Today I heard

Today I heard A.E. Stallings give her first lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in November of 2023:

https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/bat-poet-poetry-echolocation

Having taken the on-ramp to these lectures by first listening to a smattering of these lectures delivered by Geoffrey Hill, Simon Armitige, and Alice Oswald before coming to Stallings, I must say that her American’ness was jarring, at first. I had become used to operating the shifter with my left hand, and then suddenly traffic is zipping by dangerously on what somehow feels like the wrong side of the road. (discombobulating) I kept thinking “please don’t embarrass us, please don’t embarrass us” where, by us, I meant U.S.

Then I thought, oh shit, she’s awesome, and totally embarrassing U.S. (lol), but not really, but kind of, but no, but yes, but not at all. I then thought of how American she must seem to the majority of the room, and how the high-brow portion of the audience might be feeling. In the background, I kept thinking of her journey to this point. A girl educated in a small rural community outside of Athens GA, becomes a scholar of Greek literature and a poet and is now occupying this position at Oxford. What an American dream story; rags to riches.

Then she came into her own, in the mid-point of her lecture, — or perhaps I settled down– and her fearless small town American girl authenticity just shone through and was completely delightful. I was pleasantly amused at how she mimicked, poorly, –because she probably thought, should I really be doing this?–a stuffy English male accent as she read some piece. I was wide-eyed when one of her asides was: “It’s a terrifying poem, I mean, I feel bat-shit crazy reading this poem”. I think it was a contrived statement that she set aside, but decided to pull in at that moment, which made it sound nicely spontaneous and funny, and yet I could not hear even a titter from the audience. Why was that?

In the end, with her blah blah blah and her yadda yadda yadda, and her digs at Robert Frost etc., she knocked all the English stuffing out of me, and by the end, brought me to literal tears.

Before listening to this, her first lecture, I did take in just a few minutes from the lecture that came after this, and was saying to myself, “no no no… this is not good, this won’t do”. It all felt too nonchalant, as if I was looking in on a 300 level mid-semester course where the bell was going to ring at any moment and she would be yelling out the homework assignments as the kids streamed out the doors into the hallway. But now that she has won me over, with lecture number 1, I shall approach lecture 2 with a better understanding of her “jizz” (birder terminology) and hopefully find communion.