A. E. Stallings' "Denouement"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 2023

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A. E. Stallings is a poet and translator mining the classical world and traditional poetic techniques to craft works that evoke startling insights about contemporary life. In both her original poetry and translations, Stallings exhibits a mastery of highly structured forms (such as sonnets, couplets, quatrains, and sapphics) and consummate skill in creating new combinations of meter, rhyme, and syntax into distinctive, emotionally compelling verse. Trained in classical Latin and Greek and currently living in Athens, she brings a wide knowledge of Greco-Roman literature, art, and mythology to bear on her imaginative explorations of contemporary circumstances and concerns. In Hapax (2006), Stallings imbues figures and events from classical drama and mythology with a modern sensibility. "First Love," written as a multiple-choice quiz, intertwines the Persephone myth with a chilling account of infatuation, and "XII Klassikal Lymnaeryx" emphasizes the satiric edge to Greek myth through a series of limericks in witty, unexpected diction. For her ambitious translation of De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things, 2007), Stallings rendered Lucretius's epic-length treatise on the nature of reality into rhyming fourteeners. The unusual meter and colloquial language she employs capture every cadence of Lucretius's enthusiasm for his subject while also making the complexities of his argument easily understandable. Through her technical dexterity and graceful fusion of content and form, Stallings is revealing the timelessness of poetic expression and antiquity's relevance for today.

-bio via MacArthur Foundation

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.5	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, November 29th, 2023.
0:09.9	Today's poem is by A.E. Stallings, one of our favorites here at the Daily Poem.
0:16.8	And it's called Dainou Moi.
0:19.4	I'll read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it again.
0:24.1	Here's denoumois.
0:27.5	Wool gathering afternoon. All I've accomplished all is to untangle a wine, dark skein, and coil it into a ball.
0:36.1	I did not knit a swatch for gauge or cast a stitch or pick a
0:40.0	plausible pattern out. I just unworked one hitch after another and went brailing along the maze
0:46.8	over, under, twist and turn to wear the ending phrase. It's always best to leave no glitches
0:53.5	in the plot. Sailors tell you that the yarn is
0:56.1	weakest at the knot. Open. Do not tug the little nooses closed. Tease the cat from her cradle,
1:03.1	lead the minotar by the nose, out of the labyrinth through which all heroes travel and where
1:08.8	the waiting wife will learn to raffles to unravel.
1:12.5	Out of the complicated roll the smooth, round one, so when it drops out of your lap, it brightly
1:18.7	comes undone, leaping over the floor like swift ships outward bound, unfurling the catastrophe
1:25.9	that aches to be rewound.
1:36.3	Alicia Staling's is a contemporary poet American by birth, though she spends a good deal of her time now in Greece. She's also an accomplished
1:47.1	translator of classical poetry and one of the best committed formalist poets working today.
2:01.6	This poem's title, Danu Mou, is, among other things, a literary term referring to the
2:09.6	end of a plot, especially the plot of a novel, where all of the tangles and complications, all of the problems and obstacles that
2:21.9	the protagonist has had to overcome are finally being worked out, coming loose and straightening out.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.