By Jamie Spataro and Brandon Yao

“Little Time”: Five Questions for Alina Stefanescu

by Jamie Spataro

Alina Stefanescu is a present-day poet and writer born in Romania. She currently lives in Alabama with her spouse. She constantly involves herself in the literary community, participating in workshops and holding leadership positions in many literary societies, such as Poetry Editor for Pidgeonholes, board member of the Alabama Writers Cooperative, and co-founder of 100,000 Poets for Change Birmingham, the town where she now resides. Her work has been published in many literary journals, like World Literature Today and North American Review, and an abundance of anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2022 and Stronger than Fear (Cave Moon Press, 2022). Her poetry has won countless awards, a few being the Brighthorse Prize (2018) for her Every Mask I Tried On collection, the 2020 Wandering Aengus Book Prize for her DOR collection, and the ASPS Poetry Book of the Year for her poetry chapbook, Objects in Vases.

The mention of the young mothers death hints at themes of loss and grief, was this moment in the poem shaped by any of your own personal experiences?    

My mother’s several years ago has wafted through many poems in various shapes or forms, but “Little Time” doesn’t engage that consciously. I wasn’t thinking about my mother’s death when the poem arrived. In many ways, what stung me was the knowledge that my own kids will be forced to reckon losing me, too. And there is no way to know what shape or form that loss will take. The death we fear is rarely the one that extinguishes us. My mother, for example, worried constantly about dying young from breast cancer, like her own mother. But she died of a pulmonary embolism while traveling. One day she was standing on my front lawn, laughing about the trip she would take to Amsterdam to see my cousin, and a few days later, her laughter was irrevocably gone. Her laughter will never run its lips over the dogwoods and azaleas again. Even the trees grieve losing her.

There is a large contrast between the innocent action of building a paper boat and the harsh loss and tragedy of the death of the young mother. What message do you hope to convey with this? 

Every inch of this existence is fragile. From the paper boat to the horror that greets us in headlines, humans are surrounded by loss or its shadow. That potential haunts us like an undercurrent of preemptive grief. A boat is a thing we build from paper, and paper is built from dead trees. There is a cycle at play in the making of the boat, a vessel that carries humans over water and oceans, and the news that speaks of a drowning. No boat protects us from that headline.  In a way, this poem explores the strange obsession we have with “safety” — or this belief that anything can render us safe from the horrible things that might happen to us. The horrible happens daily, across the world, in our towns and cities. The horrible doesn’t discriminate. But the horrible is also haunted by its silences and the fetish we make of safety.

In the first few lines of the poem, the discussion of going for a walk is proposed by a “he,” who is this person? 

He is the speaker’s lover or spouse. Her partner. The person with whom she shares a life. 

If you were to write a continuation of this poem, about the little boats continuing to sail on, what destination would their journey lead them to?

That’s a great question. I feel like this poem wanted spacing; it wanted steps, a measured pacing, and a way of moving through the world. It doesn’t claim a future, per se. When I wrote it, I was thinking about musical phrasing and theory. About the gulf created by caesuras. Somewhere in an essay, Larry Levis compared the caesura to musical phrasing, or the “slowing and pausing” of musical phrasing in song. Music to him is a “movement of mind.” Billie Holiday is “a great pauser, a great withholder,” Larry says, and this capacity to build from silence, to hold sound in harness, makes her an incredible “giver” as well. She holdsthe reigns.  Levis’ point about phrasing is also a point about punctuation. The comma, for example, indicates a pause, or marks a pause on the page. A comma is the thing “you can’t read over,” Levis says. The comma reminds us that endings exist, and an ending imposes a strong pause in the continuum of time. Ends change the sound of a pause by extending it, rendering it as linear, and then riding the shape of that line to indicate rupture—which is different, I think, from the curb of the comma. Or the wink of the semi-colon. “Little Time” leans heavily on its pauses and absences. In a way, I can’t even think into the space where the little boats might go next without altering the beat of the punctuation.  Perhaps more palpably than other poems I’ve published, “Little Time” holds its breath.

In the poem you “venture into the thicket with cacti in our open corneas.” You could have used the word “eyes” in order to make it rhyme. What thoughts went behind the use of the word “corneas” instead? 

Eyes fascinate me because we tend to “believe” our eyes, even though science makes it clear that our eyes pick what to see. Our eyes select what they perceive. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Color is perceived when a wavelength of light is reflected by an object and all other wavelengths are absorbed. Each color has a different wavelength, but red has the longest wavelength. Red is the easiest to see and read. Red is a loud color, in this sense: it demands attention. But the speaker of this poem doesn’t need loudness; she feels the world acutely, at high-fidelity. A rhyme would have allowed the poem to fall into place, to appease our ears by naming our eyes. Sometimes I think the poem refuses to placate us by fulfilling our expectations. Corneas are visceral and strange—we don’t identify with them. We don’t say “my cornea watched a video”. Because this poem moves through a feeling of deep unsettlement, I wanted embodiment, and the language used to inscribe the speaker’s relation to her body, to reflect this unsettling eeriness.  Paul Valéry asked his friends to inscribe the following words on his gravestone: “Here I lie, done in by my fellow men.”This, too, is a poem. I mean we are done in by love for each other. We are undone by the extraordinary strangeness of loving others beyond the capabilities of language. If I write to remind the living of the dead, it is only because the world drowns out the quiet realities of that love in the ordinary moments of a day.