National Poetry Month: A.E. Stallings

"Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther"
(A.E. Stallings)

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night,
The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes?
Does he hum them to while away the sad afternoons
And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite?
Why should the Devil get all the good tunes,
The booze and the neon and Saturday night?


"Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther" by A.E. Stallings appeared in the April 2005 issue of Poetry. Her new verse translation of Lucretius is The Nature of Things. In a 2011 interview the poet explained her interest in the classics: " ... the classical authors were so contemporary—they were writing about contemporary situations, which, frankly, haven’t changed that much.   They seemed fresher and more modern than most of the contemporary poetry I was reading in journals in the late eighties and early nineties.  It was a revelation, for instance, that a poet like Catullus was writing about contemporary (and raunchy) things in contemporary Latin diction, but in tight, elegant metrical forms.  One shouldn’t confuse fusty, schoolmastery Victorian translation with the direct electrical jolt of the originals ... I grew up in Atlanta—well, the area around Emory was a suburb of Atlanta when I was growing up, but now is practically intown ...  My father taught at Georgia State University and my mother was a school librarian.... I took a scholarship to the University of Georgia in Athens GA, where I eventually found a home in the warm and welcoming Classics Department, then chaired by Richard LaFleur." Her three collections are Archaic Smile (1999), Hapax (2006), and Olives (2012).