Rebecca Starks: “It is hard to write about the fires in Maui as they are happening and in the face of the terrible loss of life. I took refuge in W.S. Merwin’s palm garden on Maui. The title echoes the words on the stone marking his and his wife’s ashes.” (web)
Rebecca Starks: “I’ve never been interested in family history, but over the past few years I’ve started thinking about why I’m not, why some of my family members are, and why I left my home state and never looked back. I’ve started looking back, trying to understand what has made me who I am. Writing poetry, mapping what I am beginning to know onto what I know, is my way of trying to make out the forest—and make it out of the forest—tree by tree.” (web)
Rebecca Starks: “I was trying to understand, on a smaller scale than national politics, how an obvious falsehood can seem obviously true to someone else, how it requires both active and passive participants, and how we can ignore for a long time the cognitive dissonance.” (web)
Rebecca Starks: “I wrote this in response to the news that San Francisco residents pooled funds to buy boulders to keep the homeless off their street. The boulders have since been removed (for pragmatic reasons).” (web)
What if this isn’t the time to talk about umbrellas?
I have one in my bag right now,
a Robinson, a Gamp, a spring-loaded automatic,
at a touch it will bloom
to receive the syncopated sound of rain
dancing, hopping on the taut roof
the way a gun can sound like firecrackers from the sky.
It’s true there are still puddles and spray,
there is the lower half of you, the arm aches,
the skin blows inside out like a skirt in the wind.
See the man trying to keep a woman dry,
covering suede and silk and hair
with the shield of his body.
What if umbrellas don’t keep you dry,
people keep you dry, and are broken trying.
—fromPoets Respond
2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor Winner
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Rebecca Starks: “The impulse for the poem came from something Mike Spies said on NPR this week, during an interview prompted by the Las Vegas shooting: ‘At the core of [the NRA’s] agenda is to normalize gun carrying in as many places as possible until it just becomes as natural of a thing … as any other accessory that people carry around.’ Other elements of the poem come from the news coverage of the shooting, in particular the portraits of those killed, including several men who died while shielding others.” (website)
Rebecca Starks: “I wrote this after watching the New Hampshire Democratic debate. I was thinking about how voters are expected to have short memories and often accommodate the expectation. The Flint water crisis and cover-up has also been on my mind, and I was struck by the parallels recently when I read Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl. And it all took me back to my first experience of politics, if it’s not everyone’s—the family I grew up in.” (website)