Self Help Poems by Sampson Starkweather

March 29, 2011

Ana, when I wrote this book I felt like my soul was being sucked through a bendy straw by some thirsty, bad-breathed God–

I could do that thing where I make a point about the book and then supply some quotes to justify my observation, kind of like we’re in court: use the law of the book to bolster my verdict. You might appreciate that, since the chapbook I am talking about here is out of print, and the rarity and value of its words are rising by the milli-nano. And I will. But first, let me ask you a question:

What is Sampson Starkweather’s poetry made of? Philip K. Dick said reality is the thing that doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it. In the case of Sampson Starkweather vs. Reality, the poet is not only a phenomenologist but an interventionist: I really believe Starkweather thinks he can change the world with his words, because the world and the words are made of the same thing. Thank freaking G, I say. It was about time we started thinking about poetry this way again. Signifier makes the signified, dumbasses (no, not you). And I mean that magically, gently. Poetry is the propaganda of reality. OK, I just said that cause it sounded nice. Really poetry is reality, like chairs. We can talk about it later.

These poems are a series of e-mails or snippets of insight or dreams written down in-between. A famous poet showed me a book of a famous artist’s dreams into which she was writing down her own dreams. She used his white space. This book is kind of like that. The Person of the poems is writing surreptitiously at work, in pauses between YouTube videos. The Person is anxious his cynical language will hex his mother’s health, or speed his friend’s death somehow, is amazed that it was language who won the election, and then this:

When my dad ran for office, the good old boys slandered him by saying he was a communist and that his son was a poet in New York City. (…) When I first heard it, it gave me the chills—is it possible to reach our dreams and not even know it?

then:

As if you can build trust simply by coming out and admitting…anything. It’s a marketing strategy like anything else. I’m afraid our poetry isn’t any different. (…) If only our poems could have a mascot, like a talking gecko with an English accent (…)

See, I’m doing that quoting thing, and in fact I’ve typed up and deleted three other quotes before I settled on these two. I didn’t choose the quote about Mike Tyson saying the word “Malice” on Charlie Rose, and the power of that word echoing in the room. Or “We are the kings of the fucking sea,” about how everyone wants to escape into the concept of “pirate.” It doesn’t matter, they all feed into this thing I’m putting forth, which is that Starkweather doesn’t differentiate between World and Word, and in fact lives in his field, which is poetry. He doesn’t “write.” He talks about the field, too:

The phrase “your chosen field” always makes me think of the fields of my youth (…) No one chooses their field. The way it works is, it just happens to you. It’s perfect, like the weather. Like this poem.

and

I thought you said a field of opposites. What is the opposite of a field anyway? A mountain? A pinprick? My philosophy professor said everything has an opposite. What is the opposite of midway? That’s where the poem happens.

Basically, Sampson Starkweather is a kind of shepherd and sheep rolled into one. Or alchemist. Know what I mean?

When talk in the other room turns to singing, when someone says “Snow!” – Oooo. – this is the shift/transmutation SaStar is totally effortless at. His instincts are impeccable. I had a line once that said: “like the moveable hinge on which the dream of mothers turns into a dream of the father.” That kind of thing. When one concept flows into the next, one unit of time into the next — in the words of SaStar: “Between ringtones there was laughing, silence, and what sounded like pity or seaweed, that composed a kind of second weather.” I’m fully aware that David Orr, for example, would call what I’m doing “magical poetry talk” – but if I witness one more charmingly self-abnegating curtsey about how poetry is this literary thing and that we shouldn’t get all fuzzy about it, put forth in an urbane font – I WILL yawp. Poetry is so everyday that everyone hardly notices it. The weirder, the more common. And I think the everyday is damn fuzzy, monkeys! Everyday is magic! In the way that Spicer meant it, in the way Duncan means – the meadow that is a made place. Yeah, SaStar has this thing where he molds language like someone who doesn’t think of language as a system, but a material, a place. No matter how indeterminate the place is. And that kind of fieldwork is pretty rare. It’s like Fitzcarraldo building that opera house in the jungle. It’s almost of another era. It’s 3D.

A powerful thing happens when you stop treating language as a 2D system. Suddenly it begins to respond in a different way. Suddenly the ways in which language is political, is constantly manipulated by the market as per communication theory, becomes physically apparent, like ripples on a pond. I can see marketing execs wooing our language away from us — they know language is a thing. We have to make a play for it, get it back.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: “Ana Božičević”
Date: Mar 30, 2011 8:34 AM
Subject: A funny thing
To: “Ana at gmail”

A funny thing happened on my way to work: language sat down next to me on the train.
“Please stop treating me like a tool or a construct,” it said.
“Look at this ass. Is this a cutout?”
“You’re right,” I said. “For long I’ve been disturbed by the canopies of green towering above this bower–”
Language is like, “Would you talk to your mother like that?”
Language had a Long Island accent so mother sounded like motha.
———-End forward———-

We are very 2D these days. We’re into screens and image and systems, schemata. Have we forgotten how to feel language up? What drives “Self Help Poems” is this tension between the cubicle monkey who worries poetry is all about marketing / ponders “The Wrestler”/ e-mails romantic fugues to his friend, and the shepherd/inner wizard living in the field of Poetry where things are 3D and writes poetry not as code for a virtual reality but the real reality, the one that doesn’t go away when you turn it off. The mythical city of Brasilia and the contemporary apocalyptic andro-urbanal show through one another:

When you texted me that the name of our book would be Brasilia, as in the mythical city the homeless guy was looking for in the Austin public library, I misread it as Brahzilla, as in a giant, nationalistic, half-lizard, half-frat-brother Godzilla-like monster (…) Its enormous human shadow blocking out the sun.

