Sherry Chandler

Though Alicia Stallings is not really tall, she gives the impressive of being long and thin. She has a long thin face with a long thin nose and her blond hair, cut jaw-length, is straight and sleek. She has a way of constantly smoothing the left forelock as she reads and tucking it behind her ear, though it had been securely tucked all along. Her voice is thin and reedy, a little hoarse. She sips water frequently. She is dressed in black; she is a poet after all, but her black capri pants have a bright red band and her shawl is decorated with silver threads and wine-dark velvet. She wears three inch black heels with rounded toes and an ankle strap. Across the vamp of the right one runs a green stem that continues across the left to culminate in a red rose that droops over the outside of the left shoe. She turns her ankles as she reads, tilting those high high heels like a child playing grownup.

From this thin reed of a flute, a sort of feminine panpipe, issues a lyric voice of some power and range.

Gamine is the right word for the look, gamine perhaps the right word for the intelligence that is at once mischievous, playful to the point of impudence, and a bit of an outlaw, though she does work in “received forms” and take as her subject matter the old Greek myths.

Perhaps I should be very careful to specify that I mean a bit of a poetic outlaw, a woman who will write a series of limericks on classical subjects for example, considering what Stallings posted on the Harriet blog on Monday before I heard her read on Tuesday:

I’ve been thinking a lot about translation, not just because I was on a panel about poetry, philosophy, and translation, but because I have been in the act of translation… that is “carrying across” boundaries–myself, my luggage, my family. Because of a paperwork glitch in a visa in 1997, which means he must check the “yes” box on the green form coming into the country which asks if you have ever had problems with the INS, my Greek husband still encounters difficulties when we go through passport control. We inevitably get sent to the Orange Room (or whatever it is called in the particular airport we are in), along with various resident aliens and visitors whose paperwork or appearance or demeanor has somehow sent up flags with the immigration officer.

So there we are, with a 3 year old who has been 10 hours cooped up on a plane, now running wildly around, getting shouted at whenever he crosses an ominous red line in the carpet, as we wait to find out if they will let my husband into the country, or, for some arbitrary reason or other, send him back on the next plane out. There are no rights here–no rights to an attorney, no rights just because you are married to a citizen. Everyone in the room is exhausted and tense. Some have the stoical resignation of those used to being under the arbitrary sway of civil servants. I wonder how many US citizens even know of the existence of such rooms and corridors, conviently out of sight, in the airport, behind which are interview rooms and restraining cells, limbos of all kinds, and some circles of hell.

I heard Stallings read at Georgetown College, where she claimed Kentucky roots, so they made it into the country and I can attest that son Jason is impishly cute. Knowing what they went through makes me double grateful for the experience of the reading.

If you have not read Stallings’ poetry, do. You’ll find a sampling of poems from her first collection, Archaic Smile, at this link.

Added: As Andrea points out below in the comments, Stallings blogs today about being in bourbon country and not able to buy a beer at a service station. Maybe she should have asked for a mint julep??

Ha ha.

Anyway, the posting is doubly appropriate because, as Andrea guessed, I did use this description of Stallings as one of my close observations for Leatha Kendrick’s Master Class in Poetry at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning (though I may have written it anyway, being always in the market for blog fodder). And also because Stallings discusses Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station,” which is one of the poems Leatha includes often in her workshop packets. And so the universe comes into one of its momentary alignments.

Here is Stallings:

Which in turn has been making me think of Elizabeth Bishop’s “Filling Station.” I am an ardent admirer of Bishop, but it has taken me years and years to get over an initial dislike of this poem.

I had never much liked the “Oh, but it is dirty!” opening, or the somewhat self-consciously humorous “Be careful with that match!” The tone is hard to pin down (oily?)–bemused, almost affectionate, but also… well, condescending. The narrator finds it difficult to imagine why (oh why) someone would bother with such niceties as a doily or a begonia in such a dirty place. And then the flatness (deliberate of course) of the ending, “Somebody loves us all.”

Even when I recognized the skill in it–the control of the diction (grease-impregnated wickerwork” “quite comfy” “hirsute begonia”), which, perhaps implied, is above the diction level of the attendants, the control of assonance (”heavy with grey crochet”)–how “dirty” and “oily” somehow combine to make “doily”–I still had trouble liking the poem. The only parts I liked without reservation were “Somebody waters the plant,/ or oils it, maybe” and the ESSO-SO-SO-So part.

It doesn’t seem so condescending to me now, more arch and poised and humorous

…

So I guess what I mean to say is I’ve come around to “Filling Station.” I like it, I admire it, though it still isn’t my favorite Bishop poem.

If you haven’t read “Filling Station,” it is here. And I urge you to read the whole of Stallings analysis of the poem here.