by Sampson Starkweather
Rope-a-Dope Press 2008
Reviewed by Dan Magers

Come Back to Me

Sampson Starkweather’s chapbook City of Moths attempts relentlessly to blur the distinction between words and things. Unlike bodies in space, which can be registered immediately, language must be actively and continuously attended to in order for it to register. The futility of using language to prioritize objects over language is this work’s driving force. The generally conversational style and discrete blocks of prose suggest an epistolary work, letters to an absent lover. But as much as our narrator wishes to speak her into existence, he is only speaking to himself.

There is no deliberate movement of logic, but two steps gradually emerge: he cancels the distinctions between words and objects, then dares us to ignore the objects. As for the first, he writes, “No difference between a poem and a tree,” or

“Poetry, she says, is a mountain. An actual mountain. A thing that fools climb simply ‘because it’s there.’ “Poetry is there, but why do we constantly feel the need to prove it exists?”

By “we,” the poet means “I”.  He answers by offering a guiding example of “Wolves in the city, wandering around abandoned monuments and subway stations without any sense of fear or resistance.” When they attack,

“It’s hard to pretend the shrieks are not happening, but most people are trained by now to drown out the sounds. Need I remind you that most of the time, they simply walk through the city, peacefully, with nothing at all to do.”

We want to prove poetry (like emotion) exists because it can be neglected, ignored. With the wolves, Starkweather emphasizes the absurdity of ignoring a tangible thing, and suggests we do it all the time with intangible things, like emotions. “The perfect poem you can walk inside of,” he writes; “watch yourself from above on a series of TVs.”

These are poems conceived and collected under the guiding thread of a city, giving Starkweather room to not only populate the poems with objects, people and actions, but also events, suggesting memories, which hectically turn emotions into things. There is less concern about creating a defined time and space than there is in populating it:

“In the dream, we’re at a party in a trailer park. No, the ceiling isn’t low, that’s regret. I know, it looks a lot like metal, but it’s actually closer to mist.”

This constructed world, therefore, is very fragile—half-remembered at times or half-imagined, coming apart in our hands.

With images and ideas careening back and forth, some stick better than others. In lines like “The way ‘terror’ has lost its meaning in America,” or “there are trees in the trees,” there is less emotional investment than shorthand for tasteful political sentiment on the one hand and metaphysical shadow-play on the other. Starkweather’s poems are most his own in his strains of humor and levity that do not really look on the bright side, but lash out, retaining the whole of their weirdness: “I wanted to be a robot-cop, until I saw the scene when the politician did all that blow off the blonde’s tits at the top of some city. Look what dreams lead to.”

The most indelible comment made to the “absent other” is bristling, flip and sincere:  “Tell me, what do you think, when you talk freely, without reservations, without fear, when you speak of me with your heart wide open, theoretically speaking, obviously?” Humor and desire intermingle in one of the book’s best moments:

“Did I tell you I was watching Game 2 of the Playoffs between the Pistons and the Orlando Magic…[and] this skinny little white boy with glasses, a Pistons fan, maybe 10 years old, shirtless…and painted on the entirety of his chest, in glittery pink and blue spray-paint was the message, ‘There’s No Such Thing as Magic’ and POOF – you were beside me, naked and trembling in my arms?”

He has summoned his “other” – at least, the idea of her, which is something. The other best moment takes this humor into the abyss, owning completely his weird and private world. But maybe it is not so private. Maybe some day you will be talking to a man in a bar, and in talking to him, you will have more in common with him than you think. And maybe you will even buy him a drink, but eventually you will have to say goodbye, and maybe you will ask him off-handedly where he is going, and he will answer, “I am going on a journey where all possible outcomes will end in fire.” Maybe. If not, you can imagine it.

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