Starbuck, george works poems selected from five decades, the

foreword by ANTHONY HECHTedited by KATHRYN STARBUCK AND ELIZABETH MEESE THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS • TUSCALOOSA... 2003] The works : poems selected from five decades / George Starbuc

poems selected fr om five decades

GEORGE STARBUCK

R

K S

T H E W O R K S

foreword by ANTHONY HECHT

edited by KATHRYN STARBUCK AND ELIZABETH MEESE

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS • TUSCALOOSA

poems selected from five decades

GEORGE STARBUCK

R

K S

Copyright © 2003

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designer: Michele Myatt Quinn

Typeface: Courier and Syntax

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Starbuck, George, 1931–1996

[Selections 2003]

The works : poems selected from five decades / George Starbuck ; foreword

by Anthony Hecht ; edited by Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese.

p cm.

ISBN 0-8173-1378-8 (alk paper) — ISBN 0-8173-5053-5 (pbk : alk paper)

I Starbuck, Kathryn, 1939– II Meese, Elizabeth A., 1943– III Title.

In the course of our work, we received generous assistance from many people.

We especially wish to thank the staff of The University of Alabama Press for their patience and perseverance, Braden Phillips-Welborn for her untiring indus- try, and Sandy Huss for her graphic ingenuity that made it possible for the pro- ject to go forward.

K.S and E.M.

ALSO BY GEORGE STARBUCK

The Argot Merchant Disaster1982

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second1986

Space Saver Sonnets1986

Visible Ink2002

C O N T E N T S

Foreword

PA R T O N E

Poems from the 1950s to the 1970s

selections from Bone Thoughts, White Paper, and Desperate Measures

Communication to the City Fathers of Boston 7

1958: Poems from a First Year in Boston 15

On First Looking in on Blodgett’s Keats’s “Chapman’s

Homer”(Summer 1 / 2credit Monday 9–11) 22

Cold-War Bulletin from the Cultural Front 24

Elegy for an Industrial Domestic Object 35

The Well-Trained English Critic Surveys the

Sonnet on the Recognition of China 39

Poem Issued by Me to Congressmen 42

Sonnet with a Different Letter at the End of Every Line 60The Passion of G Gordon Giddy 61

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth Circle

Desert Monarch Month Wisdom (for which there

On Reading John Hollander’s Poem “Breadth Circle

Desert Monarch Month Wisdom (for which

there are no rhymes)” Part Two 76Verses to Exhaust My Stock of Four-Letter Words 77

PA R T T W O

Shapes from the 1970s to the 1990s

Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second 96

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree 112

Films Trip Comicstrip Column Vs Krazy Kael 113Cargo Cult of the Solstice at Hadrian’s Wall

Elegy in a Country Church Yard 118

PA R T T H R E E

Poems from the 1980s to the 1990s

selections from Talkin’ B A Blues, The Argot Merchant Disaster and

Visible Ink

Three Chapters From Talkin’ B A Blues

1 This is the Place All Right 141

Incident of the Blizzard of ’81 155

On Gozzoli’s Painted Room in the Medici Palace 157

The Great Dam Disaster a Ballad 162The Universe is Closed and Has REMs 165The Staunch Maid and the Extraterrestrial Trekkie 172Sunday Brunch in the Boston Restoration 176

To a Real Standup Piece of Painted Crockery 181

The Enchanted Glade 182Amazing Gracious Living on I-93 187Errand at the Lone Tree Mall 189

Reading the Facts About Frost in The Norton Anthology 195

Like Dotted Swiss (From a Book of Unretouched

Photographs of the Patternedness of Things) 197Catalogue Raisonné of My Refrigerator Door 198

con-tion, and genuine satisfaction The Works: Poems Selected from

Five Decades,is a generous sampling of a profound poetic

lega-cy, one for which readers ought to be deeply grateful Starbuck,unquestionably one of the most brilliant poets of his day, isunmatched in technical bravura, powerful in his expression ofindignation at the daily atrocities of our time, immensely witty,and often simply dazzling

Together, these poems highlight and enrich Starbuck’s life’swork, stunning this reader with the technical agility that alwayshas been his, but that here rises to something more thanfireworks This collection is the work of a man who has no equalfor his own brand of virtuosity; a Starbuck poem has about it aquality as identifiable, as unique, as singular, as any of the majormodern poets

