This June, Oxford graduates around the world will be voting, in person and online, for the Oxford Professor of Poetry. It’s a big enough deal that Ladbrokes is charting bets on it. An American poet is up for it, and as a service to Oxford graduates worldwide, I have prepared an open letter detailing the Top 5 Reasons to Vote Stallings.
First of all, Stallings possesses
#5: Not just twice the X chromosome, twice the X factor.
If it’s an election, it’s political, and if it’s political, the gender and race thing comes up, inevitably. Stallings herself has pointed out the potential first she would represent (granted, with the Ruth Padel Caveat). But even if you’re a zealous anti-feminist who happens to have graduated from Oxford, you can rest assured that, by electing Stallings, you actually haven’t helped strike a blow for gender equality. If a woman poet has to be that good to get the post, you’re basically sending the following message to all women poets: “If you were a chap, you’d have to be no better than Cecil Day-Lewis, but if you’re a woman, consider our doors shut to you unless you’re a Stallings.”
Just as with Kay Ryan’s U.S. Poet Laureateship and Claudia Rankine’s umpteenth major award nomination for Citizen, gender has suprisingly little to do with the advancement of women in our art. The underlying factors are, consistently, intellectual and artistic brilliance. And both are present in Stallings—as well as the one factor that sets major poets apart from minor ones, the mysterious unteachable unquantifiable X factor that has nothing to do with the X chromosome. Stallings has this as well, and if you don’t believe me, visit her page at the Poetry Foundation website and click on some titles. Academically and artistically, she is the right candidate; the sociopolitical aspect is a bonus.
The irrelevance of her sociopolitical relevance dovetails nicely with the fact that
#4: She has no ideological or aesthetic axe to grind.
The best poets usually don’t; to settle on a single aesthetic ideology (“formalism,” “avant-garde,” etc.) usually implies a wish to simplify the mysterious art into a set of ideas or behaviors that, if believed and performed rigidly enough, will place the poet on the right side of (literary) history. The same holds true of the major political ideologies with regard to human affairs. Poets are frequently drawn to one type of ideology or the other: In our time, it takes the form of a strident assertion of ethnic or social (or gender) identity, or else the strident assertion of some right way to write, read, or experience poetry.
Stallings shows neither of these limitations. Nor, admittedly, do the other candidates this year. But with Stallings, the proof is in the writing. In her prose, this time: Although Stallings writes mostly in traditional forms and meters, her side career as a reviewer shows an ear attuned to the mostly nonmetrical work of Beth Bachman and the more irregular but highly musical verse style of the late Sarah Hannah—as well as to poetry stylistically closer to her own, like Don Paterson’s. Her receptive spectrum is exceptionally broad as a reader and critic of poetry, and this would be important to her potential role at Oxford as a professor of poetry—someone who is on campus, not simply as an honoree in a hallowed Chair, but as a working teacher, sharing her knowledge and, yes, wisdom with Oxford’s students.
Wisdom, I might add, that has been deepened and broadened by
#3: Her Classical Connection.
This is something that has been pointed out by other writers on this subject, like the fellow classicist Mary Beard. But it hasn’t been properly emphasized, and I’d like to take a moment to explain why Stallings’s background in The Classics (she has translated from both Greek and Latin) is a specific qualification, for this specific post, that supercedes mere popularity or prestige or female gender or accessibility or a genial disposition.
Is someone specifically educated in classical languages simply better qualified to teach English language poetry? It doesn’t always correlate with poetic prowess (nothing does), and it doesn’t always correlate with pedagogical effectiveness (based on 19th century British novels, the opposite may have been true). Objectively, though, if we take poetic and pedagogical skill as a given (and in Stallings’ case we can), a classicist is best qualified to teach poetry because Western poetry, across languages, across centuries, is simply saturated with the stuff. You would do well to consult a classicist on the Ovid in Shakespeare and Hughes, and the Homer in Tennyson and Logue; you require the guidance of a trained classicist to access even a tenth of “Lycidas.” The subject taught by the professor who holds this post is the most general one possible: poetry—not poetry of this century or the century before it, teaching which one might get away (but not very far) with a little ignorance about the old stuff. If it’s truly all of poetry Oxford seeks a professor of—and it is—then we must seek out the candidate with the demonstrably longest working memory. In her poems and in her academic work, Stallings blows the other candidates out of the water in this one regard. No matter how much you adore Armitage or revere Soyinka, this one aspect of Stallings’s superiority cannot be contradicted; it is an objective fact.
