape.
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The Rumpus: Within the first few pages of the novel the ghosts of indentured workers are mentioned, almost as if they’re part of the landscape. Do you differentiate between ghost stories and mysteries as a writer or a reader? How do you think about both of those modes of storytelling?
Kevin Jared Hosein: I spent the first few years of my life in a small rural village in central Trinidad, a very Hindu village. It’s where my grandparents live. We moved to another area when I was four or five, but every weekend we used to go visit there. So every time there’s an event, there would be this oral storytelling tradition. A lot of it would focus around what we in Trinidad would call jumbies, that’s kind of like ghosts and demons and so on. It would be spoken of as fact.
As you grow up it’d be like well, the lights came on for themselves, it’d have to be something. I don’t want to use the word superstition, but I would say a lot of it was born from where we had electricity fail in the village. Darkness breeds a kind of mystery.
Ghost stories would become mysteries. We thought of it as actual ghost stories, but we would treat it as, how could this have happened? So we would have to filter the words through that kind of lens, especially me coming from a more scientific background. That is not specific to the village that I grew up in, it’s actually culturally widespread in Trinidad. It’s endemic in many areas today. Even my own parents would say you need to do this because this goddess will visit, or if you go to a graveyard you have to walk back backwards to make sure that no ghosts follow you. It’s probably good that no robbers follow you in! But it would be treated as such.
The mystery [is] to decipher where those originated, where they would have passed down from. Because it might not have started in Trinidad, it might have started in part of Eastern Africa, or parts of Southern India where the ancestors would have come from. I would say that is the link between ghost stories and mysteries. It’s inherently linked to our history and culture.
Rumpus: You mentioned your scientific background. Do you feel like your experience in science and as a science teacher impacts the way you write?
Hosein: It does in a way. I didn’t have the opportunity to study literature, so when I came into secondary school, I went to an all-boy’s Catholic school. It has changed since then, but at the time, literature wasn’t a subject that would be offered to boys. They wanted them to do science or business. That opinion has changed, thankfully, since then. (I do think though if I did do it in that academic setting I probably would’ve decided against it so it’s probably for the best.)
In terms of the scientific background, I might go off on a little bit of a tangent here. That’s ok?
Rumpus: Yeah, go for it! Absolutely.
Hosein: Ok! So in the book all of the characters, almost all of them, speak in what we call Trinidadian Creole English, or at least what I would say is my written version of it. There wouldn’t be any two Caribbean or Trinidadian books that use Creole English the same way because we never learn how to write it. We would put it in text messages and, you know, maybe in emails or Facebook posts, or WhatsApp or whatever, right? But everyone kind of has their own version of it—how to spell it, how to word it—but all of us speak it almost the same way. I mean, you have different levels of it, but you would know a Trinidadian or a Guyanese if you were to meet them.
In school, especially primary school, it was kind of shunned to write like that, to speak like that. You had to speak the Queen’s English, or the King’s English I guess, now. So when it came to me actually writing in a Trinidadian Creole English, I did it very late in life. When I first started to write, when I was a teenager, I wrote [stories set] in America. I had only been to America two times, but I would set my stuff in America and England. Basically, what I saw in the media and on TV. I would write the Hollywood versions of those things. To write in Trinidadian Creole English, to write a story set in Trinidad, I felt like I had to explain everything. To explain our words, and birds, and plants and so on.
Coming back to my scientific background now, I’ve done some scientific writing throughout university. Scientific writing is very specific, and it’s often very descriptive, especially if you’re dealing with zoology and biology—what I study—or ecology. When I was researching and writing Hungry Ghosts, what I wanted to do was to show that everything that we in Trinidad consider educated language, like scientific writing or stuff that I might find in a psychological journal, or very literary poetic prose, I wanted to blend that with our Trinidadian Creole English to show that one is not less than the other. It has a place amongst all these other things; it can be studied and can be academic. I know some people read the book and felt like, oh there’s a lot of big words in here, there’s some scientific kind of esoteric language, but I did have a purpose for that. I wanted our words mixed with all that other type of language. I would say that is maybe how my scientific background helped.
