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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
Maggie Millner. Photograph by Sarah Wagner Miller.
It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end.
Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.”
Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.”
At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.
INTERVIEWER
Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems?
MILLNER
I hadnt imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated.
INTERVIEWER
What was missing in the couplet form that the prose was able to provide?
MILLNER
There’s a relentlessness to writing in rhyming couples that for the reader can be exhausting and claustrophobic. I was concerned about the lack of formal surprise. But also, life has formal qualities, and a relationship model is a formal question. The book was also very much about putting things in dialectical relation to each other, so I realized that there needed to be some other secondary mode or interlocutor.
INTERVIEWER
The title of the book, Couplets, is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it.
MILLNER
Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think.
I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up. The book’s jacket copy says something about coming out: one woman’s coming-out, coming undone. But I do think those two things are discrete. The consummation of queer desire is a realization that anticipates a later realization, which is that relationships are not inherently meant to be durable.
INTERVIEWER
In Couplets, the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?
MILLNER
The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.
INTERVIEWER
Much of the story of these two couples takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the highly specific proper nouns that anchor your speaker to a sense of place and social milieu aren’t easy to square in verse. Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words. Why did you include them?
MILLNER
Through this new relationship, the speaker is stepping into an identity, but she’s also stepping into a social class and milieu that is not entirely comfortable to her, where queerness is the opposite of marginal, and where being a person in an alternative relationship model is actually quite common. She is hyper-attentive to the signifiers that attend this world, which she too finds ugly (and alluring). On the one hand, she longs to be naturalized into it, but on the other, there is also this inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for. Part of why this isn’t a more triumphant coming out story has to do with the fact that queer life, within the circles she’s in, doesn’t attract public shame. On the contrary, there’s social cachet in stepping into that identity. Which is not to elide the homophobia and queerphobia that continue to dominate most spaces in this country, or the elders and activists who have made communities like this one possible. But for the speaker, there’s something disingenuous about claiming her queerness only as a socially marginal identity.
INTERVIEWER
Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry?
MILLNER
As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem.
INTERVIEWER
The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?
MILLNER
There might be more references to novelists in the book than to poets, which is reflective of the speaker’s taste and of a desire to be maximally immersed in experiences of every aesthetic kind. Novels provide that exhaustive immersion. It’s not that poems don’t, but poetry is more condensed and demanding and doesn’t act on attention the way that novelistic prose acts on attention. There’s a passivity and submissiveness that the reader of a novel gets to enjoy. The reader of poetry is invited to focus on granular particulate dimensions language—it’s a less submissive experience, or at least a less passive one.
As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.
INTERVIEWER
The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms?
MILLNER
A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them.
I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality?
MILLNER
I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition.
INTERVIEWER
I was struck by how resistant your speaker is to the endings that might otherwise be imposed upon her; she leaves her boyfriend but feels herself conducting his mannerisms in her relationship with her girlfriend, so that the two meet in her. Why were you drawn to that choreography, which seems impossible for a book about couples, written in couplets?
MILLNER
On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event.
There’s a reason that literature is still being written about the fundamental question of how to know when a relationship is over, even if you still have an attachment to that person. We don’t have cultural scripts for those questions, and the way they are legislated is still retrograde and dependent on conservative notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family. The speaker of my book is very much reckoning with the residues of historical expectations of what women owe men. There’s a great temptation on the part of women in hetero partnerships to feel an outsized sense of responsibility for their demise.
Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of the Review.
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