Starbuck once said of his path in making poems: “For me,the long way round, through formalisms, word-games, outra-geous conceits (the worst of what we mean by ‘wit’) is the onlyroad to truth No other road takes me Put another way: I have

a conscious slavery to the language The only alternatives areunconscious slavery, or the sainthood of the wholly silent.”And his is not a display of wit or intelligence for its own sake,though the intelligence is always there The poems exhibit a

style of mindthat is supremely alert to all the inflections of nacular parlance, regional speech, and idiomatic and demoticmelting-pot American They are richly embellished with learnedallusions to literary sources, popular culture, topical events, andthe shopping-mall-collage of impressions, details, and ideas thatassail our consciousness at every point of our existence Hiseffortless technique in such forms as the ballade, the clerihew,and the double-dactyl, and in the form he called StandardLength and Breadth Sonnets, or SLABS for short, astounds Hisgeneral cheerfulness and lively intelligence give us a poet to beread and remembered

ver-Moreover, Starbuck has always been a poet engaged: asriotous and as witty as many of his poems are, they are equallydevastating in the frank and frightening highlights they throw

on contemporary cultural, personal, and political life At theirmost powerful, his poems do both at once—entertain andappall with their honesty His poem “Of Late,” is not merely thebest “protest poem” about the Vietnam War that I know—it isthe only one of any merit whatever

In this collection, the editors have assembled a rich display ofStarbuck’s versatility including “A Tapestry for Bayeux,” a poemabout intricate naval operations during World War II Com-posed, dauntingly, in dactylic monometer (three syllables to aline, with the accent always on the first), the poem consists of adozen 13-line stanzas It has a needlework complexity even atfirst or second reading The poem slyly reveals an acrostic, withthe initial letters of the first 78 of its 156 lines spelling out aplayfully scatological sentence about the anthologist OscarWilliams—the editor who had included the poem in one of his

anthologies The Works also features a remarkable dactylic poem 124 lines long Starbuck’s slim volume, Essential

double-Shakespeare, is here represented in “Richard the Third in a

Fourth of a Second” and “Space Saver Sonnets.” The editors

also include three chapters from his comedy-in-verse Talkin’ B.

A Blues,as well as the entirety of his 65-inch wide landscape

poem, (presented here in single-page form) Elegy in a Country

Church Yardwhich, when originally published, surely made theFrench Ouliepian masters, who like Starbuck were trained inmathematics, quiver

Almost everywhere today, courses in verse writing areoffered at the leading universities and colleges Sometimes even

at high schools Many teachers find it useful to set before theirstudents the challenge of a superior example to imitate Suchformal exercises are not concerned with the expression of deepfeeling, but the journeyman mastery of Czerny fingerwork Notonly is this good discipline in its own right, but it richly developsstudent respect for the abilities of their betters, and therebyencourages emulation George Starbuck’s work is of this peda-gogically useful sort, and there are not as many in the world asone might hope

Here is the kind of poet from whom virtually anyone canlearn a lot, while having a lot of fun and acquiring great respectfor verbal wizardry and richness of mental life

The gifted young English poet Glyn Maxwell wrote athoughtful assessment of Starbuck’s career as a poet that

appears in The Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry

(edited by Ian Hamilton) Maxwell writes, “He is equipped with a veritable arsenal of strategies against the darkness, andthe very qualities that make his work seem at first willfullyodd—ceaseless formal exploration, Byronic ingenuity of rhyme,and playful linguistic whimsy—proclaim his strength and sanity,while at the same time dramatizing the idiocy of what heopposes That he has continued to experiment at theedges of formal possibility, while delighting in America’s absurd,demonstrates his intelligence about what truly constitutes poet-

ic ‘seriousness’: knowledge of the powers and limits of wordsthemselves, and awareness that to don a joker’s mask is merelyone of the oldest and swiftest ways into the palace.”

xv

T H E W O R K S

poems from the 1950s to the 1970s

PA R T O N E

BONE THOUGHTS ON A DRY DAY

Walking to the museum

over the Outer Drive,

I think, before I see them

dead, of the bones alive

I think of how the snake smoothed over the fact, but hung sharp beads around its charmer’s neck

