Else
Go back to the beginning of the beginning and the darkness filled with 1,000,000
eggs.
Cilia beating their microscopic hairs in the fallopians
Almond-shaped and pearly grey, ova yolking nucleus to an odor
sperm might sense …
Every month, tumbling out of my body.
Something to do with not trusting
myself, this childlessness.
Something to do with squandering
what I’m given.
And here
one must find gentleness.
The owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk,
my father says to me
by way of Hegel, about something else entirely. We must soldier on.
Send me the bonbons, they’ll get me through
to the end. Who else have
I lost?
— Page Hill Starzinger in Vortex Street
Page Hill Starzinger’s work stretches the pause, opening up the line to web-like spaces through a sculptural use of the caesura, the breath. Her second poetry collection, Vortex Street, was published in June, 2020 by Barrow Street Press. Her first book, Vestigial, selected by Lynn Emanuel for the Barrow Street Book Prize, was published in 2013. Her 2019 chapbook, Unshelter, was chosen by Mary Jo Bang for Noemi Press. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Fence, West Branch, Pleiades, Volt, and others. Starzinger was copy director at Aveda for almost 20 years, and co-authored A Bouquet from the Met (Abrams, 1998). She lives in New York City. This conversation engages with the form, themes, and inspiration of Vortex Street.
Tyler Mills: Vortex Street reads to me both as an elegy — for the speaker’s parents, and for the possibility of having children — and also as a reclamation of the female body from medical categorizations and statements often asserted by men about fertility and reproductive organs. I love this moment in your poem, “Specula”:
To the man pressing the sonogram over my ovary,
who is saying, It’s completely shut down:
it is still part of my body
it is alive
it is mine.
I’m in wonder about how this poem travels, how it begins with this callous statement made by the sonogram technician, and then opens into a poem as large in scope as “the world’s oceans” and as “tiny” as “the specks” in the water, which are, as the speaker affirms, “alive”:
If you think about less
you consider
microbes from the world’s oceans
— so tiny until 50 years ago scientists didn’t
realize the specks were alive:
now 40 million genes identified
in upper layers of seawater —
constantly dancing, keeping our ecosystem
balanced.
What was your process like when you were writing either this poem or the other poems in Vortex Street that examine the body in relationship to loss as well as environmental landscapes and organisms? What rewarded or challenged you about moving from the personal to the tectonic and oceanic in a poem like “Specula?”
Page Hill Starzinger: No country can claim exclusive ownership over the sea. That’s not to say we aren’t pillaging it, but just to say there’s more wilderness to it. There are depths we still haven’t reached in the ocean and creatures we haven’t named or even seen. A siren is often associated with the sea, but she is powerful, and in control of her life. Same for the skies, deep space, black matter, black holes, cosmic cobwebs on which galaxies are strung like pearls. I find the mystery of this infinity fascinating.
One of the artists that came to mind over and over while writing Vortex Street was the Cuban-American sculptor and performance artist Ana Mendieta. Her earth-body artworks reflect a complex relation to what it means to be female. Her 1974 “Burial Pyramid” film performance shows her supine body almost completely covered by stones. Only her face and hair are visible. Essentially, she is buried alive. She struggles to even breathe. How do you liberate your body from systems that entrap it? There’s a stanza in my poem “About a House” that’s inspired by the video:
Lying in a grassy hollow on Blood Hill,
my body covered in granite:
as I breathe, rocks rise and fall,
rolling off. Lungs
like a pair of anvils: repeating:
until almost free of weight —
gestatus. Then,
I lay for a long time because I know
I probably can get up.
As a daughter in this poem, I’m trying to break free of familial bonds. As a woman in this poem, I’m trying to discover a new world freer of the societal and capitalist cobweb in which I’m entangled. Thus the reference in “Specula” to the lipstick called “Captive.” And the reference in “My Learning Path” to the fashion label Celine being the answer to “what real women want.” I’ve worked in the beauty and fashion industries, and I have a love/hate relationship with them. There’s more to say about this also.
I wish for avalanches and identify with fault lines of earthquakes. In the book’s second poem, “And: Still,” three-year-old Aylan is found dead washed up on a beach. Ana Mendieta is known for her Silueta series — imprints of her body in different landscapes — that explore the “presence” of missing bodies or of the invisibility of certain groups.
Until you asked this question, I hadn’t realized why my mind steers toward the sky and solar system for relief and for escape from the “box” or coffin in which women are placed — or have place themselves — unless they’re set on top of it as on a pedestal. I’m looking toward something without the gravity that pins you down, a place where you can move freely.
