Empathy by A. E. Stallings

A Mouthful of Air: Poetry with Mark McGuinness

Episode 74

Empathy by A. E. Stallings

A. E. Stallings reads ‘Empathy’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/74_Empathy_by_A_E_Stallings.mp3

This poem is from:

This Afterlife: Selected Poems

Available from:

This Afterlife: Selected Poems is available from:

The publisher: Carcanet

Amazon: UK | US

Empathy

by A. E. Stallings

My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.
I’m glad we didn’t wake
Our kids in the thin hours, to take
Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And we didn’t hand over our cash
To one of the smuggling rackets,
That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets
No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark
Above us is not deeply twinned
Beneath us, and moiled with wind,
And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore
As the dinghy starts taking on water.
I’m glad that our six-year old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son
With his broken arm’s high and dry,
That the ceiling is not seeping sky,
With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish. It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.

---

Interview transcript

Mark: Alicia, where did this poem come from?

Alicia: I think I must have written it in 2016, given partly the ages of the children here. They’re older now. I live in Greece. So, this was during the first very intense wave of migration that was partly from the Syrian War, but also, there were people coming over from various places, Afghanistan, Iraq, and arriving mostly on the island of Lesbos. But in 2016, a lot of these arrivals were also coming into Athens, and I was involved in some volunteer work and so on.

But I became very intensely aware of people with children, the ages of my children, coming over in very precarious situations on very precarious boats and dinghies and so on. And there were a lot of drownings. And this, I think, partly comes out of sort of dropping my children off at the school bus and going back to the house and opening up a Facebook volunteers page and realising that two shipwrecks with maybe a total of 37 people had drowned off of Lesbos, a lot of them children, and just realising there’s a school bus of children who have just drowned, and kind of wanting to write about this, but also being concerned that I not exploit someone else’s experience. How do I write about this from my own point of view? And also kind of questioning that point of view. So, I would also add that ‘empathy’ in Greek is not quite as positive a word as it is in English.

Mark: Oh, what connotations does it have?

Alicia: Well, the English word, I think, is a relatively recent coinage, I want to say Victorian. And before that, you would use sympathy to feel with someone. But empátheia, in Greek, has a sense of maybe feeling against someone, this idea of maybe even hostility. So, I was kind of interested in the word empathy itself, which I think has a bit of privilege in it. I think sympathy, the idea of feeling with someone is different from kind of trying to get into their consciousness. I think that can be problematic.

Mark: And I’m curious as well about this. You could maybe call it, I don’t know, the poet’s conscience. How do you write about something that is other people suffering, that is big, that is a public issue maybe, and yet do it in an authentic way? Because there’s lots of ways we can respond to that as citizens, in the usual discourse, in prose, in conversation, and so on. But how do you come at this as a poet?

Alicia: Well, I think in this case, I frame it very consciously as, you know, we are not these people. And the thing about negatives, I think Anne Carson has written about this, the great thing about negatives in poetry is that it incorporates the positive as well. So, you can say ‘we are not those people’ and then invoke those people. So, there’s a way you can have your cake and eat it, too, with that framing device of the negatives.

I mean, I’ve written some other poems about this also, and they were in the form of epigrams because I think the epigram, which has been used for thousands of years for drownings in the Aegean, if you look at the Greek Anthology, this anthology of ancient Greek poems, it has that kind of maybe slight ironic distance. I think there has to be some kind of distance to it. So, in this case, there’s the framing device of the family who are not having to flee, but, also invoking the terrors, I think, of what that would be of fleeing. So, perhaps this poem is trying to have its cake and eat it, too.

Mark: I mean, it’s something that we’re all confronted with on a daily basis. On the one hand, we have our own lives, however privileged or unprivileged that may be, and then there’s this parallel reality that is coming at us through our phones, through the various types of media night and day. And it’s almost like there’s a split-screen effect for life. And I think maybe that’s what you capture with the negative aspect here.

Alicia: Perhaps. I think it also came out of having dreams and so forth. And this feeling, which is not an uncommon trope, I guess in poetry, of the bed being like a boat itself and thinking about people who are not in beds, but actually in boats. So, there was a bit of maybe metaphorical overlap there.

Mark: And the association with children as well. I mean, you have that wonderful poem about ‘all the fairy stories are about going to bed’ and sleep, and that’s an association in your work.

Alicia: Well, and I think as parents, your basic anxiety is keeping your children safe. And so, in that sense, it is easy to empathise on a certain level with people who are trying to do that for their children. But I remember just very… there’s a lot of just factual truth in the poem. You know, my daughter couldn’t swim, and my son had this broken arm. And I just thought, ‘My God, if I were at sea with them, how terrifying that would be.’ And there was this sense, too, because I do live in Greece, that when my children would go to the beach and be playing in the Aegean, that this water is touching other children in a different way.

