What We’re Reading: The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, Part 2
The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather by Sampson Starkweather (Birds, LLC, 2013)
[Editor’s Note: You can find the first part of this review here.]
The third book in this compilation, The Waters, yet again shifts subject matter and form. There is a dry sense of carelessness and a political charge that wasn’t as noticeable in previous sections. In terms of form, Starkweather uses repetition and word play to surprise the reader. In this book, we also find the closest to poem names as we will find in all four books; here, they are denoted by Roman numerals.
Some familiarities in this book arise, too. The section begins with this: “The 77 poems that comprise The Waters are transcontemporations of César Vallejo’s 1992 masterpiece Trilce. A transcontemporation is to a poem what RoboCop is to a normal police officer.” The book begins with this contextual interplay, alluding to Vallejo’s famous Trilce, which took language to the extreme, foreshadowing both surrealism and avant-garde poetry. This homage has it’s own shade of avant-garde with Starkweather’s signature dry irreverence. The irreverence in this book is slightly different from previous sections, though — here’s it’s dark, but without levity or the depths of loneliness as there were before. Starkweather acknowledge his dark depths in this book: “Everyone applauds at the nonchalance with which I sink to the bottom of things — it’s in the genes, loose change and gravity…this gift of drowning.” This brand of dark irreverence is the kind that puts on black eyeliner and lipstick, and scowls at you when you introduce yourself.
Starkweather’s back to looping his characters and settings, building layer on top of layer that circle back. Here, the reoccurring plot points are yet again slightly different than the previous books: a prison, ghosts, his uncle, drowning, tennis courts. It never comes across as redundant because Starkweather is constantly shifting perspectives, changing his story, and using language and form to surprise the reader.
In some instances, these moments of play are meant to slow you down, such as in “II.” After repetition earlier in the poem, the poem concludes: ”
The bush burns, before fire, unusual rain.
There is no point to this poem except to slow you down a little.
Manzanita. Manzanita.Ocean. Ocean.
What’s the moon got to do with it?
What’s blacker than anything?
Ocean. Ocean.
Time has slowed down here, and time has the upper hand, slowing us down or halting us as it pleases. Starkweather’s word play also comes through with fragmented line breaks, such as:
When Reagan died, he remembered no-
thing. Nothing remembered the rest
and,
O Iron Man, rusted beyond re+
cognition.
These lines trip us abruptly, and when we stumble to the next line to make sense of it all, it often plays on multiple meanings. Another way he plays with multiple meanings is through his use of parentheticals, such as “I was afraid she would g(r)o(w)…” In this way, the book becomes even more dense, with multiple meanings hidden within words, and layers stacking and looping on each other.
There is more, or perhaps stronger imagistic political static in this collection than previous collections. The poem IV opens boldly:
Reagan supplied the Contras condoms:
strawberry, cinnamon, plutonium, and AIDS flavored —
a place to put their children. What did we ever do
to deserve ourselves, private jihads of “more stuff,”
subject to random search based on being born
where you’re born. Everything ends with an -ism.
He looks head on into the political environment, says what he has to say without apologies, and perhaps purposely pushing buttons and taking names.
Finally, we come to the last book: Self Help Poems. Our reoccurring band of characters: an ordinary office building, father in politics, New York City, hospitals, a dying grandmother, commercials. The conversationalist tone from the first book is back, and now it’s in prose blocks on the page. It’s not as “poetic” in its depths, in that the language is casual and streaming in order. Starkweather seems to be aware of this, reflecting on his own writing: “Maybe away from the edge of any abyss, there is nothing to write about. No one to save. But even I know that’s bull shit.” This may be more conversational, but it’s definitely still poetry.
But then again, he’s also tap-tap-tapping against that unweildly rock, trying to find the definition of poetry in there. He’s constantly examining the definition of poetry. The poems are in consecutive order for the most part, in that one picks up right where the other left off, a string of conversations about poetry and the other reoccurring themes. After a poem that ends, “Also, technically, that shit I just took was poetry,” the next one begins in the same thought:
I was serious about that shit. Since language was invented, man has been trying to explain the feeling of taking a shit. I don’t know why, but I know there is something inside us, something we want out. I’m talking about evil.
As the above poems alludes to, guilt and shame are two themes that rise to the top of the depths in this collection. However, it’s a gleeful shame, the kind that one half revels in, is half repulsed by.
Self Help Poems brings the topics of the previous books to an everyday and every(wo)man setting, a spoof on “helping” everyday people. He does this with a tone that teeters on condescending, a disdain for the kind of people who read self help books, and maybe a bit of disdain at himself. We don’t have to always like it; but we do need to keep reading, to fulfill that gleeful repulsion that we can’t look away from.
Throughout all four books, the reoccurring plot points and characters get a little clearer, then murkier, then clearer again. He circles around his touchstones constantly, but he switches up how he gets there, and we’re left dizzy trying to map it all out, until we give up, and just enjoy the magic of it all.
What other poets are as prolific? Formally dextrous? Yet somehow manage to tie their work together with an invisible thread?
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