A. E. Stallings' "Scissors"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem offers an incisive analogy for analogies. Happy reading.

A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford University. Her poetry collections include Like (2018), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Olives (2012), which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award; Hapax (2006); and Archaic Smile(1999), winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017, and she is a frequent contributor to Poetry and the Times Literary Supplement.

Stallings’s poetry is known for its ingenuity, wit, and dexterous use of classical allusion and forms to illuminate contemporary life. In interviews, Stallings has spoken about the influence of classical authors on her own work: “The ancients taught me how to sound modern,” she told Forbes magazine. “They showed me that technique was not the enemy of urgency, but the instrument.”

Stallings's latest verse translation is the pseudo-Homeric The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice (2019), in an illustrated edition with Paul Dry Books, and her latest volume of poetry is a selected poems, This Afterlife (2023, FSG). She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. She lives in Athens, Greece, with her husband, the journalist John Psaropoulos.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:08.3	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, January 8, 2025.
0:13.1	Today's poem comes from A.E. Stallings, and it's called Cissors.
0:17.6	I'll read it once, make a few comments, and then read it one more time.
0:22.6	Scissors
0:23.1	Are singular and plural, uncanny.
0:30.2	One plus one is one.
0:33.7	Even in solitude a pair, cheek to cheek, or on a tear, knives at cross purposes, bereaving, cleavers to each other, cleaving.
0:45.4	Open, shut, give and take, all dichotomy in their wake.
0:50.9	What starts with size concludes in oars, his or hers, mine or yours.
0:58.4	Divvy up, slice clean, slice deep, in pink jags or one swift sweep.
1:05.4	The crisp sheet, where they met and married, the paper where the blades are buried.
1:14.5	This poem appears in Staling's 2018 collection Like, and it's one of those poems where the title
1:22.7	interacts with the text of the poem in an important way. You almost have to read it as the first word of the poem,
1:30.5	although there is an ambiguity,
1:32.2	depending on whether you include the title as the first word or not.
1:37.3	Taken with the title, the poem begins with a declarative statement.
1:41.6	Scissors are singular and plural.
1:47.9	Uncanny. But without the title, it's a kind of question. Are singular and plural uncanny? One plus one is one? And I defend reading it that way,
2:00.6	because that statement, that first pair of lines are singular and plural uncanny.
2:06.5	One plus one is one. They end with a semicolon. And in Greek, which Stallings knows very well, she's married to a native Greek, she knows her Greek very well. She's published translations of Greek poetry.
2:19.2	In Greek, the semicolon can be a question mark.
	...

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