Anecdotal Evidence: `Dirt Still Clinging to Their Roots'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Dirt Still Clinging to Their Roots'
Excerpt:

“It is the roots of things that fascinate me—their bulbs, their rhizomes, etymologies.”

This is A.E. Stallings, an American poet living in Greece, in a piece she wrote for Poetry, “All the Greens Whose Names I Do Not Know.” Her prose is unusually good for a contemporary poet, not silly, earnest or pretentious. To extend her metaphor a little, her prose, like her poetry, feels rooted in the real world. Every writer ought to be so roots-minded....