STARK WEEK EPISODE #4: “I saw a small boy on a great precipice” — Bianca Stone on the cover of King of the Forest
For Episode Four of Stark Week, Bianca Stone answers some questions about working with the forest king Sampson Starkweather for the triumphant cover of King of the Forest!
1) What was your experience working with Sampson?
Joy. It was like working with a doting older brother.
2) What was your process (how did you come up with the idea)?
I had just illustrated the Birds LLC book by Ana Bozicevic, Rise in the Fall, and I’d been wrapped up in the idea of the cavalier, the knight. Her book felt like an army charging over a hill. It was always the Joan of Arc figure I pictured with her book. I’d done drawings of knights in armor, looking at a pamphlet my fiancé’s father gave me on armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has always been one of my favorite things to see there. Obviously they were so insanely masculine. I couldn’t fit many of them into the tone of Ana’s book.
Luckily, I opened Sampson’s book King of the Forest. The knights charged up, offering themselves. But they too seemed too masculine for his book. I say this because the poems had the voice of a young boy, whose vivid imagination was tangible.
Rather than faceless, colossal suits of armor, I saw a small boy on a great precipice. One whose power was great, but who was afraid and isolated.
The artwork I did for Sampson was inspired by the cover of Ted Hughes’s The Iron Man. Which Sampson really loves. And so do I.
Dark contrasts and cross hatching….I’m already there.
Actually before we were friends we read together, and I remember him telling poop jokes. Or was it a poop poem? He had a chapbook called City of Moths and I bought it! My mom was there and saved the flier with our pics and bios. It’s hanging in the bathroom at her house, and when I was home last time, I noticed him on there! I had never made the connection in my mind.
Sampson and I are close friends. I love every time I get to collaborate with him because he’s so goddamn energetic. He’s one of the most dedicated, hard working poets I’ve ever met. While it might feel sometimes like your opinion isn’t filtering through his buoyant, manic stream of awesomeness… it is. He listens and takes everything in. He has a very generous heart and he’s a fucking fabulous poet.
Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of several chapbooks and the poetry-comic I Want To Open The Mouth God Gave You, Beautiful Mutant (Factory Hollow Press), the editor of Monk Books, and a regular contributor for The The Poetry Blog. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, Crazyhorse, and Tin House. Stone collaborated with Anne Carson on Antigonick (2012), a new kind of comic book and translation. She lives in Brooklyn with her boyfriend, poet Ben Pease, and their cat. For more information, check out her page at the Poetry Foundation.
STARK WEEK EPISODE #3: “The Reality of Moths” — John Cotter on City of Moths
Episode Three of STARK WEEK finds John Cotter flying around with the moths in City of Moths, the first section of King of the Forest, the first book of The First 4 Books of Sampson Starkweather. John begins with an excerpt from City of Moths:
There are constantly packs of wolves in the city wandering around abandoned monuments and subway stations without any sense of fear or resistance. As long as you mind your own business, they too will ignore you. But should some tourist acknowledge their existence or a young girl, sensing their animal presence, make a sharp movement, they will immediately swarm the victim…
What I love about this is the way the sentence beginning with “But” sounds like a translation from some forgotten surrealist poem. “But should some tourist” is suspiciously elegant but unusual. How often do you begin a sentence with “But should”? “Acknowledge” was probably more casual and familiar in the original. Was “young girl” joven or jeune fille? And was “animal presence” some kind of common phrase back then? Is that why they’d inject themselves with monkey glands?
I’m only half kidding. One of the pleasures of Starkweather’s poetry is the way he can seemingly discover original lines by Lorca or Apollinaire by writing them into existence. Jack Spicer, one of Starkweather’s heroes, could do the same.
And like Spicer, Starkweather uses the numinous to negotiate the real, as late in City of Moths, where he writes “The IRS is after me again. I mailed them Lorca’s ‘The Ballad of Weeping’ with my W-2.” That’s a beautiful idea, but we’re caught up short when we realize the title of “Casida Del Llanto” has only been published once in English as “The Ballad of Weeping” (usually it’s “The Weeping” or “Song of Lamentation”), and that was by Spicer, who famously took liberties with the texts. So was that a Lorca poem in the envelope at all?
This idea that mailing a poem to the IRS would matter is at the heart of what The First Four Books are saying. “The problem with fiction,” he writes in Self Help Poems, is that it “is predicated on the idea that there is a real.” Poetry, on the other hand, “has no pretensions of being real, it doesn’t care if you believe, it doesn’t even believe in itself.”
