A. E.

Stallings Biography

A. E. Stallings, born in 1968, is an American poet who has lived in Athens, Greece since 1999.
She studied Classics at the University of Georgia, and later at Oxford University.

She has published three collections of poetry, Archaic Smile (which won the 1999 Richard
Wilbur Award), Hapax (recipient of the Poets’ Prize), and Olives, which was a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her translation of Lucretius (into rhyming fourteeners), The Nature of Things came out from
Penguin Classics in 2009, and was called by Peter Stothard in the TLS “One of the most
extraordinary classical translations of recent times.” Her new translation of Hesiod’s Works and
Days, is also forthcoming from Penguin Classics.

She has received a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (US), and
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and United States Artists., as well as a "genius
grant" from the MacArthur foundation She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.

Her work is widely anthologized, and has been included in the Best American Poetry in 1994,
2000, and 2015, and in the Best of the Best American Poetry (ed. Robert Pinsky). Her poems
appear in The Atlantic Monthly, The Beloit Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, The New Yorker,
Poetry , Poetry Magazine (Chicago), Poetry Review, and the TLS, among others. She also
contributes essays and reviews to the American Scholar, Parnassus, Poetry Magazine, Poetry
Review, the TLS, and the Yale Review. She did a stint of regular blogging at Harriett, the Poetry
Foundation blog.

Besides leading a summer poetry seminar in Greece, The Muses' Workshop, Stallings is a regular
faculty member at the Sewanee Summer Writers Workshop (twice co-teaching with Mark
Strand), and taught for many years at the West Chester Poetry Conference. She has delivered
the prestigious Messenger lectures at the University of Cornell. She speaks on a variety of topics
at conferences and universities, including Princeton University and the University of Georgia.
She is married to the journalist, John Psaropoulos, and has two children, Jason and Atalanta.

Her debut poetry collection, Archaic Smile, was awarded the 1999 Richard Wilbur Award and
was a finalist for both the Yale Younger Poets Series and the Walt Whitman Award. Her second
collection, Hapax (2006), was awarded the 2008 Poets' Prize.[10] Her poems have appeared in
The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 2000, 2015, 2016, and 2017. She has been
awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Prize, the 2004 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award,
and the James Dickey Prize. In 2010, she was awarded the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. In
2011, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and was
named a Fellow of United States Artists. In 2012, the book Olives was a finalist for the National
Book Critics Circle Award. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
Accident waiting to happen
by A. E. Stallings

Like the scalding cup

Of coffee you left

At the brink of the table,

I brim with potential.

I’m bright and unstable

As a just-mopped floor,

I’m a curtain near a candle,

Finger in the door,

A loose axe-handle.

I’m the wrist flicked fast

With no backwards look

Blindly casting

The innocent fishhook.

I’m the toy on the stair,

The hole in the street.

I’m right in plain sight,

 I’m under your feet.

I’m over your head:

I’ve got an edge,

And I hang by a thread.

It’s almost time,

And my aim is steady.

You’re falling for me,

I feel it. I’m Ready.

Analysis ;

Her poem was inspired by a possible accident that will happen, including some sentence at the
poem like "toy in the stair" & "a hole in the street".

From this poem we can get that we must ready with unexpected situation and anything that
will be happen in the future. Because everytime we are in the middle of accident, so we must
ready with some accident that will happen to us.

From the example, the sentence "l'm a curtain near the candle" means that we always in the
middle of accident. Maybe a candle will burn the curtain and can make a bigger problem. So we
must solve it with avoid something that close to the problem.