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?

 

The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather by Sampson Starkweather (Birds, LLC, 2013)

This is a big ol’ book of poems, and a densely written one on top of the sheer size. I bought it at Twin Cities Book Festival last October, and have flirted with reading it, but never fully dug in until recently, when I finally got over the size and intimidation of it all. I found I slipped in easily, and completely into Starkweather’s meta-realist world.

It is indeed divided into four books: King of the Forest (which is then divided into subcategories: “City of Moths”, “The Photograph”, “Dreams”, and “The End of the Sea”), La La La, The Waters, and Self Help Poems. Each book is wholly different, yet they all talk to one another with reoccurring themes, characters, and settings. Because of the size and gorgeous depths, I’ll be reviewing the first two books (King of the Forest and La La La) this week, and the other two (The Waters and Self Help Poems) next week.

None of the poems are titled, except in The Waters, where they are labeled by Roman numerals. This means you can read each section either as one long poem, or a series of interconnected poems strung together.

The books are rich with contextual references to other writers and their texts, as well popular culture. In this excellent review of the book in ColdFront Magazine, reviewer Mark Gurarie puts it beautifully: “The dichotomy here is a construct in itself: everyone has a city inside them; everyone emerges from a forest.” Starkweather’s city and forest are full of familiar faces: Lorca in New York, Shelly, drugged out college kids from Sarah Lawrence, Coleridge’s suffering,  Tony Hoagland, JFK, Lincoln, Keats — and that’s just a handful.

Yet despite the references throughout, the poetry is also accessible and extremely engaging to read, thanks to Starkweather’s smart sense of language and textual play. As he writes in “City of Moths”, “[…] Language. The zoo we all lose our nature to.” And the collection does feel like a zoo sometimes; there is a lot of winding inner reflection happening and synaptic sparks flying, and it can be a lot to absorb and keep up with. As a reader, you can’t quite pin the narrator down, as he’s constantly shifting and talking on either side of each topic. His self-awareness borders on self-conscious when various worries and anxieties arise. The very significance of poetry is questioned by the narrator and his friends, who tell him that poetry is “a thing that fools climb simply ‘because it’s there.’ ” The narrator is pondering much — the meaning of a poem, of love, all the while searching for himself. It’s in these anxieties and self-awareness that as a reader, I connected to the narrator, as these are universal experiences, despite the individuality of each expression of the experience.

The first subsection of King of the Forest, “City of Moths” is at once reflective with Starkweather looking down at lonely depths, then irreverent and almost nonchalant (“I’m not really trying to tell you anything; I just wanted you to hear the sound of being alone, oh yeah, and the snow is deep and bright.”), and yet in other lines, darkly funny (“The IRS is after me again. I mailed them Lorca’s ‘The Ballad of Weeping” with my W-2. Because there are very few angels who sing. Because there is room for a thousand violins in the palm of my hand.”). “City of Moths” is conversational in tone, with run-on, meandering sentences that wind us around — yet at the same time, Starkweather has his keen poetic eye right on the meaty subject matter, such as in this excerpt:

Wait, I have a question — Is a man, severed from his own shadow, covered by the Death and Dismemberment Plan? I only ask because I live in the forest, and lately light can’t find its way through the pines. Okay, for the sake of full disclosure, I’m afraid a woman has split my heart like firewood. Take me off speaker-phone for a second. Can you speak to the third-party for me directly? Good, write this down: Why does your love always feel like fumbling for condoms, as if it was your own fear that was fucking you?

Throughout each book, Starkweather layers conversation on top of conversation, looping back to topics of language, love, suffering, and family. There are reoccurring characters (ex-lover, uncle, father, sister, mother) that shift perspectives and roles in the different sections. There are even reoccurring settings: the forest, the sea, the city. Yet despite the reoccurring themes, characters, and settings, it doesn’t feel repetitive. Rather, it builds a foundation from which to form an identity, and through the looping themes, we find out what really sticks to the bones of this identity.

While “City of Moths” takes much of its content from the city itself, and directs much of its tone to this ex-lover figure, the “The Photograph” poems are linked by just that: a photograph, a camera, the impossible task of capturing a moment of light forever. The section weeps science, and matches the scientific tone with form; this section is less conversational and instead uses short, clipped sentences. The poems read as moments distilled by chemistry, carefully removed piece by piece: “The poem always has a handful of your pieces beside her, off the board, standing like little gravestones. A cemetery. Of you.”

“Dreams” is a surreal dreamworld that we swim through, sometimes quite literally. Water and forests are the reoccurring settings here. In this section, the speaker can’t quite see everything, and reasons for certain actions aren’t clear. There’s a kooky ambiguity characteristic of dreams that is different than previous sections. We are flooded with the speaker’s sense of lost control, letting go, giving up. The narrator shares his dreams with an uncle, and a father, which keeps us from ever getting a firm footing while reading this section. One of the many beautiful moments that captures the dream-like current of this section:

A page rises up into the yard like a white flag into the green, green grass. Imagine inventing snow. As the last page tumbleweeds away, I can make out black markings and immediately recognize them as that of a foreign language. Inexplicably, I know exactly how to pronounce each word, even though the shapes and letters are strange, and as they leave me, I know they are frightening and beautiful and all my name.

The final section of the first book, “The End of the Sea”, is the shortest. The setting is familiar, but slightly altered: there’s a lot of seaweed and and a forest floor — we’re down to the roots of the matter again. Even the speaker has shifted age — it’s about a boy and his life story. In succinct, direct, and beautiful lines, this boy pulls all those previous sections of King of the Forest together, gathering the countless threads his older self has left hanging, and tugs on just the right ones to make us melt into his hand.

The second book, La La La, shifts form again: here, we find short lines that build long, spinal poems. The world is now a technicolored, fast-paced one, peppered with familiar strains of irreverence and dark humor. Popular culture is under the microscope as we see flashes of TV, video games, computers, emails, iPhones, video tapes, SNL, and the Superbowl in these poems. There are so many moments where I laughed out loud, surprised by the moments I found funny, such as this one:

Dear Mom
you don’t know shit
about poetry
if you were a think tank
we’d all be making
cartoon balloons

Because even while they are funny, they are tinged with frustration, anger, loneliness, and loss. Starkweather is still playing with language, but it’s got a hint of violence that wasn’t there before:

syntactical revolution
is real
language is going
to get up
and bust
some heads
ever feel
like a gang
of exclamation points
is following you
boo

Formally, it feels like Starkweather is going through the stages of grief, or some process like this. First there is intense loneliness and reflection; then clinical dissection of that loss; then a sense of letting life wash over the narrator without any control; then with La La La, we see his anger and confrontational side.

The lines in La La La are bare, without punctuation. They fall into the next one, sometimes bumping into each other when we aren’t sure which line they are supposed to go with. But the beauty of Starkweather’s writing is that they work in multiple ways, such as in this instance between “to break” and “everything”:

things don’t have
to be
whole
to break
everything
is an action
watch the poem
sail into
itself

Loneliness is the most common thread throughout these different books, and as Starkweather writes, “what I really wish / is to be alone / without feeling alone / to make sense / of these lines”.  And perhaps he’s accomplished just that: he has us, the readers, sitting not next to him, but nevertheless with his words, trying to make sense of it all, too.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this review next Thursday…