Sampson Starkweather Interview: The Land of Magic

To follow is an email interview with Sampson Starkweather re his wonderful chapbook of poetry "City of Moths" (Rope-a-Dope)

Sampson Starkweather was born in Pittsboro, North Carolina. He is the author of The Photograph from horse less press. His work can be found in Typo, Octopus, jubilat, Absent, Tarpaulin Sky, RealPoetik, and Sink Review. He lives in the woods alone.


RK: I see City of Moths as a series of temptations. Dreams, for one, are a strong temptation. They are pure and, as you point out, everything in a dream (all its parts, characters, etc) is "you." Some of the most beautiful moments in City of Moths are dreams but they lead, you say (and when I say "you" I mean the speaker in the poems), to an island like Lord of the Flies. So much for dreams then. God/Religion?-- some moments you lean towards a religious-like submission. And an inclination to (zen-like) enjoy it. But this isn't enough either. And neither is the similar temptation of the normal life. To be simple, like cows and pigeons. Love is the biggest temptation. Two-ness. You go back to it and back to it but it's always, at bottom, broken. In a similar realm to Love is the temptation of the body. Your "poetry" as "mountain" as "woman," leaning back--ready to commune (submission, again). But, this again is not enough. So, again and again, and always, it's you in the zoo of language and self. Like a panther pacing back and forth in its cage, trying to fill with light, and sometimes doing it. But, as you say, late in the book, "this is one of those stories where no one survives." You are tempted. You indulge in the temptations. They seem, at points, to have a real hold on you. But, ultimately, they are (and you know it) just temptations. Your thoughts on this, please?

SS:

Dreams

Dreams are important and a kind of actualization of our temptations; I never understood when people said as soon as they read/hear “dream” in a poem they turn off, or feel like everything that follows is fake, that’s like saying as soon as I read/hear words in a poem that I turn off, or that “language” is fake. Language is artifice, a layer between us and experience, at least as it’s presented in a poem. Words are symbolic, you can’t stub your toe on them. Even though that’s the goal of any poem, or at least my poetry, to transform language into experience or things (thing-language), something to stub your toe on, maybe a kind of third experience between the poet, the poem and the reader. What I’m getting at is that dreams are real, we experience them, they are experience (especially nightmares); dreams teach us, warn us, shape who we are, how we act, and reveal more than our ego/consciousness allow us when we’re “awake.” Almost the way a gland or organ in the body functions, I think dreams provide us, our spirit (for lack of a better word), with beauty (imagination) even terror, which helps us survive in a world decreasingly devoid of imagination and where we grow immune to terror, where “it’s hard to pretend the shrieks are not happening, but most people are trained by now to drown out the sounds.”

I got my first idea of the book (the seeds) at a time when I had grown skeptical, apathetic, frustrated, and unmoved by reading so much contemporary poetry, which seemed more interested in its own mechanics than as a transfer of energy or provoking a reader to feel or think. I was losing faith in poetry, the system, and questioning why I was investing so much of my energy, time and hopes into poetry. At the time, I was on an email list with four or five of my favorite poets and now best friends, where we talked about everything, but mainly argued, complained and theorized about poetry. Even this seemed to be exhausting or futile after awhile, when, for some reason we started telling each other our dreams and nightmares. I realized reading each others dreams/nightmares was more interesting, moving, frightening and beautiful than the poetry I’d been reading (or writing). They were full of terror, insight, psychological complexity, and most importantly, a method of “telling” that felt real and honest, that I could trust, striping away the artifice or layer/distance between the thing and the person experiencing it, while magically freeing me to be unaware of it as language. It felt more like the way we experience a movie or an event, as if it was happening to us. More like a phenomenon than a poem. I wanted to capture that sense of situational metaphor that dreams create and that sensation of hyperreality in a direct trust-worthy manner, so when I talk about dreams, the poems break into a letter from me to the reader. Fellow citizens.

Temptation

There is a passage early on that encapsulates the idea of temptation, as both pure and the way it transforms once it has been indulged in: “Pain is to have seen and tasted one’s desire, and to live with that apple in front of one’s face, forever, with no way to touch it. But that part of the story comes later.” Love and pain are poles in the book, but paradoxically, also become interchangeable and fuse as a kind of necessary degree for the other to exist, “The boy spent his first 12 years with his ear pressed to his parent’s door. Love and pain still sound the same.” There is a temptation to turn love into the longing for love. A sad condition, but one of necessity when one feels perpetually heartbroken and alone. But ironically, a good condition in which to write out of or from; meaning the same way love is the longing for love, poetry is a kind of ouroboros or grail search, an impossible searching for itself, what Spicer calls “the perfect poem…which is, of course, impossible.”

