George Edwin Starbuck
George Edwin Starbuck Poems
for Joshua Starbuck, master of montage
A Caledonian megalith.
A tinted bather from Cape Ann.
The 1937 kith
...
purged of accretions & newly published in the corrected hemimeter version prepared under the general folgership of G. Starbuck
Poor Soul
...
Here is the grackle, people.
Here is the fox, folks.
The grackle sits in the bracken. The fox
hopes.
...
"Stephen Smith, University of Iowa sophomore, burned what he said was his draft card"
and Norman Morrison, Quaker, of Baltimore Maryland, burned what he said was himself.
You, Robert McNamara, burned what you said was a concentration
of the Enemy Aggressor.
...
"Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are
No rhymes)" was just the title, and I only read that far.
That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar
When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions,
...
Virgin, sappy, gorgeous, the right-now
Flutters its huge prosthetics at us, flung
To the spotlights, frozen in motion, center-ice.
...
for Helen Vendler
O for a muse of fire, a sack of dough,
Or both! O promissory notes of woe!
One time in Santa Fe N.M.
...
I wonder what the Greeks kept in these comicstrip canisters.
Plums, milletseed, incense, henna, oregano.
Speak to me, trove. Tell me you contained dried smoked tongue once.
Or a sorcerer or a cosmetologist's powders and unguents.
...
for Arthur Freeman
Pigfoot (with Aces Under) Passes
The heat's on the hooker.
Drop's on the lam.
...
Federico Garcia Lorca
used to uncork a
bottle or two of wine
whenever the duende dwindled for a line.
...
George Edwin Starbuck Biography
George Starbuck's songs of protest are usually concerned with love, war, and the spiritual temper of the times. John Holmes believes that "there hasn't been as much word excitement . . . for years," as one finds in Bone Thoughts. Harvey Shapiro points out that Starbuck's work is attractive because of its "witty, improvisational surface, slangy and familiar address, brilliant aural quality . . .," and adds that Starbuck may become a "spokesman for the bright, unhappy young men. . . ." Thomas Gunn, on the other hand, believes that Starbuck "is not even very elegant," but, Louise Bogan writes, his daring satire "sets him off from the poets of generalized rebellion." After reading Bone Thoughts, Holmes hoped for other books in the same vein; R. F. Clayton finds that, in White Paper, the verse again stings with parody. Although Robert D. Spector wasn't sure of Starbuck's sincerity in Bone Thoughts, he rates the poems in White Paper, which range "from parody to elegy to sonnets, and even acrostic exercises," as "generally superior examples of their kind." In particular, Spector writes, when Starbuck juxtaposes McNamara's political language and a Quaker's self-immolation by burning, or wryly offers an academician's praise for this nation's demonstration of humanity by halting its bombing for "five whole days," we sense this poet's genuine commitment.)
The Best Poem Of George Edwin Starbuck
A Tapestry for Bayeux
I Recto
Over the
seaworthy
cavalry
arches a
rocketry
wickerwork:
involute
laceries
lacerate
indigo
altitudes,
making a
skywritten
filigree
into which,
lazily,
LCTs
sinuate,
adjutants
next to them
eversharp-
eyed, among
delicate
battleship
umbrages
twinkling an
anger as
measured as
organdy.
Normandy
knitted the
eyelets and
yarn of these
warriors'
armoring—
ringbolt and
dungaree,
cable and
axletree,
tanktrack and
ammobelt
linking and
opening
garlands and
islands of
seafoam and
sergeantry.
Opulent
fretwork: on
turquoise and
emerald,
red instants
accenting
neatly a
dearth of red.
Gunstations
issue it;
vaportrails
ease into
smoke from it—
yellow and
ochre and
umber and
sable and
out. Or that
man at the
edge of the
tapestry
holding his
inches of
niggardly
ground and his
trumpery
order of
red and his
equipage
angled and
dated. He.
II Verso
Wasting no
energy,
Time, the old
registrar,
evenly
adds to his
scrolls, rolling
up in them
rampage and
echo and
hush—in each
influx of
surf, in each
tumble of
raincloud at
evening,
action of
seaswell and
undertow
rounding an
introvert
edge to the
surge until,
manhandled
over, all
surfaces,
tapestries,
entities
veer from the
eye like those
rings of lost
yesteryears
pooled in the
oak of your
memory.
Item: one
Normandy
Exercise.
Muscle it
over, an
underside
rises: a
raggedy
elegant
mess of an
abstract: a
rip-out of
kidstuff and
switchboards, where
amputee
radio
elements,
unattached
nervefibre
conduits,
openmouthed
ureters,
tag ends of
hamstring and
outrigging
ripped from their
unions and
nexuses
jumble with
undeterred
speakingtubes
twittering
orders as
random and
angry as
ddt'd
hornets. Step
over a
moment: peer
in through this
nutshell of
eyeball and
man your gun.
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4/26/2024 4:17:55 PM # 1.0.0.1119