It is also an objective fact that
#2: She is accomplished.
How accomplished? Okay, she doesn’t have a gajillion readers like Simon Armitage (but she deserves them and will get them soon enough), and she doesn’t have a Nobel Prize like Wole Soyinka, either. But she is a MacArthur “Genius” with the not-always-the-case bonus of being a genius genius to boot.
In case you Oxford graduates (you’re mostly British, I assume?) haven’t heard of Poetry magazine, let me tell you that appearing in Poetry is, for an American poet, the equivalent to appearing at the Royal Albert Hall. Statistically, A. E. Stallings has published more poems in Poetry since she graduated from Oxford than years she has been an Oxford graduate. You could collect her Poetry poems into a chapbook that would be better than any chapbook ever published. At this rate, she will, by the time she is 80, have published so many poems in Poetry that I feel compelled to express the phenomenon mathematically:
[# Poems in Poetry] >>> [# Years Alive]
This is not the equivalent of performing at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s like unrolling a sleeping bag onstage at the Royal Albert Hall and having Her Majesty the Queen fluff your pillow.
…Okay, maybe that wasn’t that so effective a simile. I should probably read more Stallings to see how such things are done. Which brings me to the next reason:
#1: Oxford students will magically start writing better poems.
To tell you why, I have to wax personal here. Of anecdotes, after all, are reputations made.
True story: I actually met A. E. Stallings once, at the West Chester Poetry Conference in 2011. I had signed up too late to be part of Stallings’ faculty workshop, which is to say, I signed up like one day after signing-up became possible, only to find Stallings’ faculty workshop booked up with a line that wrapped twice around the block. I ended up in a Masterclass on Prosody, which terrified me because there was an enormous packet of reading material, and I did not and still do not really know what prosody is. Phonetically a sinister combination of “prose” and “malady,” it sounded like something I had best avoid contracting.
So I introduce myself to Stallings (full disclosure, she’d picked a manuscript of mine for the Donald Justice Prize, but please don’t think I’m writing this because of that). Long story short, she encourages me to write a didactic poem, we disagree a bit about the value of Harry Potter, and with a minimum of me begging, she authorizes me to pull up a chair into her workshop the next day and fly-on-the-wall it.
That should be the end of the story: She’s a generous person, great, we get the picture. But no. The generosity involved here, Oxford graduates, is way weirder. Listen:
I sat next to a poet in that workshop who recited, on the first day, a poem of his that was, like nearly all poems, unmemorable. Maybe it was “bad,” but truth be told, I don’t remember what it was about, and I don’t remember any of the lines, which I vaguely recall suffered from a mild case of prosody. That evening, the official workshop members each had private meetings with Stallings.
The next day, when workshop time rolled around, the poet next to me read the prior poem’s post-Stallings revision. I went crosseyed, popped an aneurysm, and felt the earth move. This guy was throwing down transcendent terza fricking rima in iambic fricking tetrameter about the inauguration of Jack Kennedy. “For something something something stand: / Young Kennedy has won the land!” he thundered, like the all-American lovechild of Longfellow and Whitman. (Did I just remember a line from a poem I heard once four years ago? Yes, I did.) I wondered briefly whether Stallings had written it, but on further reflection decided the poem wasn’t that good. Stallings had simply sprinkled some Muse dust on it.
Ask yourselves, Oxford graduates: Couldn’t British poetry use a little more Muse dust? Sappho was called the Tenth Muse—do yourselves a favor and pick the Eleventh as your Oxford Professor of Poetry this summer.