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This Way Out
by Carmine Starnino
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau
Press Limited, 2009, ISBN 978-1-55447-051-8, 75 pages, $18.95 paper.
Carmine Starnino is a poet and essayist who has been able to garner awards and attention for his work in both literary forms.His debut collection of poems, The New World (1997), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award and the A.M. Klein Prize. Credo (2000), his second collection of poems, won the Canadian Authors' Association prize for poetry.
Starnino's collection of essays on Canadian poetry, A Lover's Quarrel (2004), generated a great deal of discussion and considerable controversy between two different camps in contemporary Canadian poetry. On the one side, there are the traditionalists and moderns who still believe in the ability of language to generate meaning and still view the lyric as a valid unit of poetic sensibility and expression. On the other side, there are, for lack of a better word, the experimentalists, who mistrust the tyranny of meaning, or at the very least suggest that meaning and language can never fully articulate human perception and feeling. This sensibility is grounded on the view that the poet faces the hopeless task of expressing what ultimately cannot be expressed and is infinitely curious about language and how it can be pounded like sheet metal to meaning and sound. Even at this far distance the clash and thunder between the two camps managed to travel and echo across the wide empty spaces to here on the prairie.
Starnino falls roughly speaking in the 'traditionalist' camp.
Much of modern poetry is a quarrel or discontent with the world and often expresses a malaise or ironic views on contemporary taste, politics, and culture. You can argue that this view has become a kind of literary convention. You can also argue, from the psychological point of view, that irony is the last defence of the mind.
Nevertheless, Starnino's fourth collection, This Way Out, begs to differ with the literary 'malaise' convention.
As the title richly suggests, this is a poetry that points to the opposite direction, and a way out of the post-modern impasse of failed meaning, by refocusing on poetry's original function to celebrate the world as the poet sees and finds it.
Starnino is interested in using language as a tool rather than questioning whether in fact language is a tool or whether it can do anything at all other than be language. That he celebrates the world, however, does not mean he possesses a Pollyanna or Hallmark greeting-card view of the world.
The opening poem, "Next Door Café," for example, is well observed and celebrates the drunk, the broken, the lost and the hopelessly found: ". . . night-shifters cooled their heels / attended by soul-tools: cellphone, lighter, cigarette. / Nights of middle-aged men enduring middle-aged men / in their cups, buying rounds . . ." (11) In this poem the heroic are those who have shattered themselves, and the seamy side of urban life is celebrated in unflinching terms. Notice also the clean direct language. All that is missing in this poem is the smell of piss in the alley.
Starnino takes pleasure in the well-wrought phrase and his poems move with delight on the wings of their own found rhetoric. The poem "The Butcher" demonstrates Starnino's aesthetic to be about letting images accumulate line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph, and be spun together into a seamless organic whole. The shift in stanzas in this poem is done using rhetorical phrases or devices we normally associate with prose writing such as "as well" and "more to the point."
Many of Starnino's poems and the individual stanzas inside them work as unique and tidy little units of meaning, with each stanza contributing to the general argument of the poem. Thus his poems are often constructed with the neatness and completeness of an essay. Even in prose poems such as "Vita Brevis" (a wonderful evocation of youth and place in an old quarter from Starnino's youthful Montreal done in a chatty, cheerful voice), we sense not the voice of everyday patter but the controlled and refined voice of a sophisticated and rhetorically cagey poet seeking to sound causal and relaxed with the lost Eden of his youth.
As in a good prose essay, we do not lose our bearings in a Starnino poem; potential ambiguity is sacrificed or replaced with clarity and a voice that strives to be musical speech, albeit heightened as in song.
The "Nine from Rome" poems written in the form of poem/letters are a good demonstration of Starnino's clear anchored poetry ("here" is an important word anchor in Starnino's poetry) as it applies to his literary takes on Rome. Rome's antiquity is exhausting: "But even extinction can be done to death"; the poems, however, do not dwell on the obvious impermanence of life that the old monuments suggest. Instead, Starnino takes delight in the quick contemporary pulse of Rome found in its shops, fruit and vegetable stalls, ancient markets and "oblivion is driven out by cheap editions / and good knock-offs, lo-fi gewgaws and ziggurats of baubles, / / ribbon-tied letters complete with old bureau." (27) No grand gestures here, no mind leaping over centuries and connecting the dots to the present. Instead, a delightful small poem about the detritus of the ages collected in dusty old Rome.
The poems in this collection do not rely on pyrotechnics or work by consciously drawing attention to themselves in a gesture of "look ma no hands" and am I not a clever poet for letting you in on the word games every once in awhile. These are poems of real delight that use ordinary language to effectively express thoughtful, unalloyed feeling.
The affectionate tender poem "Lucky Me" is a good example. In this poem an older Starnino recollects his young father as a gambler and playful young man who was adored by his uncomprehending young son but who also always seemed to disappoint his wife.
this marriage that ran riot over common sense,
a still-young wife now yelling at a boy husband
who waited until he had had enough (waited,that is, until she started to sob)
and left that room
unfussed, ultimately unrepentant, heartthrob . . . (41)Although this is one of the more personal and private poems in the collection, it is unsentimental in its view of both parents and their marriage, and avoids sliding into cliche or sentimentality. It is rather, like many of the poems in this collection, a good example of clear-eyed comprehension and love. Starnino sees his immigrant father, warts and all, and understands that his father more than likely did not have the ability for, nor was he interested in, knowing himself too well.
The poems in this book aim to comprehend and describe the world with sanity and generosity. This attempt, in particular since the narrative in the public world often lacks both, is a welcome counterpoint to the confusion.
As for the two warring camps in Canadian poetry, surely there is room for both communities on the small stage of poetry and it is pointless to assert which is a more valid aesthetic or able to reestablish poetry's lost lustre and appeal.
Carmelo Militano is a Winnipeg poet and writer. His latest book is a collection of poems, Feast Days (Olive Press, 2009).
Buy this book at McNally-Robinson Booksellers.