Rumpus: That’s so interesting, because I noticed when I was reading that all of the Creole words—a lot of which I recognized, though some of them are slightly different than the words used in Guyana—are not italicized. Usually in English, copyeditors will encourage you to italicize any words that are non-standard English, and that can be a fluid list of words. It depends on who you’re talking to, and if the audience is expected to recognize those words. If I were to go to a bookstore and pick up a novel, I guarantee if the word croissant is in the book, it wouldn’t be italicized. I love that it’s just included, like “baigan” is written like any other word.
Hosein: No glossary or anything like that. [With] a lot of older Caribbean books, the publishers wanted them to have a glossary. But nobody brought up the possibility of it here.
Rumpus: We’ve talked a little bit about science, and you mentioned your education and oral storytelling. Are there other forms of storytelling outside of literature and science that had an impact on the way you think about story and about writing? Like moves, TV, music, video games, anything like that?
Hosein: Oh, yeah. I love movies. I’m not sure if this is true, but some people tell me I write cinematically. I just write it as I imagine it playing out in a scene, how scenes are set, and kind of paint an image in my head.
I like to listen to music when I write—typically video game soundtracks because they’re so atmospheric. I’ll just give an example: the Elder Scrolls Skyrim soundtrack, because a lot of the time you’re just wandering around in this big open world, so the music is not really specific to any setting, but it has this kind of long, ethereal, wandering kind of feel. So for this book, that was probably on constantly to kind of get those ideas flowing.
A movie I had in my head when I was writing it was Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life, which is a poetic, esoteric kind of movie, but still about imagery. I was thinking about how he used the images to tell an otherwise basic story, but gave it extra dimensions.
Rumpus: In terms of history, what is it about this particular period in the 1940’s in Trinidad and Tobago’s history that felt like a really rich place to set a novel?
Hosein: That specific time was when we had two superpowers on the island. We had the British and we had the Americans. The Americans were there throughout World War II and they would’ve vacated I believe sometime in the late sixties or early seventies. It was interesting at a time when both of them were there, because how the locals would’ve seen the British were like these authority figures who were almost infallible. They were very stern, strict, and appeared to be well-dressed, respected officials. To make it in Trinidad you had to emulate that behavior and style of dress and so on.
When the Americans were here, it would’ve been the navy and this was because they thought Nazi boats were in the area so they set up a base there around the capital. They built a road that kind of cut across the country and the navy was allowed to use that road, so it wasn’t a civilian road. We could kind of say it divided a certain part of the country because you had a part that was around the Americans and the more urban areas, and they were a little more developed. And there are the more rural parts like where the barracks would have been. I did find that was an interesting setting, like an actual road dividing the two.
So when both of them were there, the Americans were actually very brash and loud, and kind of the opposite of what the British were. The locals used to see that, and some of them would start emulating that because it would be like, oh the British are not infallible because now we have some Americans bossing them around. It’s almost a kind of feel-good schadenfreude kind of feeling I think some of them had. The Americans also, I think, brought with them the notion of the dream, the American Dream. You could come here and you could build yourself up, you could do what you want. They were very carefree kind of people, they had radios with loud music and they used to play with the locals. You of course had, you know, the very bad ones, but overall they were kind of the opposite of the British because they were very jovial.
What I sought to do was to put characters between, to give them that notion of a dream. I like to say this is a novel about split-second decisions, because either you go for it or you sink into the water and be forgotten.
Rumpus: I wanted to talk a little bit about your research process for this book, especially in terms of researching history.
Hosein: I think in 2016 or 2017 or so, I used to do some work for the Commonwealth Foundation. They run the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. They have an online magazine called adda, they were just starting it, and they were commissioning pieces from former entrants, and they asked me to write something about Trinidad. There’s so much to write, but at the same time I didn’t know what to write.
I had a childhood memory of dressing up—we used to put on these monster masks and go around, kind of like Halloween, what we call J’ouvert. We would take these broomsticks and make noise, and then the neighborhood people would pay us to go away. Last time I played that I would have been eleven years old. Later on, I noticed that nobody used to do it again. The practice has altogether stopped, and it’s almost as if everybody forgot it, and I was like, is this like a Mandela effect? Am I misremembering this thing I did for like eight years? Now it’s as if people vaguely remember it, so I wanted to write about that, or at least start with that.
