Angry Poodle
Thursday, April 9, 2009
FROM BAD TO VERSED: It was a classic behind-closed-doors power play sprung upon the citizenry with little opportunity for debate or discussion. Early Tuesday afternoon, according to its well-crafted plans — simultaneously Manichean and Machiavellian — the Santa Barbara City Council appointed a new Poetry Czar (Poet Laureate being the official title) for the citizens of our fair town, what with April being Poetry Month and all (see sbpoetry.net for the month’s events). His name you will come to know well: David Michael Starkey. As usual, the News-Press, that august repository of gas baggery and noxious fulminations, was asleep at the switch and missed the story altogether. Like Councilmember Helene Schneider’s announcement this Monday that she would run for mayor, there was not a scintilla of a syllable of coverage to be found in the pages of Santa Barbara’s allegedly daily paper.
Angry Poodle
No doubt Starkey’s appointment failed to conform to the News-Press’s rigorous standard of news coverage, which requires that every story (even Little League scores and obituaries) shows City Hall employees to be overpaid, underworked, and blitheringly incompetent, excepting, of course, city police officers and firefighters — whose $100,000-plus take-home pay has been deemed strangely off-limits to News-Press comment at a time when city bean counters are girding their loins (and everyone else’s) for the budget buzz saw. In this narrow context, perhaps, the Starkey scandal hardly warrants mention. After all, he is paid but $1,000 a year, which compares poorly with the pay of poet laureates in comparable cities. Only members of the Santa Barbara School Board make less.
Starkey gets no special badge, no free parking permits, no FBI-like windbreaker, and, most unfortunately, no special Poet Laureate Taser to punish abusers of the language by making them “do the chicken” for five-to-12-second stun-gun spurts. And when the other 30 poetry czars from around the state hold their conventions, City Hall will definitely not spring for Starkey’s airfare, hotel room, and liquor tab.
But as poorly paid as school boardmembers may be, at least they’re elected. Candidates for the post even have occasional debates, performed for the edification of a few bored reporters in hopes that they, in turn, will illuminate prospective voters as to the issues involved. That’s how the democratic process works, folks, but there was none of that when Starkey got the nod. Santa Barbara’s system for appointing a poetry czar is so opaque, so inscrutable, and so downright Byzantine that even the Vatican would blush. In the first place, you can’t apply for the position; you have to be nominated. Then an ad hoc subcommittee of the city’s Arts Advisory Committee — all appointed by other appointees and accountable to the electorate by at least six degrees of separation — asks the nominees for their résumés and work samples. No interviews take place. The job of the laureate — aside from writing and performing four poems a year — is to elevate the role of poetry throughout the city. Here’s hoping that Starkey can give poetry the same mass popularity it enjoys in many Arab nations, where poetic throwdowns are the stuff of TV mega hits that dwarf even American Idol.
I might have enjoyed a good debate about free verse versus iambic pentameter. Should poems rhyme? Or even have capital letters? And can a poem be any good if it doesn’t make the reader feel stupid? But such a debate never took place, the skids having been thoroughly greased. Starkey emerged out of the poetic equivalent of the good ol’ boys club. By that I mean he was the hand-picked successor of the city’s two previous poet laureates, Barry Spacks and Perie Longo, who worked their back-channel connections for all their worth. When I asked Starkey how he got the job even though his first name did not rhyme with the first names of his predecessors — Barry and Perie — he answered revealingly, “Free verse.”
On the phone, Starkey was charming in the extreme, but what would you expect? He runs the Creative Writing Program at S.B. City College by day, hosts a public-access TV talk show at night, and in all other intervening moments appears to be a prolific poet of the Anglo-Irish sensibility. He was raised in Sacramento, a city he wanted to leave so desperately that as a youth, he sought refuge in poetry books. But Starkey was no sensitive, self-loathing emo — a cultural subgroup, by the way, that now finds itself seeking protection from persecution in Mexico. Instead, he played guitar in a punk rock band called The Assholes until he was 18, and still listens to The Clash, one of his all-time favorite bands. I tried grilling him on such weighty issues as gang violence, budget cuts, homelessness, and the proposed height limits initiative. Politically, the dude was an adroit talker, and all I got for my exertions was an easy laugh and a whole lot of pleasant conversation.
As charmed as I was, I was disappointed by Starkey’s maiden voyage in front of the City Council this Tuesday. I’d put him on notice that I wanted a poem in which he came up with rhymes for Santa Barbara, Arrellaga, and Micheltorena. Instead, he merely invoked “the euphonious names” of three city streets — Anacapa, De la Vina, and Camino Manadero. Dude, it’s easy to invoke Santa Barbara’s place names; just read from the Thomas Guide. The heavy lifting gets done when you create rhymes. Fortunately, our staff dedicated itself to the task from which Starkey shied away, and discovered that “carbonara” and “sayonara” rhyme with Santa Barbara, “white-trash raga” rhymes with “Arrellaga,” and “funky cool Medina” and “pustule cream-a” rhyme with Micheltorena. Well, sort of. But still, there was a glimmer of hope. When asked how a good Irish boy like himself could have no confirmation name, Starkey demurred, “My family history is clouded in mystery.” As usual, he dodged the question. But at least it rhymes. And what more can you ask from a Poetry Czar?