Mark: So, there’s that doubleness all the way through. And how did you get started with the poem? I mean, is the finished text that we’ve got here fairly close to how it ended up, or was there a process of evolution?

Alicia: This poem, I think, came out very close to how it is now. I’m sure there was some tinkering with adjectives and word choices and maybe an occasional rhyme. But it came out quite quickly, and I basically left it alone. There are other poems, that I work at very hard and for a very long time and really struggle with. This one kind of came out more or less as it was. I think it sort of started in this kind of song meter, these kind of short lines with these envelope stanzas so that the quatrains are not rhyming ABAB, but ABBA, which is, I guess, another kind of mirroring in the poem, but also these short lines, which are very songlike. And I deliberately left some wonky rhymes in there. I like ‘raft’ and ‘adrift’, partly for their wonkiness.

I don’t know if I have some other ones. Maybe not. You know, I liked that I had ‘rackets’ and ‘jackets’, which I think is a kind of fun rhyme. And the last line, I think, is a bit metrically wonky. I sometimes read it different ways. And I left that on, too, that felt true to the poem to have this kind of slight stumbling last line where it’s not entirely clear how the stresses might fall and it doesn’t matter. And it’s got that maybe off rhyme or slightly wrenched rhyme with ‘generous’ and ‘die to be us’. So, to a certain extent, it was quickly done. And then I felt that the rough edges were part of the poem. And so, part of the process was leaving it alone.

Mark: Right, right, not tidying it up too much. So, I had that reaction to the last line. I love the fact that, you know, ‘Not to be those who’d die to be us’ – you’ve got to do a lot of sorting out of the negatives and the positives and the syntax. And when you describe it as a slightly wrenching, I mean, it’s almost like the mental contortions we have to go through to live in a world where we’re holding all these realities simultaneously in our mind.

Alicia: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good argument for the last slide. I hadn’t thought about it that deeply, but I am aware that it’s not smooth and it’s not perfect. And there are times when I write poems, and I really try to get that perfect, smooth surface. And this, I really wanted to leave the rough edges on. So, I’m glad that it seems to work.

Mark: And even so, I mean, your version of rough edges is a lot sharper and crisper than a lot of poets. I mean, you’ve got this wonderful facility with form, with rhyme. You know, we always know everything is very well considered. I mean, did you have any hesitation about using regular form with rhymes for a subject like this? I mean, the cliche about this kind of form is it’s too neat and tidy for the world.

Alicia: I think some of what the sort of song meter going here, and by that, I just mean something shorter than a pentameter line, does have a kind of childlike and lullaby-like association with it. So, for me, it’s good for poems about children. And if you think about it, a lot of nursery rhymes and lullabies have a kind of sinister depth to them. I think that’s not uncommon. So, I quite like that combination of the simpler kind of sing songiness that goes here with a trimeter with three beats in a line. And the subject matter, to me, I think that that can be effective.

Mark: As you’re saying that, I’m noticing things like, ‘a girl and a boy’. I mean, that could be Hansel and Gretel. It’s a kind of classic fairy tale trope. And I guess the journey, it can be romanticised certainly in poetry, in songs, and so on, and nursery rhymes. But it’s anything but romantic here. And you’ve got so many kind of really telling little details like the lifejackets, no better than bright orange trash, and less buoyant.

Alicia: I think with the lifejackets, I should also add that my husband is a journalist and was at that time going over to Lesbos, and you would see these mountains of lifejackets because, people would take them off and deposit them on the beach. And the thing was that a lot of these lifejackets were not regulation lifejackets. And if you end up in the water in them, you will drown. So, some of that is factual details that come from having a journalist husband.

Mark: And your own experience of actually volunteering and helping out, did you feel it’s a different poem because of that than if you’d, say, read about it?

Alicia: I’m not sure. Trying to think. This must have been in about February or March of 2016. Yes, I was doing some volunteer work, maybe not as much as I ended up doing, that at that time involved going to the Port of Piraeus and helping solidarity groups pass out whatever it was we were passing out that day, you know, oranges or, baby carriers. That was a big thing. And things changed in late March of 2016 because before that, people who had arrived in Greece could simply walk up through Germany and the borders were open. But late, I want to say March 20th or so of 2016, those borders closed, and then you had a kind of backing up of people stuck in Greece.

But I think one of the things that did strike me almost immediately, again I had young children at the time, was seeing children who looked very much like my children, they are half Greek, also could pass for Syrians, wearing the same clothes that the kids were into the same things. You know, they missed their Lego and their pet, they left at home, and are, wearing the Spider-Man shirt, or so forth. So, there was this kind of overwhelming sense of our positions could easily be reversed.