But these lines don’t believe in themselves. Or do they? When Obama is elected, the poet is astounded because “it had nothing to do with politics or humanity or any of that shit, it was simply the fact that language did this.” Hope is the last word in the book, books. On the other hand:
I want to say what Nicanor Parra says after every reading: I take it all back.
Let’s propose for a moment that we can’t read without creating some kind of narrative (we can move our eyes over the words without creating a story, but that’s not reading, it’s scanning). So, to test this hypothesis, can we locate a story inside City of Moths?
If all of Starkweather’s poems are either epistles or apostrophes, Moths is both. The poems could easily be read as a series of letters to a former lover, letters never sent. “Okay,” the poet tells us early on, “for the sake of full disclosure, I’m afraid a woman has split my heart like firewood.” Their division isn’t the only cause of agony (or pleasure) in the book, but it’s profound. “Do you still live in the city we made?” he writes her. “You are a genius for leaving me.” And so the wolves in that opening passage are both the torments of the poet (could they tear him apart, as they did the girl) and the poet himself (he tore her apart). The surrealist pastiche becomes a way to rephrase loss. It’s also a method of wishing it away (“Hell is merely a series of images you can’t shake”). And it’s a needed distraction. And it’s all there is.
“I believe in scarecrows,” he writes, “They’re more convincing than people and much less frightening.” When he looks at them he thinks the word fire, the word Pascal sewed into his pocket against “the eternal silence of those infinite spaces.” Starkweather is the scarecrow and the king of scarecrows. He’s scared a woman away. He goes alone to the woods.
You can have your fucking city back. Just writing that feels like confessing a sin. Do you ever feel that guilt is our religion? I used to tell my mom, “My religion is that I love you.” Foolish boy, king of straw. Don’t tell anyone, but some of the scarecrows made a mistake and were real.
John Cotter is a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly. His novel Under the Small Lights is published by Miami University Press.
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July 16th, 2013 / 2:19 pm
July 16th, 2013 / 2:19 pm
STARK WEEK INTERLUDE: SLampson and the Mermaid
This is what happens when a poet meets a mermaid on Second Life, a 3D world where everyone you see is a real person and every place you visit is built by people just like you.
[19:31] SLampsonSLarkweather: Hail, Hail, the kid can swim!
[19:32] rigar yumsfeld: kid?
[19:32] SLampsonSLarkweather: I scream even more, you’re all here to see me bleed, run down roosters, bees, the buoyancy of already gone, I was just playing
[19:32] SLampsonSLarkweather: FISH OUT OF WATER.
[19:33] rigar yumsfeld: haha
[19:33] SLampsonSLarkweather: So I float. So I kick and scream for no other reason than being born.
[19:33] rigar yumsfeld: haha you could float
[19:34] rigar yumsfeld: :)
[19:35] SLampsonSLarkweather: We whored our pool via free advertising. Paid through the nose. “Above ground” is a term I still don’t understand.
[19:37] rigar yumsfeld: haha yeah
[19:38] SLampsonSLarkweather: We all come out swimming. Not a lifeguard for miles. They called me White Lightning in the stands, but nobody knew my name was Doubled-Over, that I peed my pants simply to stay warm.
[19:38] SLampsonSLarkweather: What can you do?
[19:38] rigar yumsfeld: what you mean?
[19:40] SLampsonSLarkweather: I mean that You believe in words. Their power. Weight.
[19:40] SLampsonSLarkweather: Like some kind of nerd.
[19:40] SLampsonSLarkweather: imagine this as music.
[19:40] SLampsonSLarkweather: dunzo
[19:40] SLampsonSLarkweather: now where to go
[19:41] rigar yumsfeld: idk wtf you are talkign bout
[19:43] SLampsonSLarkweather: clusterfucks aren’t a breakfast cereal.
[19:44] SLampsonSLarkweather: I’m telling you the clouds point to us, too.
[19:49] rigar yumsfeld: sorry im at work
[19:51] SLampsonSLarkweather: Instead of a raise, my job offered to get me a new chair, in the form of one of those giant exercise balls.
[19:53] SLampsonSLarkweather: As if I don’t realize they are actually saving money by buying me a plastic ball for a chair.
[19:53] rigar yumsfeld: I dont need a raise
[19:53] rigar yumsfeld: ^^
[19:55] SLampsonSLarkweather: i can do anything with money.
[19:55] SLampsonSLarkweather: i’ll show you if you give me the money.
[19:55] rigar yumsfeld: lol
[19:57] SLampsonSLarkweather: Have you noticed all the commercials these days are trying to cash in on the economic crisis?
