Poem of the Day: ‘Another Lullaby for Insomniacs’

Today showcases a poetic form we haven’t used in The New York Sun’s Poem of the Day feature: the pantoum. This repetitive form comes to us as an import, via the French, from Malaysia, and it consists of a series of quatrains, usually rhymed abab, in which the second and fourth lines of each quatrain become the first and third lines of the next. Typically the poem concludes by repeating the first and third lines of the first stanza as the second and fourth lines of the last.

The form lends itself aptly to obsessive, repetitive subjects, as in Donald Justice’s account of ongoing drudgery in “Pantoum of the Great Depression,” as well as here, in “Another Lullaby for Insomniacs,” by the American poet A.E. Stallings (b. 1968). Sleepless tossing and turning, the relentless treadmill of a mind that won’t shut off: the compelled repetitions of the pantoum, which come around with a sense of frenetic haste (but going nowhere) in these short trimeter lines. The interwoven form calls up all the terrible internal energy of the insomniac, longing for elusive sleep, which makes no promises.

This poem appears in Stallings’ most recent book, “This Afterlife: Selected Poems.” A classicist and translator as well as a poet, Stallings lives with her family in Greece.