The Madrona Project: Volume I, Number 1, A Festschrift For Clemens Starck, edited by
Michael Daley
Empty Bowl Press, November 2020
This may sound like an old story (it is) and it shows little sign of changing. Thus, the fresh personal discovery of a poet who approaches poetry from beyond the classroom and has always remained there while continuing to write is quite notable. Clemens Starck is one of those few poets, and quite the finely accomplished one, who truly has worked construction, carpentry, and various relatively low wage labor jobs his entire life. He has dipped below many a radar, mine included, for decades. Yet now, in addition to the recently published Cathedrals & Parking Lots: Collected Poems, Pacific Northwest’s Empty Bowl Press has turned out a festschrift in his honor that dutifully emphasizes, without any excessive hoopla, the labor-aspect behind this poet’s lifework.
I am a fan of the festschrift. I enjoy the comradery infused throughout such affairs. Usually all entries are relatively short, often quite pithy with candid first person recollections and assessments. If there are those that drag a bit, they are easy to skim over to get on to the next offering. So even without knowing a thing about Starck, I was interested in picking up this first installment of a projected series entitled The Madrona Project. Which an editor’s note informs “Empty Bowl will attempt to publish twice a year, offering the best work by poets and writers who are ‘outsiders’—who write in and of this world: outside of self, outside the mainstream, or simply outdoors”.
Most of the pieces here are direct commentaries on individual poems of Starck’s while some take the shape of a poem generally in homage to Starck’s sensibilities. The original intent of the gathering had been a short pamphlet to accompany the Collected Poems yet, as often happens on such occasions, the returns coming in after the call for work went out quickly ballooned beyond the size of a pamphlet. Eight poems from Cathedrals & Parking Lots open things up, quite handily for any reader unfamiliar with Starck, while for those familiar with his work there is a bonus of half a dozen fresh new poems closing things out in the back. As a result, Starck and his work emerge from these pages rather fully fleshed out.
Here is a brief sampling of what some of the sixty contributors have to say:
“a philosopher-working man poet” (Barbara Drake)
“The poem speaks as Clem does, deliberately.” (Florence Sage)
“Starck suggests that we follow the Way, like the Taoist Cook Ding, whose knife never dulls; find solace in good work done well; salute our masters; name the lost; give praise; recognize the cost of the gifts we are given; enjoy the stew.” (Gary Young)
“Clem’s poems always nudge me out of my furrow, they take me to places, they make me want to write, sometimes they make me laugh.” (Guido Golüke)
“Clem’s poems came in a tidy envelope, addressed in his meticulous script, a stamp affixed square and plumb in its upper right corner.” (Jon Broderick)
“Clem says that a poem from his last book could be set next to a poem from his first without jarring incongruities.” (Glen Downie)
“That’s what Clem Starck’s poems do by habit and by craft: they live in (and make record of) a mind paying attention.” (Lex Runciman)
“Clem asks, is watching football on TV as important as reading poetry? ‘And who’s to say / the one is more ennobling, less self-indulgent / than the other? Who’s to say?’” (Carlos Reyes)
As frontispiece to the selection of eight poems from Cathedrals & Parking Lots appears the cover of the Oct 7, 1970 issue of California Builder & Engineer “Caputo’s I-280 Job Straddles Mainline” depicting a construction site, assumedly I-280, with several truck cranes hoisting/supporting numerous I-beams going into place atop cement girders. At first glance, it looks as if work has been paused, but taking a bit longer of a look at least one or two workers are clearly present atop the job. A note at the bottom of the image directs attention to a glint of silver high above a girder in the foreground: “That silver hardhat up on the I-beam is Clem Starck.”
There is nothing grandiose about Starck
or his work. He comes across on the page like any other regular older fella you
might fall into easy conversation with over a beer. It feels as if his poems
must be quite near his own patterns of speech on which he no doubt has based
his homegrown metrics. Yet to the core, what sustains his work is the decades
spent performing labor-oriented work. Giving a final measure to his refined
sense of poetic form. His well-chiseled poems, ever deliberately sculpted bare
no trace of excess. He has run the lines through his head until all that
remains is an exact statement of a taut sensitivity, offering up a
self-reckoning with where matters stand for him in that moment.
Wife gone. Children grown. Retired now,
but still in dreams I find myself
out on a job site
nailing up batter boards, pulling a string line—putting in
footings again.
(“Some Passing Thoughts While Driving Airlie Road Again”)
Throughout his long life, Starck has
been following the sage advice found in the opening lines of John Brandi’s
included tribute to his admired peer: “Read a good poem, close a good book,
travel a good road, / return home and the journey keeps going.” For Starck, the
work of making a living has long been one with the work of poetry. There is a
clear symbiotic play in his poetry between the two with one reinforcing the
other. Even in advancing years, it shows no signs of falling off, as Red Pine,
a.k.a. Bill Porter, puts it in his own homage found here: “Despite alcohol and
old age / the synapses still fire”. As proof, in the back of this festschrift
there’s a few pages of photos from Starck’s recent trip with Porter and Finn
Wilcox as “undaunted, undeterred, / they made their way through Europe” as
Starck puts it in “The Three Amigos Do Europe”. The three gents took in all the
sites, giving readings of their work along the way and even stopping in for a
visit to Ezra Pound’s daughter and granddaughter in Italy, not so shabby of an
itinerary.
As noted, Starck has largely avoided the classroom, yet he has spent time hanging around poets. In fact, as a snapshot at the very opening of this festschrift attests, as a young man in the summer of 1959 he even spent a speck of time hanging out with the likes of such glorified poet-types as Robert Frost and Anne Sexton at the storied Breadloaf Writers Conference. There he sits young, bearded and longhaired lighting up a cigarette with Frost pontificating perched upon a rock to his right and Sexton smoking away in a white dress on the grass just to his left. A scene straight off the slopes of Mount Parnassus if ever.
Starck explains the story behind the shot in a short accompanying text: He was a college dropout, adrift, hopping trains and looking for work trying to get to Europe. He had not yet written a single poem or had the thought to do so. He popped over to Breadloaf hoping to resurrect a past job from a previous year spent waiting tables there and he ended up offered a scholarship, so he stuck around. Later he found his way out to San Francisco for a time and later moved on heading further up the coast into the Northwest. Always working laboring jobs to make the bills. Next time you see some manual labor being performed keep in mind chances are Starck’s worked that line himself at one time or another. He has had quite the life and turned out an admirable body of work (not just in terms of poetry).
