FROM POETRY MAGAZINE
A Tapestry for George Starbuck
BY KATHRYN STARBUCK
George Starbuck
George Starbuck
Note: Poetry first published George Starbuck in January 1960, and over the course of nearly three decades he published almost two dozen poems in the magazine. These include elegies, concrete poems, and many others you can find in our online archive. George Starbuck would have been 84 this month. His wife, Kathryn Starbuck, wrote the following post on his poems and the couple’s friendship with the late Patrick Leigh Fermor. Her poem “Sylvia En Route to Kythera” appears in our June 2015 issue.
Alas, I rarely read poetry. But I was married to poetry for nearly three decades in the person of George Starbuck. George was born June 15, 1931. His ten-book body of work was cut short by a twenty-two-year struggle with Parkinson’s disease that ended with his death at home at age 65 in 1996. While thinking of George and his work, I’ve been re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Roumeli, 1966, his masterpiece about northern Greece, Byron, poetry, and modern Greek history. Leigh Fermor, the incomparable British prose stylist, lived in Greece, and died at 96 in 2011. He was a literary warrior-scholar who loved poetry. As a commando in the British special forces, he became the hero of the Battle of Crete in World War II when he kidnapped Nazi General Heinrich Kreipe.
He admired George’s poetry. Leigh Fermor sent George a fan letter about his poem “A Tapestry for Bayeux” when his first book, Bone Thoughts, came out in 1960. He invited George to visit him in Greece.
George and I stayed with him for a memorable day and night at his home in Kardamyli in the Mani peninsula in the Peloponnesus in the early 1980s. I sang him a song a young Greek shepherd had sung to me in the Tayegetus mountains, which Leigh Fermor had hiked for decades. I sang it in Demotiki and in the rough translation I had fashioned. My father was born in Greece in the Peloponnesus. The Nazis extirpated his family in 1944. Leigh Fermor and I talked late into the night about the Massacre of Meligala. (I published an essay, “Singing for Patrick Leigh Fermor,” in 2014 in The Sewanee Review.)
Leigh Fermor sang folk songs in eight languages. He favored back formations, artificial formations, portmanteau words. I believe my husband had only five languages. George was a master of poetic forms. His Bayeux tapestry poem is a 156 line display in dactylic monometer about the Normandy invasion. In virtuosic metrics, it also conceals bawdy versified digs at a well-known anthologist of the day, Oscar Williams. Leigh Fermor and George were fans of the French Oulipists.
George and Leigh Fermor held a glittering exchange of hilarious rapid-fire shots back and forth like world-class tennis players of their favorite poetic forms, poetic short hand, and archaic forms. They kept outdoing each other, like mountain climbers racing for Everest, with examples of what worked best and what almost never worked for Shelley, but did work for Byron, and usually for Keats and always for Pope…while I, like the journalist I was at the time, took notes.
Nearly five and one-half feet wide and five inches tall, George’s “Elegy in a County Church Yard,” a landscape of shaped tombstone poems, is thought to be the world’s widest concrete poem. Leigh Fermor declared himself dumbstruck, awestruck, and more when he received a copy of it.
Here is an excerpt from the ending of Fermor’s Roumeli:
The seas of Greece are the Odyssey whose music we can never know: the limitless sweep and throb of prosody, the flux and reflux of hexameters scanned by winds and currents and accompanied, for its escort of accents,
for the fall of its dactyls
the calm of its spondees
the run of its tribrachs
the ambiguity of its trochees
and the lash of its anapaests;
for the flexibility of accidents,
the congruence of syntax
and the confluence of its crasis;
for the fluctuating of enclitic and proclitic,
for the halt of caesurae and the flight of the digamma,
for the ruffle of hard and soft breathings,
for its liquid syllables and the collusion of diphthongs,
for the receding tide of proparoxytones
and the hollowness of perispomena stalactitic with
subscripts,
for the inconsequence of anacolouthon,
for the economy of synecdoche,
the compression of hendiadys
and the extravagance of its epithets,
for the embrace of zeugma,
for the abruptness of asyndeton
for the swell of hyperbole
and the challenge of apostrophe,
for the splash and the boom and the clamour
and the echo and the murmur of onomatopoeia
And here is the beginning of George’s 156-line “A Tapestry for Bayeux”:
Over the
seaworthy
cavalry
arches a
rocketry
wickerwork:
involute
laceries
lacerate
indigo
altitudes,
making a
skywritten
filigree
into which,
lazily,
LCTs
sinuate,
adjutants
next to them
eversharp-
eyed, among
delicate
battleship
umbrages
twinkling an
anger as
measured as
organdy.

After George died, I edited his final book of poems, Visible Ink (2002), then The Works (2003), a selection of his best work. When I turned sixty, I wrote my first poem. Greece and grief, the Tayegetus mountains of the Peloponnesus, my father and the Nazis echo throughout my first book Griefmania. I sent a copy of it to Leigh Fermor in 2006. His response brought me to my knees.
Tags: George Starbuck, Kathryn Starbuck, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Poetry magazine archives
Posted in From Poetry Magazine on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2015 by Kathryn Starbuck.