"Fishing" by A.E. Stallings

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-Sleerickets

-Poetry Says

-Fly poet Ernest Hilbert

-Versecraft for softies podcast Poetry Unbound

-Baumeister Dave Klug

-You can now email me!

-Even better, you can now send me money!

-The one and only Alicia Stallings

-Also great poets Joshua Mehigan and Shane McCrae

-Buy Alicia's book here!

-It's another sonnet, doggone it!

-Loosey goosey iambic lines

-Ave, Tertius Paeon

-Do I get Postmodernist windbag points for saying liminality?

-Get hype for hypallage!!

-Etymological trans-linguistic puns, boy

-The Four-fold method strikes back

-The unity of opposites

-Let's get diluvian

-Elizabeth Bishop's poem The Fish

-Robert Lowell's poem The Quaker Graveyard In Nantucket

-The best pun you've heard all week

-The Moirae make marionettes of us all

Text of poem:

Fishing

The two of them stood in the middle water,

The current slipping away, quick and cold,

The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,

Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.

Maybe he regretted he had brought her—

She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—

Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.

Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:

To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails

And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.

And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales

Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,

Life and death weighed in the shining scales,

The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.