Tyler Mills: I keep thinking about movement in your work. Your approach to form is expansive —the line might step downward as though breaking free from confinement or split apart at the midpoint, opening up a gap for negative space to shine through the poem before the line moves on. How do you think about form in your work? I’m particularly interested in your approach to the poetic line. Is there something about the way in which ruptures, pauses, or breaths articulate the subject in the poems of Vortex Street?
Page Hill Starzinger: I feel like I’m pressing my body — and spirit — into words so they take form from within myself. Mendieta’s material was the earth. Mine is the alphabet. Mendieta’s outline pressed into a meadow was irregular and eroded by water or weeds. My poetic line is also organic — not machine-precise, not ruled by syllabics, not usually left-justified, not following a pre-existing poetic form. The line moves with breath and thought — as I head into difficult subjects— such as never having a child or never seeing my parents again — the line sputters or fractures because that’s how I respond to grief and pain. The line might disintegrate in the middle of a thought because getting to the end of it is unfathomable. There simply aren’t words for everything. Sometimes there are just letters. Or white space. My first book, Vestigial, was much more experimental in this regard. In Vortex Street, I’m trying to push myself deeper into emotion and to stretch out within it.
But sometimes you can only go so far into pain. You have to find another approach. When I open the Oxford English dictionary and look up an entry — let’s say “free” — I find an archeology of thought and meaning that also is a repository of feeling. Often the etymology opens up the world of a word, so it’s more expansive. One of the etymologies of “free” is the Old English frīg, meaning “love, affections.” But these resources also reflect a patriarchal set of beliefs that surround me and then I try to climb out of them.
This is all to say — poems are alive. Jorie Graham changes how you experience time, slowing it down so you focus on minutes. She doesn’t speak only to rain falling, but to the ongoing-ness of life itself — to life within a being, behind the skin of a tree, or of a person. Something indefinable that’s pulsing behind everything around us and within us. She captures the sensory elements unfolding in a way no one else does.
Tyler Mills: Which poem in your book was the most gratifying or challenging to write? Could you share a moment of that particular poem with us and speak to what your process was like in writing it?
Page Hill Starzinger: “Specula.” I begin with something most people won’t talk about. Menopause. The first couple of stanzas are a true story of a technician saying my ovary did not have any more eggs left. He said it had “completely shut down.” Where do you go from there? I realized how random this all is — the technician I happen to see in the clinic, the time when my eggs drop away, the genes I inherit, even the way I feel about it all. And when I think about randomness, I think about a throw of the dice. That’s when I found a story about Mozart throwing dice to create musical sequences. What is a poem? A musical arrangement. There may not be an answer to how to live with regret or grief. But there is song. Here’s the rest of the stanza you begin quoting above, and how it moves to Mozart.
I want to know:
Is it velvety when you hold it?
Is it ghostly white?
Is it fragrant?
Does it hum?
This is where all my children
would have sprung
if you could time-lapse back:
magnificent glands,
corrugated, grooved
and furrowed:
alea, meaning dice
as in aleatoric music: Mozart
selected a precise sequence
of notes
based on throwing
a handful.
I feel the same anger when gardeners insist on pinching off flowers before they go to seed. There’s life in winter, I want to say to them! Birds and insects find protection in plant stems and bracts, in ground cover. Dried seed heads are food for birds in the cold. Letting perennials stand through the winter is good for the environment, for biodiversity. There’s also a beauty — the russets, umbers, gold, and lunar white. The architecture — dried alliums look like exploding stars. If we value only spring and summer, what does this say about us? If we cut everything off in the late fall to push more vibrant blossoms only in summer, what does this say?
Tyler Mills: For many years, you were copy director at Aveda, and I’m fascinated by this biographical detail in your life. You mentioned that your poem “Specula” brings up the name of a lipstick, “Captive.” How has your experience as a writer and copyeditor in the cosmetic industry influenced your approach to color, for instance, or even to metaphor in your poems? I just love the names of, say, nail polish colors. They can feel so personal — something about them can say choose me! and resonate with you when you’re looking at a row of bottles on a shelf. What was your writing life like when you were at Aveda? How has it influenced you as a poet?
Page Hill Starzinger: There’s no denying the power of color in and of itself — take Rothko paintings. After he stripped away figures from his work in the 1940’s, his radiant bands of color emerged — pulsing, hovering around a horizon line — like pure emotion, so heightened viewers felt like they were on a spiritual journey or traveling into an unknown dimension.
