Thursday Poetry Post: Olives

I love so/I solve.

I printed out this poem and carried it with me for a week. This benefitted me in two ways: it forced me to read it every time I opened my purse, and it allowed me to make annotations.

For a time, I kept a notebook that acted as a personal dictionary. Whenever I would encounter a word I didn’t know the meaning of, I’d copy it down, and every few days, I’d go through the notebook and copy down definitions. I just rediscovered the notebook, and would like to continue the practice; this poem is good incentive. It includes a whopping four words I couldn't define before reading it.

Sylphs – imaginary spirits of the air, mortal but soulless; dark green and blue hummingbirds, the males of which have a long forked tail. Had heard this long ago in context of a fantasy novel.

Sloe – the "small, astringent, wild fruit of the blackthorn," a shrub with sharp thorns and round berries. I'd heard it as a component of the terms "sloe-eyed" and "sloe gin fizz," never independently.

Slives – to slice off or cut through, as in, to create a sliver. Had never heard this.

Voile – soft, sheer, fabric, usually made of cotton. Heard this and was fairly sure I knew what it was, but searching for the definition revealed the part about cotton.

You’ll notice that most of those words have several letters in common. Get ready for more of that! This has all been a way to tease the anagrammatic poem Olives, by A. E. Stallings, which you can read in Poetry Daily:

OLIVES
A.E. Stallings

Is love
so evil?
Is Eve? Lo, 
love vies, 
evolves. I 
lose selves, 
sylphs of 
loose Levi's,
sieve oil of
vile sloe.
Love sighs,
slives. O
veils of
voile, so
sly, so suave.
O lives,
soil sleeves,
I love so
I solve.

I learned about this poem in a tweet from Alina Stefanescu (who I talk about alllllll the time because she is SO GOOD at finding and sharing brilliant work). Last week, I talked about Dora Malech, an indisputable champion of the anagrammatic form. This is my first encounter with Stallings’ work, but she won me over instantly. Palindromes and anagrams, man! The way to my heart.

The opening and closing couplets hint at a poetic speaker who is asking questions about love as a roundabout investigation of their own morals. Is “solving” something – dissecting it, replicating it, rearranging it – an evil act? Does this poem, in its sparse sophistication, cross some imperceptible line?

Look at what love “does” throughout this text. It slices and dices, it fights and adapts. Sometimes, love even sighs, feels sorry for itself. Yet it’s inescapable. Love bookends the beginning and end of time. It comes before genesis (represented in this text by Eve) and outlasts death (the “soil sleeves” fitted around every coffin). Stallings chooses delicate physical objects to represent life on the page. They’re fading even as they appear: loose jeans, the last drips of fluid squeezed from a berry, sheer swaths of fabric. All these things are temporary – “I/lose selves,” our speaker says, watching them slip off until only a thin cotton shroud is left. And when that’s gone, there are two things left: the passion and the poem. The loving, and the solving.

Do I understand this poem? I feel like I’ve done a good job of trying to. But, in all honesty, this feels far above my station. I’ve ignored the title up until now because I don’t understand it. Maybe – olives are small, and in the same way that love “slives,” Stallings’ attention separates tiny fragments from the word “olive” and reconfigures them (“evolves,” to borrow from her text). Olives is also the title of Stallings’ third collection of poems, but the poem titled “Olives” in that book is a different poem; according to Poetry Daily, this Olives is excerpted from the more recent This Afterlife: Selected Poems. It confounds me. Just like the speaker of this poem, though, I give the questions my attention. I love so I solve. When the solution doesn’t make sense, I solve again. Anagrams give us infinite ways to reimagine tiny words and big concept. The pleasure is the puzzle.