7 10 339 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/666657ba20e4197307ae29d651bfc21a.pdf 6e5ddaed5b9b2009f6ff70f8ee97dc46 PDF Text Text Onomatopoeia ordinarily turns me totally off, but "alack, alack" for the sound of the wheels on the track is both absolutely accurate and a stroke of imaginative genius. In "Bad News 'Blues" Stallings takes on the late Thom Gunn on his own ground, and may well surpass him. When Bad News comes to town, hold on to your heart. When Bad News comes to town, the troubles start. He's a hit, marked with a bullet, climbing the chart. His smile swings open like a pocketknife. He smiles like he could slice right through a life. Nobody's daughter is safe. Nobody's wife. He plays the odds. He needs just half a chance. Sooner or later he'll ask you to dance. He gets his own way like an ambulance. He's got your number, and he dials direct. He's calling you long distance and collect. You gasp--something is wrong, somebody's wrecked. He's standing outside your door. It's quarter to three. You know he's out there, and it's quarter to three. There is no knock. He's got the skeleton key. The rhyming triplets cut closer to the bone than two generations of San Francisco Beats… Hippies… Bikers… I find it hard to keep current. It is interesting that Stallings and Gunn, both of whom had strict Oxbridge educations, handle the Counterculture better than their dropout contemporaries.. In "Two Rhymes for Grown Ups" she can be equally plain. 1. Drinking Song. The moon is chalky, white & thin. The moon is bitter as aspirin. She drinks it down with a glass of gin. Clear and strong the moonbeams fall. As the proof of alcohol, And everything they touch, appall. But there are stars for all her ills-- �A scattering of spilled, white pills. The glass is sweating as it chills. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings xxxxxx.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2007-01-10T16:40:59 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-10T16:41:00 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context b278a2cc72e6343ddaea1bd3efc0a8f5 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/e2de9fd58fadd354f036be96cf1acd1a.pdf 458b27c3ed417004dc733877ee4005d8 PDF Text Text From a proud tower in that town Death looks gigantically down. Being so excessive himself, Poe is hard to parody, but the Texaco station nails him. Pluto may have been evicted from the nine planets, but as a god he is very present in these poems. Equating death with the masculine principle seems less classical than pre-classical, an atavism from a time of rape and rapine (not that classical Greece was without either). . King of the appetites, King of shade and dust. I met him at the crossRoads of love and lust. … Now I mask and flavor Decay beneath the breath, Consecrated ever To the King of Death. --"Mint" Morpheus, or his absence, is also a conspicuous presence here. Insomnia looms large. Go back to sleep. The hour is small. A freight train between stations Shook you out of sleep With all its lonely ululations. Through the stillness, while you slumber, They trundle down the track, Lugging cattle, coal, and lumber, Crying "alack, alack." It's cheap to pay the engineer: The moon' s a shiny dime. Shut your eyes and you will hear The Doppler shift of time. The hour is small. Resume your rest. Tomorrow will be kinder. Here comes a freight train nosing west, Pulling the dawn behind her. --"Lullaby near the Railroad Tracks" �� Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings xxxx.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2007-01-10T15:11:24 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-10T15:11:25 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context eae630afabb1ea61342d7e99521989c8 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/9be3c425438b6143e180c582acd0210f.pdf 89e91bdde570744f6a13ae102978bff7 PDF Text Text Thus piteously Love closed what he begat: The union of this ever-diverse pair! These two were rapid falcons in a snare, Condemned to do the flitting of the bat. Lovers beneath the singing sky of May, They wandered once, clear as the dew on flowers. But they fed not on the advancing hours; Their hearts held cravings for the buried day. Then each applied to each that fatal knife Deep questioning, which probes to endless dole. Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this out life-In tragic hints see here what evermore Moves dark as yonder midnight's ocean force, Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse, To throw that faint thin line upon the shore. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings xxx.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2006-11-17T14:03:48 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-10T17:49:27 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 46a1a909747eda071e9d95ffe2934c90 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/3655d5ff7142b2ef6e2b08f9f1a11456.pdf bd630d6d14875db3ad25e5e5bb5b6d87 PDF Text Text A sonnet is a moment's monument-Memorial from the Soul's eternity To one dead deathless hour. Look that it be, Whether for lustral rite or dire portent, Of its own arduous fullness reverent. Carve it in ivory or in ebony, As day or night may rule; and let Time see Its flowering crest impearled and ardent. A sonnet is a coin; its face reveals The Soul--its converse, to what Power 'tis due:-Whether for tribute to the august appeals Of Life, or dower in Love's high retinue, It serve; or 'mid the dark wharf's cavernous breath, In Charon's palm it pay the toll to Death. --from "The House of Life" I am afraid the operative word is arduous. Fortunately Rossetti did not always follow his own prescription. His sonnet on Lilith is one of the better poems of the Victorian period. ' Of Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told (The witch he loved before the gift of Eve) That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive, And her enchanted hair was the first gold. And still she sits, young while the earth is old, And, subtly of herself contemplative, Draws men to watch the bright web she can weave, Till heart and body and life are in its hold.be The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare? Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent And round his heart one strangling golden hair. "Body's Beauty" The first sonnet of Meredith's Modern Love used to be very famous. Notice that it has 16 lines. I call it a sonnet because he called it a sonnet. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings xx.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2006-11-17T13:47:21 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-08T18:28:14 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context f545a91433385231320d87f051ef5be4 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/1c184f81e5f4620dcfb81d863f1c55ba.pdf 1e399f5e7c314ddd60d5c99b41171fe2 PDF Text Text I must be one of rather few poets who have never written a sonnet. I have not consciously avoided the form; it may be simply that my subconscious distrusts the predictable. If you think my couplets are predictable, look again. In any event I am able to comment on sonnets with a certain degree of detachment. I admit that the continuing popularity of the form puzzles me, as both the Italian version and the Shakespearean have built-in problems. In the former the writer has to shift gears after line 8, and most of us in any literary form have trouble shifting the gears without grinding them. After the three quatrains of a Shakespearean sonnet the poet has probably said everything he has to say and still has to come up with a final couplet. One would think that in the great onslaught of free verse in the 1920s the sonnet would have been the first traditional mode swept away. Except for the success of the ever retrograde Edna Millay it probably would have been. Interestingly, the other great retrograde, A.E. Housman, the best Latinist of his time, never wrote a sonnet, possibly because no classical model exists The lack of a Greek or Roman model has not deterred A.E. Stallings, in Parax she offers some of the most original and attractive 14 liners I have seen in years. That they are only glimpsed in silhouette, And seem something else at first--a swallow-And move like new tunes, difficult to follow, Staggering toward an obstacle they yet Avoid in a last minute pirouette, Somehow telling solid things from hollow, Sounding out how high a space, or shallow, Revising into deepening violet. That they sing--not the way a songbird sings (Whose song is rote, to ornament, finesse)-But travel by a sort of song that rings True not in utterance, but harkenings, Who find their way by calling into darkness To hear their voice bounce off the shape of things. --"Explaining an Affinity for Bats" Before launching into a sonnet sequence, D.G. Rossetti led off with a defense of the form. Perhaps in fear of Anglo-Saxon prejudice he chose the Shakespearean over the Italian. �. . � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings x.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2006-11-16T13:51:44 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-08T18:26:17 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 3e09fa7dabe38bfe10d6e26f0fde3f40 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/052db93a1d97b13e294470c0b36b55f2.pdf 4bff210d59fad486efb29370183d3f22 PDF Text Text The livelier figure in any Greek line-up is always Cassandra. If I may have failed to follow Your instructions, Lord Apollo, So all my harping lies unstrung, I blame it on the human tongue. Our speech ever was at odds With the utterance of gods: Tenses have no paradigm With those translated out of time. --"Cassandra" Do not fail to appreciate the double meaning of harping. But no amount of discipline alone could account for Stallings' achievement. She passes the test of genius in that the simplest devices turn to gold in her hands. Incidentally, the test applies in music as well, if not always in the visual arts. "Song for the Woman Poets" reminds us that rhyme is an eternally renewable resource. And she will grant you your one wish To fetch across a river Black and sticky as licorice The one you lost forever. --"Song for the Women Poets" 'Wish' and 'licorice' is, as we say, to die for. Not all the echoes in her poems are Mediterranean. Behind "The Village in the Lake" I seem to hear Poe's "City in the Sea." There are those who tell me down At the bottom is a town, Flooded years and years ago: Houses, and a Texaco. Somewhere a cemetery lies. How could it be otherwise? Yet I wonder of those dead (All that water overhead), Who were buried underground. Can ghosts swim, or are they drowned Sinking slowly in the mud, While in the treetops fishes scud, And thjrough the murky heavens floats The shadow of the pleasure boats? "The Village in the Lake" � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings 2.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2006-11-15T16:09:33 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-10T14:38:25 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 00c61f7c162f6bc7c34dbb7fddbc4397 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/5c3078c0f73a1a3025d7b39f5a9091c5.pdf 97c95949f12d8cc37be767e60d711164 PDF Text Text A.E. Stallings is a classicist, and would be if she never used a Greek or Roman reference. Intelligence, balance, an unerring sense of which form will further the material: these are classicism's characteristics, and hers. She makes you realize how much poetry is simply a mess. In some cases a striking and imaginative mess; still… One hates to think what Sylvia Plath would have done with the situation in "Last Will." A father in the NRA? What he really wanted, she confesses,: Was to be funneled into shells, and shot Across a dove-field. Only she could not-The kick of shotguns knocks her over. Well, I say, he'd understand. It doesn't matter What becomes of atoms, how they scatter. The priest reads the committal, something short. We drop the little velvet pouch of dust Down a cylindrical hole bored in the clay-And one by one, the doves descend, ash-gray, Softly as conders on the parking lot. And