Which brings me to — when a woman picks a lipstick or hair color shade, is she commanded to do so by societal norms and beauty industry advertising? Or is she commanding — in charge of —her self? Or both? Certainly, the beauty industry operates two ways — first, it offers a narrative to fix and adjust the self, which implies there’s something wrong and “not quite right” or not perfect yet, about her. Second, the industry suggests a narrative of escape from the very same world that criticizes her. Issues like these slide into my poetry. “My Learning Path” moves from Mary Tyler Moore, an independent working woman in the 1970’s TV series, to Shelley Hack in Charlie perfume ads, to fashion designer Phoebe Philo who “got what women wanted” at Celine, to A.I. instruction for a user of a digital marketing branding tool. I end the poem yearning for something different — a world of “cyclamen, tarragon, / oak moss, / and rose” in which I live with a child:
… my child.
And you shall exist like a character
in a
fictive world so true
that we touch —
At Aveda, our shades were named after flowers and plants — and I have a fair amount of these in my poetry. I could get sidetracked by the folk tales about the plants, but that was good, too, because we created glossaries for the plants in our products (“the art and science of pure flower and plant essences”). The seasonal makeup palettes moved beyond the natural world, deep into metaphor. We’d present at least three options. These were my favorite — to sit and dive into color, what could be better? Hair styling products also moved into metaphor — because the results were again more artistic versus technological (like skin care). I loved being able to encapsulate a whole world in very few words. Talk about compression. I’m sure this sort of work intensified my tendency to see the world in metaphor.
About my writing life as a copy director at Aveda … At a cosmetic company, copy was approved by multiple departments — marketing, product development, legal, and more —so I was relieved to write whatever I wanted in my poetry on weekends. Clarity of messaging at work was paramount — simplification was a goal — so I was thrilled to be just as complicated, fragmented, moody, negative, and idiosyncratic in my own poetry as I wished. It’s possible that my first book, Vestigial, was more experimental than my second, Vortex Street, which I finished when I left Aveda, because I was pushing back. But it’s equally true that most of the poems in this new collection — all but a handful — were written when I was at Aveda. I was wrestling with feelings I wanted to address more directly in my second book — the death of my parents and of my aunt, the realization I was the end of the line. It didn’t occur to me to have a conversation with my unborn child (“My Unborn Child Says to Me”) until I had more time to myself.
Aveda interested me in ways that certain poetry interests me. It’s a complicated company. You can’t compress the spirit of Aveda into one or two words. It isn’t just a hair care brand, although certain marketing executives tried to steer us there. It was an outlier in the 2000’s when so many brands were built to fit simple advertising jargon. Aveda was one of the first lifestyle brands.
But, if I weren’t a poet, I would be a painter. Or a sculptor. I always see the world through an artistic lens. This actually helped me in the cosmetic industry because it’s a lot harder to sue a company when the claim is poetic.
Tyler Mills: You named color palettes for seasonal makeup! I always wondered who did this — it was you! And a poet, of course! I’m interested in what you said about perceiving the world “through an artistic lens.” I keep thinking about how metaphor is a language structure of transformation and can be so deeply connected with the visual, with the aural, with movement. It’s so embedded in the world and also a fantastic act of the imagination. In Vortex Street, is there a moment where you thought, “This is how I’m being a painter or sculptor through language?”
Page Hill Starzinger: I’m not aware in the moment, but I recognize it in hindsight. In the poem “Edge Effect,” I gathered personal narrative (my mother who had dementia), research (coquina shells, Blue Ridge mountains), and scraped them together so the elements overlap, blend, blur. Painter Gerhard Richter repeatedly drags a squeegee loaded with oil paint over earlier layers of color, disturbing the surface, etching and smearing, leaving drag marks that excavate deeper. Here’s an excerpt from my poem:
I’d like to go home. She insists. How long are we staying in the
hotel? Incontinent, a shell of shadows — and shallows: we’re at the
edge itself where increased erosion from groins and tidal walls is
disrupting flow and sensitive dwellings. Prey: regurgitates grit of
chitinous matter, leaving gobbets of indelible remnants. Rough coffin.
One wishes for grace. Finds sediment.
Another poem that comes to mind is “And: Still.” It’s a sculpture with a tall thin Alberto Giacometti core interrupted by bulges, which might owe something to Louise Bourgeois. The central narrator in my poem doesn’t have a child and she’s no longer the daughter of anyone alive. This “emaciated” figure at the core is split or bisected by “pregnant” observations of parents and children. The lack of care and mindfulness she sees accrues, with greater implications beyond her life. Here’s the beginning of the poem:
I am a child of
no one alive,
no one who
can remember
my name.
Fathers,
mothers,
grand,
and great —
they are gone.
My child, will you consider this:
His name was Aylan, three years old.
Washed up, face down in a red T-shirt on a Turkish beach.
On the way to a country that already
denied him asylum.
—-
I was thinking about attention. Not being there.
And I didn’t notice what happened.
The last two eggs simply
fell out of myself, tumbling —
__
A hospital CEO, rushing to attend a series of meetings
in Perry Iowa, accidentally
left her daughter in a minivan in 90 degree heat.
