A. E. Stallings' "Like"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2023

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem is by Alicia Elsbeth Stallings (born July 2, 1968), an American poet, translator, and essayist.

Stallings has published five books of original verse: Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), Olives (2012), Like (2018), and This Afterlife (2022). She has published verse translations of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) and Hesiod's Works and Days, both with Penguin Classics, and a translation of The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice.

She has been awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship,[2] a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship [3] and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry [4] and the National Book Critics Circle Award.[5] Stallings is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.[6] On June 16, 2023, she was named the University of Oxford's 47th Professor of Poetry.[7][8]

—Bio via Wikipedia

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is
0:06.1	Wednesday, June 21st, 2003. Today's poem is by contemporary poet A.E. Stallings. Stollings has
0:15.5	authored a number of books of poetry, but conversant in both modern and ancient Greek and I think other
0:25.0	languages.
0:26.1	She has published several verse translations of classical works, including Lucretius'
0:31.6	De Rererimnatured or On the Nature of Things, and more recently Hesiod's Works and Days, which is currently the Penguin Classics translation, and it's quite good.
0:43.3	So whether you are already a fan or not of Hesiod, this is your chance to pick it up and enjoy both him and this talented poet.
0:53.6	Stallings is also one of the great and rare working formalist poets these days.
1:01.7	Many of her poems, in fact, are inspired by ancient Grecian themes and topics, mythological characters, and concerns that are brought into
1:11.2	conversation with modern dilemmas, as well as universal problems of human existence.
1:19.0	This poem today is not one of them, however.
1:23.6	Rather, it's a playful reflection on modern language.
1:29.0	It's called Like the Sistina.
1:32.4	I will read it once, offer a few comments, and then read it a second time.
1:40.3	There is an epigraph to this poem.
1:43.4	It reads, with a nod to Jonah Winter.
1:47.0	Now we're all friends. There is no love but like. A semi-demi goddess, something like a reality TV star lookalike, named Simile or Me Too. So we like in order to be liked.
2:03.6	It isn't like there's love or hate now.
2:05.6	Even plain dislike is frowned on.
2:08.6	There's no button for it.
2:09.6	Like is something you can quantify.
2:12.6	Each like, you gathers, almost something money-like, token of virtual support.
	...

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