by Shane Neilson

In 2009, I published “Singable Development: The Poetry of Carmine Starnino” in The Antigonish Review.¹ This essay painstakingly worked through Starnino’s then-four books (The New World, Credo, With English Subtitles, and This Way Out), demonstrating the unity of his themes and the strength of his technique. The main objective of “Singable Development” was to show how Starnino suddenly came alive in With English Subtitles, that the previous books were apprentice work. I reflected on the pivot Starnino’s work took, from boringly competent to fresh and exciting, mainly because, at the time, I was desperately wanting to come alive as a poet. I contrasted Starnino’s assumption of craft with other male poets of his ilk (Guriel, Murray, Outram) to broaden my familiarity with the enlivening phenomenon. I wanted to know how the trick was done, how one “got good,” although I doubt I conceived of my undertaking in those terms then. 

Starnino took seven more years to publish Leviathan, his fifth book. It was due out sooner than 2016, but the text was delayed by the poet. When I got it in my hand, I expected the long stretch was simply a function of Starnino’s legendary perfectionism. But as I made my way deep into the text, I drew a different conclusion. The stretch between books, the delayed release, it all made sense for a reason provided on the evidence of the poems themselves: Starnino was creatively exhausted as a poet.  

That 2016’s Leviathan was not a good book makes the occasion of a Selected in 2020 an odd one. A mid-career capstone after a book that already suggested that the poet’s creative powers were in decline? Strange. Stranger still is the absence of new work, for this could have been a New and Selected volume, but isn’t. Starnino might be writing up a storm, with a new volume of poems due to come out soon. Somehow, I doubt it. Let me show you why, only using the work from Leviathan that made Dirty Words’ cut. Consider the entirety of “My Black and Decker Lh4500”:

The writing is essentialized, clipped; there is no bloat or bloviation. Across his books, Starnino is consistent in terms of delivering economy, slant end rhymes, and internalized perfect rhymes. He never knew a cliché he didn’t want to redeem through juxtaposition. Yet even summoning the personified voice of an angry yard tool, he can mount no dramatic energy, merely an unintentional mockumentary air. The title – “My Black and Decker Lh4500” – is the first instance of a My Dad, Rapping^TM move in the Leviathan section of Dirty Words. The title’s not the only sign of Rappy Dad, though. Notice Rap Battle dad who spits the braggadocio-laden, rap-battle-esque snippet “Surround-sound / roid rage, a ramped-up me / on a rampage. / The fight’s unfair, everything flees.” Yet, above all else, the cardinal sign of creative exhaustion in Starnino are the puns. For example, the terminal pun (“Blow me”) is merely the most obvious groaner, one of the worst dad jokes imaginable. The more one looks at Starnino’s work through the lens of Dadness, one appreciates how Starnino depends on puns to give his economized language gusto. Flattened grass “can’t come up for air.” A leafblower is a “whackjob” that “flies off the handle.” If you will, click on this link for a perfect critique of the Dad Joke phenomenon:

My son introduced me to this first, of course. There are a lot more bad dad jokes like those ones in Leviathan. You’ll have to go look them up. I never steal another dad’s bad jokes, it’s part of the code of Dad Comedians.

In Starnino’s defence, the Dad joke schtick seems somewhat conscious, but then only in poems that have a pulse. “Leviathan,” the title poem’s messy, magnificent play with cliché and sonic rock, boasts great lines like these:

Yet it inevitably – even celebratorily – devolves into Dad jokes: “Honest. Ask around, but for now pull / my finger. I come from pig-latin, bronx cheers, armpit farts.” This isn’t as Dad as Starnino can get, for the quoted lines are delivered with mild meta-awareness. Eventually, though, the title poem – which flirts with Dad disaster gloriously all the way through – crashes at the end: “My happiness is a dayglo yoyo / sputtering death throes, garotted by my own hand.” I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling some LL Cool J there, and therefore feel compelled to offer my own Dad joke as an additional last line: “Gouging the holes in cheerios.” I . . . poke fun, but must . . . point out . . . that Starnino’s secret ingredient for goodness, otherwise MIA in his last new collection of poems, was momentarily re-accessed here. The poet went back to his people, to Italian masculinity, and he got a good poem out of it. 