silence sounds its deafening report. --"Last Will" I could point out such classic devices as in medias res and oxymoron, but will let you search them out yourself. My point is that she can be absolutely contemporary and recognizably classicist at the same time. Stallings does not shy away from her heritage. Persephone appears more than once. I have to say I find her one of the drearier figures, along with Dido and Ariadne (even with the aid of Richard Strauss), but the poet makes a good case for her. The place he took me to: a. was dark as my shut eyes b. and where I ate bitter seed and became ripe c. and from which my mother would never take me wholly back, though she wept and walked the earth and made the bearded ears of barley wither on their stalks and the blasted flowers drop from their sepals d. is called by some men hell and others love --"First Love: A Quiz" � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Stallings 1.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2006-11-15T13:12:58 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-01-08T18:19:26 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context be9a2775b459c6a9da74fc0cb815553b https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/986a157fe2fef1a30f804a029004468a.pdf 1210c3dc9e883756343d6f50498446f3 PDF Text Text Souls at Sea Only at sea do we have loss of "souls." Disasters elsewhere calculate their tolls In bodies merely; and no doubt on ship More souls are in first class than make the trip In steerage, although class on board a plane Seems neither to prevent nor to obtain That right to the immortal. Soul instills Itself at pregnancy? At lifeboat drills? No souls were lost on 9/11, few Stockbrokers having any, and to view A civil servant at the Pentagon As soul is gracing an automaton. The souls that day were airline passengers Who took hijackers on, and with a terse "Let's roll." (Apocryphal the quote may be; So too the souls' Nearer My God To Thee.) � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Souls at Sea.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2007-08-10T12:29:53 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2007-08-24T17:16:51 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context e6d21fef705806e272be3af19de54de6 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/3ca5b66fbdac27fa57be2775c017d550.pdf 3c2ab56952bcef9b5d12e2b2417be848 PDF Text Text A Song without Words, or with The Singing River (the Pascagoula) produces a mysterious music. Legend says that the sound is connected with the mysterious disappearance of the Pascagoula tribe of Indians. It is said that, lifting a song, they entered the water rather than submit to oppression. Federal Writers Project. Mississippi: a guide By water too indifferent to part, A fateful exodus is set to start. As stiff as gods processing down a stair The Nation meet the river, well aware Their Promised Land is here and not ahead. And so they raise a chant. Of hope? Of dread? As ethnocentric as a music is, We cannot know. Its alien mysteries Become the simple program we infer, In which the tribe may not or may concur. What was the sound of one side of the split Waves of the Red Sea slapping? Did it fit Pronouncements of the prophets or conform To some unknown tsunamic sonic norm? A legend is just that. It meets a need Most truth does not, and on it comes to feed Such expiation or such urge to guilt As can be gathered from a singing silt. So unto whom the tribe's forced end ascribe? De Soto? No, another local tribe, Which is the truth of it, if not the song: The tone deaf fact our mythic programs wrong. � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Song wiothout words 2.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2006-10-26T12:52:41 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2006-10-27T09:51:20 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 8cd7cf117c26a9a7f717723428673c67 https://cassity.digitalscholarship.emory.edu/files/original/0af4f8250aab69e1d04a0a817352868a.pdf 1d271932d9c47ae1c761c61bde9d739c PDF Text Text The Song of Bernadotte, or, Trashing Scandinavian Modern Recessive in its reach of guarding waters, Stockholm prospers in self-serving peace. If it has guilts, its surging suicides May not exclusively from them derive. There are the winters, tax indexing, Strindberg. Neutral through two wars, though not, perhaps, So neutral as all that--as corridor For German troop trains Sweden profited, Its biases discreetly processed now Through Nobel prizes (as in dynamite The nitroglycerin is buffered). Proud, Not to say arrogant, this city might Be built to lord it over Finns and Danes. A bit of plush and grandeur, as to say Uncluttered “good design” is very well, But even Viking ships had ornaments Upon the prow, and Barcelona chairs Are stark rebukes to early Swedish kinds. Nor is this yet the Kingdom Peaceable. In tunnels blasted in the granite cliffs (We thank you once again, Mein Herr Nobel) Are bases for a fleet of submarines Still in commission, and the ferries go How many times a day? Outside the reach Of liquor laws. A Carrie Nation nation, Yes, and Lizzie Borden dairy farm. How many of those suicides do you think are? � Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Song of Bernadotte.wps Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Cassity, Turner. Date Created Date of creation of the resource. 2005-03-05T17:27:21 Date Modified Date on which the resource was changed. 2008-02-04T14:36:02 Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Compaq Presario SR1222NX (Born digital materials), Turner Cassity papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. Relation A related resource Is part of the Turner Cassity papers, 1948-2009 [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8z3tt]. Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource application/pdf Type The nature or genre of the resource document Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context 7a4f9aed85df510da22e4a2ddfe7fec4 Misc_Some_used\Beyond_the_Grand_tour Particulars_of_Hell\Misc_Some_used\Beyond_the_Grand_tour