Letter to Archilochus

By MAURA STANTON

              The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
                         knows one big thing.
                                     —Archilochus, 680–645 BCE

Well, Archilochus, I guess your lyre
might help me mock, and maybe mourn, this loss—
today I broke the frosted Elvis glass
I bought at Graceland when the symposium
of poets toured the mansion. Before I tossed
the cracked glass and thumb-sized shard away,
I looked at Elvis embossed on the side
seated at his piano, and thought of how
fans honored you for centuries just like him.
One summer in the Paros museum
I studied the frieze on the Totenmahl relief
where you recline on a couch, your lyre
and spear and shield around you to denote
your double life as warrior and poet.
I drank only water from my Elvis glass
keeping it by my bed at night while I read
poetry or history, and sometimes thinking
about Lynda Hull, now dead, who urged me
to buy the glass in the souvenir shop
that April afternoon. The gritty surface
under my cool fingers always conjured
a black dress, a hat, a fringe of red hair.
You, too, Archilochus, if you’d been there
would have bought something to honor a legend,
maybe a coffee mug with a grinning Elvis
or a keychain decorated with a pink guitar,
laughing with the rest of us, for your “I”
jumping out of your new iambic verse
still slashes across the years the way your spear
once flew into the stomach of an enemy,
invective fixed by the new technology
of writing. But here am I, another “I”
complaining about a favorite broken glass.
Shouldn’t I write about nature and beauty?
By God, I hear you laughing at me,
you hedgehog of a poet, ready to roll up
and point your dangerous spines at anyone
who thinks that poetry should praise not blame.

 

Maura Stanton won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for Snow on Snow and has published five other books of poetry, a chapbook of prose poems, and three collections of short fiction. She has poems and stories forthcoming in Allium, The Hudson Review, Plume, and Alaska Quarterly Review.

[Purchase Issue 28 here.] 

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Letter to Archilochus

Related Posts

beach

“During the Drought,” “Sestina, Mount Mitchill,” “Dragonflies”

LIZA KATZ DUNCAN
”The earth, as blue and green / as a child’s drawing of the earth— // is this what disaster looks like? My love, think / of the dragonflies, each migratory trip / spanning generations. Imagine // that kind of faith: to leave a place behind / knowing a part of you will find its way back, / instinct outweighing desire.

whale sculpture on white background

September 2025 Poetry Feature: Earth Water Fire Poems, a Conversation

LISA ASAGI
"We and the whales, / and everyone else, / sleep and wake in bodies / that have a bit of everything / that has ever lived. Forests, oceans, / horse shoe crabs, horses, / orange trees in countless of glasses of juice, / lichen that once grew / on the cliffsides of our ancestors, / deepseated rhizomes, and stars. // Even stars are made

Hitting a Wall and Making a Door: A Conversation between Phillis Levin and Diane Mehta

DIANE MEHTA and PHILLIS LEVIN
This conversation took place over the course of weeks—over daily phone calls and long emails, meals when they were in the same place, and a weekend in the Connecticut countryside. The poets share what they draw from each other’s work, and the work of others, exploring the pleasures of language, geometric movement, and formal constraint.