TWO A-LISTERS: AMMONS & STALLINGS

Yesterday, the excellent Best American Poetry website ran a fascinating photo that fortuitously included, among other luminaries, two poets bearing four of the finest first initials in our verse: A.R. Ammons and A.E. Stallings. The occasion of the picture was the launch reading for the BAP volume of 1994, which was guest edited by Archibald Randolph Ammons, known affectionately as “Archie.” Charged with selecting the best poems published that year, Archie did a bang-up job, including individual poems by some of my favorite poets: Dick Allen, John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, and Henry Weinfield.

The phrase “a study in contrasts” is eons past clichehood, but the one between Archie, then nearing 70, and Alicia Elsbeth Stallings, in her mid-20s, is irresistable. Besides their ages and appearances (the bald and bespectacled elder stateman peering criously into the camera, the Hellenically inclined younger poet appropriately coiffured, tentatively smiling), they represent a sharp contrast in their styles of verse. Archie’s long, loose-limbed, ruminative poems, which still mark him a major poet of his generation, were written in limber, shape-shifting free verse. I just have start reading the first few lines of my favorite poem of his “Corsons Inlet” ( “I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning/to the sea,/ then turned right along the surf”) and I’m in a peripatetic trance, a student walking along with Socrates.

Also one of the major poets of her generation, Stallings is a master of traditional form whose poems step with powerful vibrancy from classical Greece into the present day. “Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses,” the Stallings poem Ammons chose for volume, begins with characteristic directness—”They sat there, nine women much the same age,/ The same poppy-red hair, and similar complexions/ Freckling much the same in the summer glare,/ The same bright eyes of green melting to blue[.]” Ending with this poet’s characteristic wit, the poem records one of the muses describing their new boss: “He looked forward/To working with us. Wouldn’t it be fun? Happy/ To answer any questions. Any questions?”

Ammons was floored by the Stallings poem, which also appears in Archaic Smile, her 1999 collection. "It delivers the ancient past into our present with such astonishing justness that I'm silenced with appreciation," he wrote. Those four initials together represent a classic pair.