[19:58] rigar yumsfeld: yeah :P
[19:58] rigar yumsfeld: well I better get going
[20:00] SLampsonSLarkweather: I’d love to partake
[20:00] SLampsonSLarkweather: but i’ve got umbrellas and promises to break
[20:01] SLampsonSLarkweather: and miles to go before this roofie wears off.
[19:58] rigar yumsfeld: you are fucking weird man
[Note: This dumb thing was inspired by this broadside from Rye House Press.]
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July 16th, 2013 / 4:15 am
July 16th, 2013 / 4:15 am
STARK WEEK EPISODE #2: “Off the Top Rope” — Matt Bollinger on collaboration with Sampson Starkweather
For Episode Two of STARK WEEK, we hear from Matt Bollinger, who designed and drew the front and back covers of The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather.
Sampson wrote to me early last December to ask if I would make a cover for his book. “I’m very busy,” I summarily replied but in less summary and more polite terms. Because of a new full-time teaching job and an impending solo exhibition, I felt there was no way I would possibly have the time to make a cover. The next email I received from him came like a sudden summer storm (particularly strange in the final week of a wintering semester) complete with simultaneous heavy raindrops and sunshine. He supplied approximately 43 ideas for the cover, including examples from the history of fantastic poetry covers. Here’s an example:
“A note about Andre the Giant off the top rope: this is actually an image that doesn’t exist, which is why it’s appealing to me, the unknown, what only lives in the imagination…so to my knowledge, Andre the Giant has never jumped from the top rope, but god, how i longed to see that; (i’ll send you the poem about it), but in my imagination, i love the image of the 7’5 almost 600 pound flying through the air Jimmy-Supafly-Snuka-style, althought i’m thinking the image would only be part of him or his silhouette, or partly his enormous shadow….”
A few days after the semester ended when I was in rural Illinois staying in the log cabin where my fiancé grew up, I found myself making numerous studies for the cover. It seemed that I was going to design the thing after all. Sampson, like his neck-brace wearing alter ego from the sectional cover of Self Help Poems, is impossible to say “no” to. Of course, I realized that I couldn’t possibly have let this chance go by. I felt too much of a kinship with his poetry. In my painting-collages, I grapple with a similar intersection between memories (possibly misremembered) and the present moment; between romantic hopefulness and a self-conscious criticality that withers nostalgia. Sampson puts it well in Self Help Poems:
Nintendo always felt more real than life. Simple yet somehow beautiful worlds, constantly breaking down, designed, whether intended or not, as pixilated avatars of hope. Old school video games are perfect precisely because of how unreal they are. They don’t try to teach you anything, except if you see a hammer, you better grab it.
The process of designing the cover was definitely collaborative. In my recent exhibition at Zürcher Studio in New York, I collaborated with a number of poets, Farrah Field, Alina Gregorian, Steven Karl, and Paige Taggart, who supplied texts for collages I made that depicted notebooks (Dan Magers handled the editing process). This project readied me for the onslaught of fantastic ideas that Sampson and I power-spiked back and forth (not unlike a twisted game of dodge ball where the only defense against the red rubber ball hurtling at face-bash speed is to slam it with your best haymaker).
When developing the images for the front and back covers, Sampson and I discussed Andre the Giant, Louis Zukofsky, “guerrilla underground hand-drawn poetry press style”, LARPing, Nintendo and Mickey Rourke among other things. Sampson had become obsessed with both the coat of arms and a large number 4 modeled after the “A” on Zukofsky’s famous cover. While we tried out a number of variations (see below), we went with the big 4 on the front and the coat of arms on the back.
I had the idea that the coat of arms should spawn from the inner selves of the various personas in his books and arrived at the hobo-TV-fire, the well (Sampson’s idea), the butterfly, and the grabbable hammer mentioned above. We hoped that his cover would resemble an older generation of much coveted books, the sort grabbed hungrily and pressed to the chest in basement bookstores or, more likely, found wrapped in a banana leaf on the shore of a distant island, the same far-away shore where you might find yourself 300 years in the future founding a religion who worships that sacred number: 4.