The jawbone of my cat

So easily held shut

Breakable as ice

Mice

The mouse of course is a berry, his bones mere seeds Step on him once and see

You mustn’t think that the fish

choke on those bones, or that chickens wish

Chickens

pedaling like the dickens,

getting away on a five-man tandem bike,

unlike

that legless headstrong showoff on crutches, the ostrich.Only the skull of a man makes much of an ashtray

Whereas the wise old bat

dumps his bones in a bag

and hangs it on a hook,

the elephant says look

how I can put

this on top of that

Here’s a conundrum

Tug of a toe, blunt-bowed barge of a thighbone, gondola-squadron of ribs, and the jaw scow

Carried along somehow,

keeping our eyes peeled

for what we were just yesterday,

we surge into the Field

Museum of Natural History

with busloads full of kids

Whole-hog hominids

3

NEW STRAIN

You should see these musical mice.When we start the devicethey rise on their haunches and sniffthe air as if

they remembered all about dancing.Soon they are chancing

a step or two, and a turn

How quickly they learnthe rest, and with leaps and spinsmaster the ins

and outs of it, round and roundand round We foundthe loudest music best

and now we testwith a kind of electric bell

which works as well

In two to two-and-a-quarterminutes, a shorter

rhythm captures the front

legs, and they stunt

in somersaults until

they become stilland seem to have lost their breath.But the sign of death

is later: the ears, which have beenflat, like a skin

skullcap, relax and flare

as if the airmight hold some further thingfor the listening

FABLE FOR BLACKBOARD

Here is the grackle, people

Here is the fox, folks

The grackle sits in the bracken The fox

hopes

Here are the fronds, friends,

that cover the fox

The fronds get in a frenzy The grackle

looks

Here are the ticks, tykes,

that live in the leaves, loves

The fox is confounded,

and God is above

5

On Commonwealth, on Marlborough,the gull beaks of magnolia

were straining upward like the flocksharnessed by kings in storybookswho lusted for the moon Six days

we mooned into each other’s eyesmythologies of dune and dawn

They do the trick with rockets now.With methodologies of steel

With industry or not at all

What does it come to? Ask the treescarrying out their lunacies

for all they are, for all they know

on Commonwealth, on Marlborough

COMMUNICATION TO THE CITY FATHERS

OF BOSTON

Dear Sirs: Is it not time we formed a Boston

Committee to Enact a Dirge for Boston?

When the twelve-minute countdown comes, when Boston’speople convened in unaccustomed basements

feel on their necks the spiderwebs of bombsights,

when subway stations clot and fill like beesnests

making a honey-heavy moan, whose business

will it be then to mourn, to take a busman’s

holiday from his death, to weep for Boston’s?

Though dust is scattered to her bones, though grievingthunderheads add hot tears, though copper grapevinesclickety-clack their telegraphic ragtime

tongues at the pity of it, how in God’s name

will Boston in the thick of Armageddon

summon composure to compose a grave-song

grand and austere enough for such a grieving?

Move we commit some song, now, to the HOLDfiles

of papers in exotic places Helpful

of course to cram some young ones with hogs’ headfuls

of Lowells, khaki-cap them, ship them wholesale

out There’s a chance, in one of them the hairsbreadthimminence of the thing may speak But Hell’s fire,

what’ll they have on us in all those HOLDfiles?

You want some rewrite man to wrap up Boston

like garbage in old newsprint for the dustbin?

The Statehouse men convivial at Blinstrub’s,

the textile men, the men of subtler substance

7

squiring Ledaean daughters to the swan-boats,

the dockers, truckers, teenage hotrod-bandits—

what could he make of them, to make them Boston?

Or even make of me, perched in these Park Streetoffices playing Jonah like an upstart

pipsqueak in raven’s clothing—First Mate Starbuckwho thinks too much? Thinking of kids in bookstoresdigging for dirty footnotes to their Shakespeares,

while by my window the Archbishop’s upstairs

loudspeaker booms redemption over Park Street

Thinking of up the hill the gilded Statehouse

where just last night the plaster-of-paris faces

of Sacco and Vanzetti craned on flannel

arms at the conscientiously empaneled

pain of a state’s relentlessly belated

questioning of itself (Last year the Salem

Witches; next year, if next year finds a Statehouse ?)