This poem and others play back and forth with shadow and ghosts. Both Giacometti and Bourgeois are able to make poetic and cultural connections even in work that arises from the personal. I’m interested in this.
Tyler Mills: You remained in New York City during the COVID-19 surge this spring when so many others left, and I remember that you documented the city through photographs and your descriptions of what New York was like during this difficult and traumatic time. Would you like to share some of your observations with readers and talk about how these experiences have affected you and your work, as a NYC poet?
Page Hill Starzinger: I realized my sense of self was suspect. And my sense of the city.
Before the pandemic, I thought I wasn’t a cook or a gardener. But, when the pandemic set in, I started cooking, re-growing food scraps on my windowsill — celery, scallions, lettuce. These plants, and my self, had many lives within them, it turns out.
And the city? When “everything” disappeared — the people, high energy, museums, theatre — I loved it still, even more. Paradox is at the heart of the city, but it became heightened. Walking down the center of Broadway—without a car in sight—hearing only calls of songbirds. It wasn’t just novel. It was surreal. Definitions unlatched. Things shifted, like clocks melting in a Salvador Dali painting. There was an incredible sense of freedom even as the virus tightened around us and our physical worlds shrank.
The extremes, though, were almost unbearable. Groves of pink magnolia trees and banks of daffodils blossomed as white refrigerated trucks filled with the overflow of corpses from hospitals.
I found myself in search of what had survived — the 200-year old Albanese Meats & Poultry shop in SoHo — the owner, Moe Albanese, died from COVID in June, but his daughter is running the shop. Poet Frank O’Hara’s 9th Street apartment from 1957, off Tomkins Square Park, now carries a plaque. The 1990’s East Village squats — today, cooperatives growing herbs on rooftops, still encouraging political dissent. I learned about Peter Stuyvesant’s pear tree (1647-1867) at the corner of 13th Street and Third Avenue, blooming for 200 years before two horse-drawn carriages ran into it.
I’d come to New York to grow into my self, but what I discovered was that it — and “I” — weren’t there. We were more flexible and porous than I imagined.
My Unborn Child Says to Me
You are a mouse in a dove’s coat.
An apron with hands:
that’s what I didn’t want to be, I replied.
It’s taken you a long time to catch on.
But is it a race?
Time grew tired waiting.
He’s sexist.
You’re binary.
I don’t think I was strategic.
No, you wanted to be free of the past.
Untethered.
To step into a stream like your mother,
walk one narrow slice
of water after another.
Mayflies rising.
A world — constantly changing,
shimmering.
You felt this was New York.
That sounds right.
See, I knew you before you saw the stream.
I lay inside you
when you curled within your mother.
I was one of your last two eggs —
you saw me on the sonogram: remember?
I look at my right thumbnail —
misshapen from picking at cuticles. I can’t
see this child now,
but for the voice.
We come accidentally and try to find our place.
I have been hungry before: in the south of France,
the cypress, the picnics, the boy’s lips. Simply too animal.
Unprotected, we were. But everything else receded,
a blaze of heat pushing outward, filling
Probably a late period, so I went to his doctor
and he recommended a wash,
just from the pharmacie,
nothing much.
Yes, I recall: Aix comes from Latin for water.
You
have never been ready.
I was
pursuing the boy.
And then you didn’t trust
your body again.
I think it scared me.
You worry too much about the past.
Stop dwelling
there.
Where did you get so bossy? I mean, so
definitive.
I got it from you, dear.
* * * * *
Galaxy Filament
Of time evaporating, of my mother’s finger
running down my nose during the uncording
ceremony, after she died, the vast sky,
the Milky Way neighborhood,
and me, and David, and the black cat growing tumors,
rain falling, drops left over, puddles gathering,
reflecting the baby birds, black millipedes dropping
off branches, white blossoms floating below cedar,
sunrays bleaching shells, stop signs fading,
a family of wild donkeys milling around
an outdoor basketball court at noon in high heat,
sargassum mats drifting from the horse latitudes
into Drunk Bay, flush with plastic waste and
eel nests, washing onto sandstone rocks,
a lost rubber raft cast ashore with a long towline dragging in the surf,
chickens jump-flapping off trash heaps filled with twisted stair railings
and corrugated roofs blown off by 30 tornados
of two Cat 5 hurricanes, red dust from the Sahara Desert
sifting toward us, nutrients feeding the phytoplankton
but also pathogenic bacteria of the genus Vibrio,
iguanas digging nests into the ground and burying their eggs
until hatchlings crack the shells, wait underground
until each emerges, then one after the other, in a line,
scratch their way out. A lone heron soars across the bay.