More Seeds

When I wrote City of Moths I was “in a dark time” as Roethke would say, of sadness and heartache, where I alienated myself from my loved ones and found myself often angry and resentful and stewing in all this. So I wrote. I wanted to create a poetry that had an effect (Action poetry) and I knew the poetry that I had written up to then wouldn’t do, wouldn’t have power. Power that, for example, could hurt or heal someone, perhaps myself. I wanted to create a poetry with consequences, the way our decisions in life have consequences. I also wanted to implicate the reader. I happened to stumble onto an astonishing Henri Michaux poem written out of a similar set of frustrations and circumstances and new immediately this would be my inspiration. Mixchaux explains that the key was to transform one’s enemy, pain or frustration into energy, and not to waste one’s anger, but to float inside it, to take pleasure in it and intensify in it. I found by isolating myself I was able to do this, but it wasn’t enough.

The letter form was perfect in that it allowed me to “aim” and while it was good to have something to aim at, the source of my heartache was not a good enough target to measure up to my emotions or allow me to create the kind of poetry I wanted, so I’d modify it into a kind of superheartache, every heartache I’d ever had (or imagined). And occasionally, in my delusion, I was literally scared I might succeed and hurt someone or effect them, make them feel this loneliness and longing that I had become a ball of. All of which sounds absurd, and of course is, which was sort of the brilliance of it, grand delusion and ego of a shattered self.

RK: I mentioned already the temptation of the normal life. You quickly, though, dismiss this in favor(glaringly but momentarily) of being a kind of superman artist. Isolated. Higher-tasked. Looking for the "deepest freshness deep down things." There's a kind of righteousness or arrogance at play here. While the other is in his/her "room, looking up the word thirst" you are working "the night" communing with the "river of moths" that's moving "beneath the city, rustling." Here it seems as though an ego is ready to rise up like a Whitman or a Neruda or a Nietzche (we get a flash of it, like a fish jumping out of water, but just a flash.) This prospect (a huge flaunting ego with Starkweather cleverness and eloquence) is quite exciting. I'd certainly like to see it more. Do you have other work more in that vein? Forthcoming work we might see? Or is that transcendent god-like ego (I contain multitudes! I am a city of stars myself!) just another facet (or temptation) that glints from time to time, and then sinks back down in the pacing panther's eyes?


SS: It’s funny, because any act of writing is an act of the ego, right? Humility and gall. Ecstasy and doubt. Writing is a negotiation of these, a kind of equation, or recipe. A magic act. For City of Moths, some of that ego that flashes was less a conscious decision or default mode of writing than a product of personal injury, bitterness, and frustration which made it more of a monster than I could control. However, one I had to learn to submit to or trust as true an emotion as any other that fueled my writing before it (the more normal kind, glory, validation, love, admiration, etc..) Unlike most of my writing, I think I didn’t write Moths to be loved (how’s that for ego). If pressed, I might say more to be feared, or even more accurately, simply because “I just wanted you to hear the sound of being alone..”

But paradoxically, there is also a kind of killing of the ego at work, or at least the part that separates what’s real from fantasy. It accepts the world of the unreal as real and vice versa, so the two become blurred beyond recognition. The book bounces back and forth from common sense and a consciousness of the external world and situations “Tell me, what do you think, when you talk freely, without reservation, without fear, with your heart wide open, theoretically speaking, obviously” to a hyperreality, a land of Magic or unreality “…and POOF – you were beside me, naked and trembling in my arms.”

The ego is your friend and your enemy, the trick is to learn to harness it’s ability, let it work, transform Hulklike and do it’s thing in the poem, and once it’s reverted to human size, go back get rid of it’s traces where it’s interfering with the poem. For City of Moths this was done by writing to prove something, to prove I was worthy of love, a ridiculous premise, but a trick/lie I sold to myself to create something better than I could on my own.


RK: Many times I've been asked a question that's a version of something like this: Do artists/writers need to be unstable, drink, do drugs, etc, in order to do what they do? I tell them that's bullshit. But? I don't drink anymore, do drugs, smoke, etc. But I'm always eager to find myself (or set myself) on edge. Traveling. Reading. Meeting new people. Whatever. It's nice to fill with light. One feeling I get from City of Moths (a shadow message I guess) is the championing of solitude and a kind of self-torture. Of wanting to be in the cage and relishing the "agony, agony" that comes from this constant self-cage consciousness. (While, at the same time, making sure the world through the window "can see me naked and new.") A subjection to solitude and suffusion of pain-- a drug to light up the ocean and river. An extreme kind of artistic no-pain-no-gain ascetism. Your thoughts?



SS: This is hard to answer, but my personal experience was that I didn’t need to manufacture any instability or edge, that was simply where I already was in my life, crushed. I just wanted to make a poetry that would make people feel (if not what I was feeling, something). I wanted to cause a visceral reaction in the reader, whether it was to gasp, run out of the room, leave a poetry reading, cry or laugh. But the truth is when I’m writing I fall into a sort of prolonged trance, and it doesn’t matter if my life is on some edge or “fucked up” or if I’m completely stable/secure in my life, because everything melts away, time doesn’t happen, even my emotions become more of a weather to work in, a fog. I tap into some energy which is generated by my thoughts and language, and I try to ride that energy (I like to think it of as magic) until it disappears or exhausts itself.

