Reading
This Afterlife is A. E. Stallings’s new Selected Poems, drawing on her four full-length books, and including a “lagniappe” or bonus of previously uncollected poems and translations. Stallings, a poet who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, has made Athens, Greece, her home for almost two decades. Her education in Classics, Latin, and Greek prepared her for a life preoccupied with the Grecian peninsula, but the move was not preordained—it’s rather as if her work over the years led her there, from her debut collection Archaic Smile, a book of rewritings of myths and riffs on sayings, her second book Hapax, her translations of Lucretius and Hesiod and George Seferis, on through her third book, Olives, and her fourth, the Pulitzer Prize finalist collection Like, which begins with an epigraph in Greek and a poem that responds to it. That the poem is a villanelle tells us on the one hand that she is a poet whose strongest work often emerges out of inherited forms, and that her sensibility was European before she herself knew it was—the poem recalls that journey in the slow boil of the villanelle, building, and recasting:
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The cartoonist HT Webster predicting generative art in 1923
1. Snide comment.
2. Snidier comment about other’s political party affiliation.
3. Snidiest comment unwittingly based on an Instagram meme about a certain political party.
4. Retort based unwittingly on another Facebook meme created as a response to the first.
5. Sweeping unassailable generalization.
6. Righteous indignation.
7. Fact.
8. Conspiracy theory.
9. More facts.
10. More conspiracy theories.
11. Conspiracy theory.
12. Counter–conspiracy theory.
13. Fact?
14. Fact?
15. Snide slogan masquerading as fact about issue not directly related but rather inferred from stance of preceding discourse.
16. Snidier slogan masquerading as fact about yet another inferred issue.
17. Didactic speech about the importance of using reason, facts, and research rather than snide slogans and didactic speeches.
18. “Research.”
19. Question veracity of sources.
20. Question the word “veracity.”
21. Question mental fortitude.
22. Righteous indignation.
23. Massive unfalsifiable statement.