Thinking of Thor, Zeus, Atlas Thinking Boston

Thinking there must be words her weathered brownstonecould still re-whisper—words to blast the brassboundbrandishers on their pads—words John Jay Chapmanscored on her singlehanded—words Sam Adams,

Garrison, Mott, Thoreau blazed in this has-been

Braintree-Jamaica-Concord-Cambridge-Boston

There were such men Or why remember Boston?All of them dead of course Or else old Boston

wouldn’t be acting like a perfect Boston,

counting its thumbs and counting up the Boston

dividend-factors in this made-in-Boston

guidance-umbrella heisted over Boston

leaking the gods’ own laughter in on Boston

while the apprentice ironists of Boston

target the obvious But then that’s Boston

9

A TAPESTRY FOR BAYEUX

I Recto

Over theseaworthycavalryarches arocketrywickerwork:

involutelacerieslacerateindigoaltitudes,making askywritten

filigreeinto which,lazily,

LCTssinuate,adjutantsnext to themeversharp-eyed, amongdelicatebattleshipumbragestwinkling an

anger asmeasured asorgandy

sable andout Or that

man at theedge of thetapestryholding hisinches ofniggardlyground and histrumperyorder ofred and hisequipageangled anddated He

II Verso

Wasting noenergy,Time, the oldregistrar,evenlyadds to hisscrolls, rolling

up in themrampage andecho andhush—in eachinflux ofsurf, in eachtumble ofraincloud at

veer from the

eye like those

unattachednervefibreconduits,openmouthedureters,

tag ends ofhamstring andoutriggingripped from theirunions andnexusesjumble withundeterred

speakingtubestwitteringorders asrandom andangry asddt’dhornets Stepover amoment: peer

in through thisnutshell ofeyeball andman your gun

1958: POEMS FROM A FIRST YEAR IN BOSTON

1 Hospital Visits Visits to Beacon Hill

Boston Lord God the ocean never to windward,

never the sweet snootful of death a West Coast

wind on its seven-league sea-legs winds its wing-ding

landfalling up by upheaving over you

Winedarkhunger for some washboard music to this one-way

maze

Hunger for the stink of kelp winrowed

on beaches Hunger for the hills, hills somewhere

anchoring the dizzy sky No wonder

it groans, groans It’s the wind’s own girl I waylaid

through deserts who sours here, a sick wife

With land-wind.Nothing but land-wind hot with steel, but lint-white

bundles of daily breath hung out over textile

towns, but the sweat sucked from mines, white smokestackssoaring from hospital workyards over grassplots

of pottering dotards Take it, the dead wind whispers,

crouch to its weight: three thousand miles, three of-years of life rolled up in a wind, rolled backwards

hundreds-onto this city’s back, Jonathan Edwards

Funny old crank of social history lectures,

firm believer in hell and witches, who knows whether

you of all witnesses wouldn’t watch this wayward

city with most love?

And the busy winter bustle of steam and batting And the white-wound

handiwork of the nurses, the spattered internes

sober as bloody judges, culling the downtown

haul of the mercy fleet, while rearing and sounding

15

through panicked traffic the sacred scows come horns-downheaping the hecatomb The pretty hundreds

of bells nod off to sleep like practiced husbands

propped in high corners of their lady Boston’s

white-laid and darkened room

And yachtsmen, footlooselegatees fitting reefers into faultless

features with febrile wrists, protest: some leftist

restlessness threatens them in brittle leaflets;

some angry boy, some undiscovered artist

has put soot whiskers on their public statues

They wring their strange left hands that every-whichwaysscatter the khakied corpses onto elsewhere’s

turbulent waters to save oil Peer westward

plotting the last-ditch sally of The West

Peer from the Free World’s keep

Old pioneer,Jonathan Edwards, did you stop off here

where marsh-birds skittered, and a longboat put

its weed-grown bones to pasture at the foot

of Beacon, close on Charles Street? And see then,

already sick with glut, this hill of men?