Moving on. The pun factory continues to work night and day. “Winning,” a poem that could have been titled by Charlie Sheen, and that is about a balloonist attempting to fly over the Atlantic Ocean, comes up all puns at the start: 

which isn’t to say it doesn’t stay all pun. Here’s some more from the middle which isn’t redeemed cliché, but rather the straight stuff: 

When you’re a poet who tries to write as concisely as possible, there is a concentration of faults that is possible and with Starnino, the chief one is that whole poems can be formed from the building blocks of redeemed cliché and pun. Other poems relapse at key moments, such as the end of the otherwise fine “Fashion Sense” that concerns the death of the poet’s father: 

Glasses are a “perfect fit.” Death “wipes clean,” but also of “every trace” of “the man I knew,” which is “by heart” no less. 

Leviathan’s other sign of creative exhaustion is thematic. In “The Manly Arts” we have a poet declaring that “Most lawns are shit” and providing a critique of how others landscape:

This poem contains no overt dad jokes but it comes from the same place that issues them. As readers of the Leviathan section in Dirty Words, we see how middle age has become a place for Starnino to acclimatize to domesticity in a classical way: the Dad Who Does Stuff Outside, and Who Especially Provides Gruff Lawn Maintenance (ie. “Snow Mould,” “The Tree Trimmer,” “Yardwork, Ctd.”) Yet there’s little linguistic life at work, merely a poeticization of days. The aforementioned thematic broadens to a General Dadness with “Shadow Puppet,” ‘Courtship” and ‘Dragonflies,” poems about fatherhood. “Dolce Vita” is a poem about the poet’s father. “Tadoussac Bay” formally groans its exhaustion as a love’s-ending poem:

Here, we don’t even get Starnino’s typical sprung line, crammed with successive noun and modifier on noun and modifier. It’s the rare instance where what makes Starnino good, his craft, deserted him. He could no longer rub two clichés together to redeem them in lines nor could he rub a noun or modifier together to light a spark and give the verbal construct some life. I almost want to collar Starnino the poet, currently lost in the garage, and yell Go back to the Italian words that transformed your work in With English Subtitles. They will rekindle the fire in you! Leave the lawn alone. Let it go strange. Go strange with it. 

But then, maybe he already has? Maybe, in the four years since Leviathan, he has produced more poems like “San Pellegrino,” the one masterpiece in Starnino’s career. I often return to this poem for its unruly heartbreak. Readers of the present review will not be surprised by its start on the note of Pops: 

Yet readers of this review might, like me, sense a sublimated “One Art” spirit animal villanelle somewhere here, as if Starnino started with father/daughter as an end rhyme, decided to make it slant as he proceeded, and in the end decided, this feeling’s messy, death’s messy, this poem will be formally messy. So it proceeds, with variable line length, extending the slant rhyme at a tremendous distance:

I don’t want to write out more of the poem, analyzing it further; you really must seek it out, it’s the kind of thing that validates the purchase of any book. Leviathan, for example. Dirty Words too. “San Pellegrino” gathers momentum as it goes, and if getting to this poem required a packet of others about lawn care, then maybe the Dad Joke is entirely on me. Maybe I too will seed the lawn next Spring, desperately hoping to grow masterpieces.

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1. Around the same time I was writing that omnibus review of Starnino’s work, I was in Toronto’s Press Club one night with a group of poet friends. Michael Lista appeared for some reason. We started to talk about Starnino’s work, and Lista gave me the quote that became the title of this review. “Carmine’s poetry is like my Dad, rapping.” Bro! ↩︎

Shane Neilson is a poet, physician, and critic who published Constructive Negativity, a book of evaluative criticism, with Palimpsest Press in 2019.