A.E. Stallings - Lost and Found

A.E. Stallings, “Lost and Found” — first published in Beloit Poetry Journal 63.3 (Spring 2013): issue · full text (PDF). Collected in Like, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Thirty-six stanzas in ottava rima — the abababcc stanza of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, in its heroic register rather than Byron’s comic one. It begins with the poet on her hands and knees, searching the house for something small that has gone missing — a Lego brick, a puzzle piece, a doll’s leg — and opens out into a dream: a hooded female figure leads her to a valley on the moon where everything ever lost on earth collects. Mounds of keys and socks and pills; the frayed threads of arguments; lost sleep, lost minutes, lost baby teeth, a lost daughter glimpsed in a mirror.

The conceit descends from Ariosto: in the Furioso, Astolfo rides to the moon to recover Orlando’s lost wits, because the moon is the storehouse of everything lost below. Stallings keeps the geography and changes the losses — a hero’s reason becomes a mother’s slow daily attrition of objects, names, and time. The poem knows the debt: by its second stanza you already “misplace / Your temper and your wits.”

Only near the end does the guide name herself — stanza 31: “My name’s Mnemosyne … the Mother of the Muses.” The figure walking the poet through the valley of lost things is Memory herself, from whom, she says, all the arts and sciences are born. Fitting, for a place whose whole business is what we manage to hold onto and what we don’t.

The line this blog borrows is from stanza 8, where the figure first speaks:

This is the valley on the moon Where everything misplaced on earth accrues, And here all things are gathered that you lose.

It gives loss a place — not a void but an inventory, a lost and found with an address. That is the spatial half of the metaphor the misplaced manifesto runs on. The temporal half — a search that cannot end — comes from Umberto Eco - The Search for the Perfect Language.