Mark: And also, I mean, I live in the UK, and so people arrive here on boats in pretty well identical circumstances to this. I know you were writing it in Greece because I know the context, but it could have been written by a British poet, and you wouldn’t have to change very many details, I don’t think, if any.

Alicia: Yes, unfortunately, it is still a very topical poem. One would wish that it were more dated.

Mark: I think that was the feeling I had was that my admiration for the poem and the fact that you’d nailed the subject was tempered by… But also, I wish you didn’t have to write a poem like this. And also, just the idea that empathy is something that you need… maybe in the modern sense is in pretty short supply.

Alicia: Yes, I think there has been a sea change in some of that. I remember when we had early arrivals in Greece, a lot of people were very welcoming to these new arrivals. Greeks on the island of Lesbos, I think about 60% of the native population there are descended from Asia Minor refugees from 1922. And so, we’re within just a couple of generations of being refugees themselves. And there was this sense of kind of recognising what this is like and what migration is like.

And I think a lot of attitudes kind of can come from the top, from the government kind of setting the tone for how people deal with arrivals. And people can, I think, rise to the occasion, or there can be an emphasis on distrust and scarcity of resources. So, it has been interesting to watch kind of the changes in public sympathies, empathies, and otherwise.

Mark: And the ending, I mean, it’s really hits you in the face. ‘Empathy isn’t generous, it’s selfish.’ Did that come to you? Was that in your mind all along? Was it as much of a surprise to you as it was for me as a reader?

Alicia: I think it must have been something of a surprise. I might have been thinking in the back of my mind, balancing the Greek meaning with the English meaning, and maybe not sure how to end the poem. And then I think I just thought, ‘Let’s just say the thing, let’s just say it, and see what happens.’ Generally, I don’t know an ending to a poem until about maybe two-thirds or three-fourths through. At about that point, I might see an exit strategy, but I wouldn’t have started with this idea or stanza.

And I think I’ve really tried in the poem to kind of carry through this thought experiment with the details of the thought experiment. But, I couldn’t end within the thought experiment. I had to go back to the frame, which is, ‘This is all I’m imagining from a point of safety.’

Mark: Right. So, the thought experiment ends with, imagining the children, ‘Our son with his broken arm’s high and dry, / That the ceiling is not seeping sky, / With our journey but hardly begun.’ That’s the end of the I’m-grateful-that-this-isn’t-happening-to-us. And then it’s a bold move, I guess, syntactically and in terms of the point of view, as well as what you’re saying. But my goodness me, is that an ending!

Alicia: Well, I think partly, there’s a sort of limit to the empathy. You know, ultimately, you can imagine changing places, but you would not change places. And, just thinking about how much people had paid literally and metaphorically and how, we would all of us pay that price to get to safety if we had that choice.

Mark: Yeah. I mean, to end up with that contemplation of price, in a way, is just as brutal as the statement, empathy isn’t generous. Alicia, thank you for coming and reading such a heartbreaking poem and for being generous in your appraisal of ‘Empathy,’ the poem, and empathy, the concept.

Alicia: Thank you for this interesting conversation. I enjoyed it.

---

Empathy

by A. E. Stallings

My love, I’m grateful tonight
Our listing bed isn’t a raft
Precariously adrift
As we dodge the coast guard light,

And clasp hold of a girl and a boy.
I’m glad we didn’t wake
Our kids in the thin hours, to take
Not a thing, not a favorite toy,

And we didn’t hand over our cash
To one of the smuggling rackets,
That we didn’t buy cheap lifejackets
No better than bright orange trash

And less buoyant. I’m glad that the dark
Above us is not deeply twinned
Beneath us, and moiled with wind,
And we don’t scan the sky for a mark,

Any mark, that demarcates a shore
As the dinghy starts taking on water.
I’m glad that our six-year old daughter,
Who can’t swim, is a foot off the floor

In the bottom bunk, and our son
With his broken arm’s high and dry,
That the ceiling is not seeping sky,
With our journey but hardly begun.

Empathy isn’t generous,
It’s selfish. It’s not being nice
To say I would pay any price
Not to be those who’d die to be us.

---

This Afterlife: Selected Poems

‘Empathy’ is from This Afterlife: Selected Poems by A. E. Stallings, published by Carcanet.

Available from:

This Afterlife: Selected Poems is available from:

The publisher: Carcanet

Amazon: UK | US

A. E. Stallings

A.E. Stallings is an American poet who studied Classics at the University of Georgia and Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, Archaic Smile, Hapax, and Olives, and most recently, Like, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has published three verse translations, Lucretius’s The Nature of Things (in rhyming fourteeners!), Hesiod’s Works and Days, and an illustrated The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice. A selected poems, This Afterlife, was published in 2022. She is currently serving a term as the Oxford Professor of Poetry.

A. E. Stallings’ Website

Photo: Kostas Mantziaris

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