Matt Bollinger is an artist who lives in Peekskill, NY. He has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and France. In March 2013, he had his most recent solo show, Bed on the Floor, at Zürcher Studio in NYC. His work has appeared in the New Yorker and has been written about in Le Monde, Elephant Magazine, Anthem Magazine, and elsewhere. He is represented by Zürcher Studio, New York, NY. www.mattbollinger.com
STARK WEEK EPISODE 1: “The redonkulous and the sublime” — An interview with Sampson Starkweather
WEEKS: A lot can kill you in a week. Even more can eat you at your weakness. A whole week of hair growth depends on, uh, genetics? Weeks contain a finite series of burritos and an infinite burrito of choices. Hoopla, regrets, collapses, dancing so hard you have to pour a cup of ice water on your dome, other times that feeling like you have to drag yourself so hard by your own collar your shirt might tear. Huge trucks at night carrying turned-off, unblinking versions of those normally blinking signs that say CONSTRUCTION AHEAD or SLOW LANE ENDS, except the signs are big so the trucks themselves say OVERSIZED LOAD and are blinking, themselves, even though their cargo’s dark. What I would like to do is nominate Sampson Starkweather to rewrite the entirety of America’s highway marginalia, to be the official roadside spokespoet for all of America’s restless feelings. I don’t have shit to do with those decisions, so what is happening instead is that this week will be Sampson Starkweather week here at HTMLGIANT, aka STARK WEEK.
THE BOOK: Sampson’s debut book of poems, The First Four Books of Sampson Starkweather, is out now from Birds LLC. It’s really big. Like almost 400 pages. Who does that? It’s what it says it is. 4 books. All the feelings enacted in the opening paragraph happen inside of its four books, which are categorized as “poetry/life.” Sure, yes, yeah.
WHAT’S IN IT: It’s a book I’d give to someone just coming to poetry and to someone who feels totally burnt out on poetry. Those are kind of the same readers, I think. That’s why the whole week. Starkweather’s poetry is the existence of a nonexistent photograph of Andre the Giant jumping off the top rope. In his introduction, Jared White mentions “bass-voiced sexy soul-singer slow jams” and “punch-drunk Harlequin-robocop masculinity.” The poems have angry leaked dreams and love before roads and a pistol-whipped desire and the world’s saddest TV and offensive hurricane names and corpses wrapped in huge tropical leaves on islands named after them and that’s just in the poems you can read on the excerpt page.
WTF IS GOING ON: Over the course of this week, we’re going to feature a series of guests talking about Sam’s work in each of the books within T4B—1) King of the Forest, 2) La La La, 3) The Waters, 4) Self Help Poems—and also we’re going to hear from the awesome artists who made the covers for each of these four books. There will be criticism, talk of process, grand sweeping theories, tiny insightful scalpels. You’ll get to read some of Sam’s poetry. There will be some talk of what goes into, in 2013, putting out a 400 page book of your poems that is actually 4 books. Maybe there will be some interaction, multimedia, surprise. Buy a copy of the book if you want to follow along closely. I promise it won’t feel like being stuck on a brokedown bus at a rest stop in Connecticut. There are poems that feel like that, but not in this book. Here’s a list of who’s coming at you: Matt Bollinger, Ed Park, Bianca Stone, John Cotter, Melissa Broder, Eric Amling, Elisa Gabbert, Jonathan Marshall, Amy Lawless, Sommer Browning, and Jared White.
WHO IS SAMPSON STARKWEATHER ANYWAY, IS HE THAT GUY WHO DID THAT THING GUYS DO: The reason a lot of people want to share and talk about Sam’s huge ass tree-killer is because he and his work (which are impossible to unspoon from each other, which is how it should be) is like getting the best high five of your life from Teen Wolf. He is loved and easy to love and easy to mistake in rural supermarkets for Javier Bardem. He’s a longhaired poet surfer with a heart of messy pizza and manic kindness. Thank the exhausted fucking stars he is with us and with poetry. Enjoy STARK WEEK.
HOW DOES STARK WEEK BEGIN: To begin STARK WEEK, I talked to Starkweather:
1) Hi Sam. Welcome to Stark Week. This is how it starts, with an interview of you. Our interview starts with the “who is Sampson Starkweather and what’s going on, what is this stuff all over my arms, is this sap” portion of the interview. So let’s start at the start. Four books? Why? Why buck the prevailing model of slim little precious supermodel books? More importantly, why buck it in this beautifully thunking doorstop fashion?
Sorry about the sap “this forest / is unusually horny.”
In the end it came down to precisely the opposite of your question: “Why not?” Why not 4 books in 1? Why not a 328 page monster poetry collection that sounds like a seminal lifetime work by some famous, award-winning, about-to-die poet who now tends a garden, published by some big-ass conglomerate press like Penguin, but is actually by some dude with a ridiculous name that no one has heard of (and sounds like a character from Game of Thrones) and has yet to publish a full-length book, on a small indie poetry press that, oh yeah, he just happens to be a publisher/founding-editor of? It seemed ridiculous, audacious, absurd, unheard of, taboo, laughable—in other words, perfect.
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July 15th, 2013 / 1:28 pm
July 15th, 2013 / 1:28 pm