All ages are contemporaneous, guffaws Ezra Pound. Sampson Starkweather published a thing called “Brazilia/Brasilia” in esque with his friend the poet Dan Boehl, whose book is Kings of the F**king Sea, and many things echo between it and Self Help Poems.  These friends conversationally dream up their poetics and it’s a bit of a bro-down, but it’s good. Seems to Help. “Ana,” SaStar wrote on the front page, “when I wrote this book I felt like my soul was being sucked through a bendy straw by some thirsty, bad-breathed God.” But then he goes on to say the book worked, he’s better. The very heightened sense of the relatedness of everything set poets apart, warbles Duncan. I know this most of the time but in Starkweather the sense of Person being of the same order as language or city is renewed. It’s like a little mass with Mickey Rourke as the altar boy. I do expect poetry to help me. It needs to help me be in the world without screaming my face off. This book Helps. Thanks for that, Star.

And now I feel tired. I made many grand essentialist statements and I hope they turned you on a bit, like good propaganda always does. And I feel like now I want to pink into some fuzzy finale solo where suns rest on shelf mushrooms, but instead I will put to the author a questionnaire:

Were Self Help Poems written at the same time as Brazilia/Brasilia?
Why are they called that? Were they intended to help you or me? Did they?
Did the truth set you free? Did it break the spell of marketing?
What is time? What is space?
Are you a political poet?
Is there such a thing as a prose poem?
What do you think about the concepts of “project” and “poetics”?
How is poetic heritage different from having friends?
If Mike Tyson is your favorite poet, then who, to you, is Mickey Rourke?
Who are you reading these days?
What kind of poems are you writing?

Please answer at your leisure.

~

Though the chapbook made by the excellent Greying Ghost Press is out of print, you can read some of the Self Help Poems in Action Yes.

I love talking about myshelf.

March 29, 2011

My life on this shelf begins because of things that don’t have much to do with each other.

1. Because I work in the City, but live an hour away on the Island, in a place to which trains from Brooklyn stop running at 11pm. And so after many years in Brooklyn I am absent, as Person, from readings and weekend shindigs in Prospect Park and such. I work and I go home and sit in the yard and sniff the slightly grinchy whiff of seagull.

I love living in the margins where time prowls like an undead tiger in a polo shirt. But the direct result is that, though I’ve read many friends’ books over the past year or two, I haven’t really had a chance to tell them so – or how much, or why.

2. Because in the fall I am starting a PhD program. I expect I will be even less of a Person to the outside then, but boy, my brain will grow. Yeah, I wanna grow my brain. To begin my scholastic life as a brain, I want to begin writing down some thoughts on books, as an experiment in saying but also to have a record of how my saying changes as I begin to read more criticism & theory & shit. And I want to do this in a space without outside editorial control, word counts, or where I can’t use cusswords. Because I so love to cuss.

3. Because there are not enough poetry reviews, I will “publish” my notes here. I will still write reviews for other “respectable” Places but I hope this shelf too will become a Place. Because in the past I often reviewed when I was inspired to critique; which, though it always means a thorough and intrigued engagement on my part, often didn’t fly over so well with those critiqued. Don’t worry, I will never stop chewing on my foot, since I can’t help but respond to work that challenges me with a challenge. But I want to counterbalance that impulse with the one that often goes unpublicized in my case – to praise. I want to praise.

4. Because I really love poetry, and I think about it all the time, and agonize over it, and thoughts about it race in my head in the shower and then I forget them. My memory is shit. It would be nice to have a net for the mental lepidoptera.

I still wonder about the digital world — in the words of Diane di Prima, what is the matter of it? What are these words on the web made of? They’re real, for sure, but using all my gadgets I still feel like the king drinking a potion his very wise, but potentially shady, magician mixed together. So I will use this unknown quantity for what I know is the good. The books are real too. They are concrete and kind of holy. Maybe it’s the trees in them that are holy. I will shed the light of the screen on those trees and see what happens.

5. Because I have bookshelves full of books by friends and acquaintances. And some of them are the best books I’ve ever read. My “best” means many things and I will tell you about them soon. I won’t pretend to objectivity in my reviews, which is great because I don’t believe in objectivity anyway.

Over the next few days I will post a list of the books on my shelf, so you’ll know what to stay tuned for. But to start you off, the first book I write about will be Sampson Starkweather’s Self Help Poems from Greying Ghost Press.