And even there, see God? And in this marsh,

and in the wood beyond, grace of a harsh

God? And in these crabbed streets, unto the

mid-mire of them, God? Old Soul, you said you did

2 Jack Spicer Says There Is No Witchcraft in Boston

What’s with the shrub rubbish? I’d say it’s witchcraft.Brats in the belfries, catboats in the outskirts,

junk maples at the dump sites waving kerchiefs,

something there is, it sure ain’t Spring yet, itches

to kick this customary blacktop dragster

into a new gear In a quick-march mischief

her prim white picture-postcard patchwork

slithers on down the Charles The crisscrossed Mystictwitches in snazzy sequins though the calls

of her small tugs entice no geese All’s

up; all’s on us; a life raft wakens the waters

of Walden like a butt-slap

And yet she loiters

Where’s for-keeps while the lark in winter quarters

lolls? What’s to solace Scollay’s hashhouse floaters

and sing them to their dolls? and yet—

strange musics,migrant melodies of exotic ozarks,

twitter and throb where the bubble-throated jukeboxlurks iridescent by these lurid newsracks

Browser leafing here, withhold your wisecracks:

tonight, in public, straight from overseas,

her garish chiaroscuro turned to please

you and her other newsstand devotees,

the quarter-lit Diana takes her ease

So watch your pockets, cats, hang on to your hearts,for when you’ve drunk her glitter till it hurts—

Curtain

Winds frisk you to the bone

Full-feastedSpring, like an ill bird, settles to the masthead

of here and there an elm The streets are misted

A Boston rain, archaic and monastic,

cobbles the blacktop waters, brings mosaic

to dusty windshields; to the waking, music

3 Surfeit and Hot Sleep

Heavy on branch, on tight green knuckles heaves

the Spring Cumulus, thick as broodhens, thieves

17

green from the earthy bark like worms, like leaves,like dollars from up sleeves.

Outbreak of billfolds,bellbottoms, burleycue babes Musical billboardsjoin the parade And deep in bars the railbirds

listen: “They selling something?” “Can’t tell, traffic.”

On corners cats bounce once or twice: “Hey frantic.”

“Yeah.” and they stop Flared forward like an intakethe lips lurch on DISASTER OUTLET, NATICK

BEHEMOTH BARGAINS MONSTER DEALS TITANICthe soundtruck reads; but what it says is “Mine.You’re my obsession No I can’t resign

possession I’m confessin’ that you’re mine

mine mine mine mine click.” Da Capo Move on

Slowly the moon, that shifty chaperone,

performs her preconcerted wink Green, green

upon green, hips the store windows—I mean

it’s summer now, that lolloping large mother,

comes puttering about some spell or other

among her brats the beasts

And milky mutter

of pigeons, splash of children, scissoring shadowsweave us asleep as if there were no goddess

other than this of love, as if old Venus,

sprawled on the Common grass, her honeyed wonder’shernia’d ruiner snoozing against her shoulder,

had found a better nature with an older

There’s something still goes on on Beacon’s backstairs,there’s something gets discovered in the drugstores,but it’s not hers, not Cupid’s, not the Dog Star’s.The prank still plays, but it’s a colder jokester’s

If spring and fall and all, the hapless hustler

does her impersonation of the

picture-palace posture on an Elvis poster,

if spring and fall and all, her helter-skelter

sisters go squealing to the marriage-smelter,

the tin-pan Moon, the Moon’s to blame!

Throngs follow the bouncing ball and sing along,

singing about the Moon in every song,

singing about the Moonbeam scoobie-doo,

Using the Moon to slouch allegiance to—

A pox!

Powder with stardust While the bride’s

the broad’s the broodmare’s Moon at a cloud’s side

poses and slowly the light is hers She glides,

golden, an apple of eyes, and so cold, only

heart at its heaviest can join the lonely

circle in emptiness that is her dance

Yet she is Love, our Love, that frantic cadence

Gasp at the flash fadeaway into the dot

that swallows the bright stridency of the sign-off shot.Shuddering just to think it, think with what

aplomb the proud haunch of the Moon hangs through,while far back in the dark she truckles to,

stoppling her champagne giggles, what rough crew

19

something I almost hear

in you (You purse your eyes,look from ear to ear

and back again.) Surmise

a room, the table setwith fists, the fists with sheaves

of evidence as yetsafe in manila sleeves

Suppose commercials done,cameras, papers, fistsset moving, everyoneplunged in light to the wrists

Say, when those hands aghast,those thumbs awag with woe,jig like the naked cast

of a Punch and Judy show,that pretty comedydraws millions Say they gawk

too openmouthed for glee,

too tranquilized for shock

Say every well-fed gut

unshaken at that jape

eases or freezes shut

one stronghold of escape

and every head that smiles

in torpor or assent

nods me the empty miles

of its imprisonment

But say I came to you,

waiting for you to speak?

Would I be such a jew?