I do think solitude is essential to write poetry though. It’s a kind of slowing down. To be alone is to think. Thinking begets thinking. Personally, I can never turn off my thinking, but only when I’m alone am I able to follow through with my thinking to where it takes me over. It takes intense concentration and focus to get to that place where the poems are inside me. In this case it was painful, but being so isolated allowed me to create another world, and a poetry that was bigger than me. Big enough to contain a city and a woods. What Mixchaux calls the land of magic. A city where wolves wander around with nothing to do, where clouds are seen for the first time, where scarecrows have made a mistake and become real, where you wake up and realize you’re living in a little girl’s doll house, where everything trembles, always, always.


RK: I know you're at work on a full book-length manuscript, and I also know that in your writing and thinking you don't shy away from difficulties. You don't give in to easy, comfortable and conventional "outs." When I saw you in Chicago (AWP) you told me that City of Moths is one of 4 or 5 sections of your manuscript. This makes, then, for a pretty long first book (for a poet, these days, at least.) Can you talk about the manuscript a bit? Its parts. How they fit together? Don't give away too much, of course. Heck, whatever you want. And, again, touch on a bit about yr tendency (which I'm really digging) not to give in to temptations. Not to go the easy way. I for one I am really looking forward to your first book and I am sure many others are too. So, anything you can share would be much appreciated.


SS: Yeah, it’s kind of scary. I realize it’ll probably scare most publishers away, but that’s what I like about it, its gall. There are 5 sections (almost all are prose), each section (which I think of as books because they are able to function that way as a unit) is ambitious in its own way, in both scope and in methodology. Each attempts to find a new way (of writing and of trying to make something happen). The way its parts function to inform or contextualize each other is sort of like of a combination of Anne Carson’s Plainwater or Jack Spicer’s Heads of Town Up to the Aether. The way they try to get at some thing that no one way of writing can achieve on its own, but collectively can (or at least come close). What I find exciting about it is each section is its own community with its own laws and rules and strange little shops, but also part of a bigger city, a city more interesting and beautiful than its infrastructure, because it’s populated by these strange neighborhoods that are a product of their environment. I realize how silly and arrogant it is trying to describe it, so instead to get a taste of the book, I’ll list the Contents, which act as a kind of strange makeshift poem that tells as much about the book as I ever could.

I. The Photograph

Ask the photograph. It says science. It says spoon…
There is a process called burning in photography,…
There is no feeling like fiddling with a camera...
You believe in words. Their power. Weight...
When I say “you,” I don’t mean you. The poem…
It almost always has to do with light...
The photograph is proof of time. This has to…
The poet must pay for making a private language…
The photograph attempts to create a “flowing boundary”…
The photograph does not fade away ala Back to the Future…
A famous photographer went to India and…
The “you” is boring. The actual you. But your calf…
Love or a Polaroid: the suspension of disbelief...
The photograph is a life/or has a life?...
A girl’s leg is not a girl’s leg. The dress, presently…
The “you” wants to know what the poem knows…
Old-fashioned cameras had a lens that showed…
A photograph is a symbol. Of status or an incantation…
The poem is no match for the feel of human breath…
In chemistry, there is a saying: like dissolves like...

II. Famous American Lighthouses

A Limitation of Birds
Transgressions
A Meditation of Frost

III. Music at the End of the World

I am walking without moving, a kind of floating…
There is an anchor, rising. Some kind of flood has happened…
I am sitting in a white wicker chair, in the middle…
We were rehearsing a school play based on my friend’s life…
I’m driving to the house where I was born…
My sister lifts her veil of bees to kiss…
I must be on a boat out in the ocean…
Based on the way the light splays…
I’m alone in a desert. Traveling for a lifetime…
I am at a wedding. The woman I love is there…
Everything happens a little bit too fast…
I’m driving to work wondering whether Monica…
I’m being chased through the mall by this big kid…
I’m teaching again. It’s the end…
I could tell by the way the quiet became a kind of coat…
All around town, through sound-bites, overheard…
It occurs to me that I need to scream,…
The signs all said I existed outside of time…
I’m underwater again. Above me, a family…
There is simply color. A chromatic block…


IV. When One Has Shoulder Blades Who Needs Reason

Review of a Review of Thomas Bernhard’s Frost
Review of Sampson Starkweather’s Review of a Review of Thomas Bernhard’s Frost…
Review of Chris Tonelli's Wide Tree
Review of Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw
Review of a Review of Mark Danielewski’s Only Revolutions
A Review of a Review of Robert Olen Butler’s Severance
Review of the First Two Pages of a Six Page Review of Two New books of Charles Darwin
Prussian Dance Steps are Making a Comeback, Or a Review of a Review of Zoli
Review of a Visit by the Suburban Propane Gas-Man, After 68 Hours without Heat in 9° Weather
Review of the Reviewer’s Placated and Mid-thawed Soul …
A Review of Ms. Pac-Man
A Review of a Fleeting Meditation of Incomprehensibility While Sitting in Seat 24F…
A Review of Shoulder Blades and its Discontents

V. City of Moths