So I said I would ask my grandparents, or my grandfather—he’s the talkative one. He was like, well things start and then stop. That was his explanation. I wanted to seek into why it ended, and one of my aunts said, well, people just got too ashamed of sending their children out to collect a few cents. It was almost like begging in a way. I don’t know if that’s the reason, but the conversation actually led to something deeper where my grandfather was talking about his childhood, and I was kind of relating it to my own. Over a period of ten to fifteen years, some things change and some does remain in a time capsule.
That first interview with him, I just gathered a lot of information. There was a story that he told me that I found completely unbelievable. In the villages there used to be a lot of floods, so people would actually carry boats in the roads and carry children to school and so on. Of course, when you have a lot of floods, you would get a lot of potholes in the road. There was this British official’s wife, and she was walking through the village, and he said that she tripped and fell, and she landed face down in a puddle of mud. She had this white dress on, so it smeared. Everybody was just kind of silent, and nobody was sure whether to help or not, so then he said this little boy started to laugh. [The official’s wife] got furious and apparently said she would order that the village be torn down because of that.
Apparently it didn’t happen, but I thought something about it was unbelievable. At the time I had a friend who was a historian, and he had a couple of books in Trinidad. His name is Angelo Bissessarsingh, but he passed away a few years ago. He never heard anything like that before, but he was aware that there was an order that was declined by some high official to raze that village, but there was no reason why, really. There was a made-up reason where it was encroaching upon something. It didn’t go through in the end.
So, what I thought was interesting was that, of course, not everything would be archived, that the story actually happened. It was as if, that [story] would’ve been lost in time if my grandfather hadn’t told it. I didn’t actually write that in the article for Commonwealth, but it remained in my head. I thought that maybe one day I could write a book with that character in it, and the book actually started with that character. Just the notion of it, someone having that high amount of privilege and power back then—it’s not like it was the 1700’s or 1800’s. This was 1940-something.
In terms of the research, a lot of it was mainly talking to people, elders, trying to extract information from them. Just me with a notepad and pen, talking for hours. A lot of people don’t like to talk about it, and I was very fortunate to find a few villagers who were quite surprised that it actually turned into a book. I don’t know what they actually thought it was going to be.
Rumpus: While I was reading, animals felt ever-present in the story. They’re pets, they’re symbols of the natural world, sometimes they’re omens of danger or disaster. How did you think about their role in the world of the story as you were writing?
Hosein: In the unedited version, there was actually a part with a cat at the barrack. The cat got edited out, and only the dog remained. It became a bit redundant, so the cat had to go. In terms of the animals and the landscape and so on, a part of me wanted to be like, well, us Trinidadians are part of the landscape too. We are kind of animals brawling and conflicting with each other all the time.
The last chapter of the book is mainly focused around the plants and animals. The book starts off with it as well, and I wanted it to seem like the land is an absolute, it is an ultimate. It’s almost as if to give a broad feeling of the island where—how can I say this—the dream of the island, the life of the island will continue. There will be others to continue the process. It’s almost as if, life will carry on, it will get better, there will be hardships. And the animals are there as a sign of that in a way, that the natural state, despite all the turmoil and hardships the characters endure, will move on.
I do see animals personifying certain emotions or ideals. The key one being what we call the corbeau, which is a black vulture. Corbeau is a French word for raven, but we call it that. It’s not our real national bird, but in a way, it is the most talked about bird in Trinidad. There’s a lot of idioms surrounding the bird, and I guess there’s one I was thinking about. It’s kind of an elitist saying, that corbeau don’t eat sponge cake, which means that you could throw out maggots and rotting food, but if you throw cake for it, it might just leave it alone. It’s as if to say that it doesn’t know what luxury is. That was something I kept in mind because we have a lot of animal idioms here. But I was thinking of it like that, as if these characters were part of the natural landscape, just like any other animal or plant.
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Author photo by Mark Lyndersay
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