A Dark Dreambox of Another Kind: The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton

by Alfred Starr Hamilton

Edited by Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal.
Introduction by Geof Hewitt.

Alfred Starr Hamilton (1914-2005) was an American poet from Montclair, New Jersey. Though Hamilton wrote thousands of poems during his lifetime, only a small percentage of them ever found their way into print. His poems appeared in small poetry journals during the '60s, '70s and '80s; two chapbooks, The Big Parade and Sphinx; and one full-length collection, The Poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton, published by The Jargon Society in 1970. In this new volume, Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal present a collection of Hamilton's poems from these publications, along with many of Hamilton's poems that were previously considered lost and poems from posthumously found notebooks.

"Hamilton is the author of spare, wry, slightly surreal poems that have, so far as I can see, no real equivalent in American English."—Ron Silliman

"Alfred Starr Hamilton 'wrote to the governor of poetry / And simply signed [his] own name.' Consider this collection—assembled by two very dedicated allographers—an essential expansion on said letter. People who've encountered Hamilton's work previously will be glad for the chance to see familiar poems alongside many marvelous new ones. And how I envy first-time readers of this most generous and genuine American writer."—Graham Foust

"It is a hidden world, a hushabye place that Alfred Starr Hamilton occupies, a secluded place where he is free to summon daffodils and stars, chimes and angels, thread and old-fashioned spoons. There is Hungarian damage, blue revolutionary stars, a sedge hammer (which is not a typo). He is obsessively drawn to fine metals—bronze, silver and gold. He would be golden, but can never grasp the elusive sad: 'One cloud, one day / Came as a shadow in my life / And then left, and came back again; and stayed' like "Anything Remembered" which is the title of that poem. He is too removed to see things any other way but his own. It is a silver peepshow in the wonderbush, and there is always a moon to scrape from the bottom of his view."—C. D. Wright

"We are living in the Badlands. Dorothy's ruby-slippers would get you across the Deadly Desert. So will these poems."—Jonathan Williams

Genres: Poetry, The United States Of America

232 pages, Paperback

First published February 15, 2013

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Generally, I can wall-to-wall read a poetry collection, no problem. For this one, I needed a break. Hamilton's style is so repetitive and the poems so similar that they begin to wear a reader down. He even takes one of my favorite poetic techniques -- anaphora -- and beats it to death.

And what would that death look like? A bit like Dr. Seuss (paramour of Fox "News"), I fear. To the point where you can simply read the end of lines and entirely skip the beginnings. Example:

Dark Continent

What do you know of its players
What do you know of its populations
What do you know of this amber theatre
What do you know of its wintry cities
What do you know of St. Johns
What do you know of New York
What do you know of its glamour
What do you know of its short aptitudes
What do you know of city lights
What do you know of its urge
What do you know of its fast bubbles on the surface
What do you know of its orange contempt

That times 190 pp. (no, not all, but many) takes its toll. What intrigues me about the poem, though, is the last line and how it anticipates the years 2016-2020, wherein a lot of orange contempt from New York was endured. How did Hamilton, who died in 2005, anticipate this?

Here Hamilton mixes things up a bit:

Xerxes

it was all so Xerxes the other night
the path they travelled was so slender
the bridge they were crossing was being
torn asunder by the storm, and I in my
bonnet was sound asleep, and
the bully whip of the winds and the storm
lashed the troops of Xerxes, and
Xerxes in his rage ordered the river
itself to be lashed back, and the river
responded, and the storm abated, and all
was as calm as ever, and the engineers
returned to their work

Interesting. Different. In small doses, maybe a lot of fun for SOME poetry readers. Ones with fond memories of green eggs and ham.

[D.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weird in so many ways, this compendium of A. S. Hamilton's mostly short, irreal poems is playful, enigmatic and jaw-droppingly fresh. A true outsider, Hamilton wrote prodigiously but published very little. An earlier collection by Jargon Society is long-out-of-print, so we are lucky to have this new edition from The Song Cave. Here's a poem that could have been written by William Carlos Williams, but Williams lacks the mystical power of association that is the hallmark of Hamilton's brilliant, illuminated lyrics:

THINK THIS OVER

just before
you left

just before
you shouldered a gun

just before
you left

the thunder
there is in the grass


It feels like I'm conversing with a holy man. Subjects seem simple, but where he takes them is surprising, enchanting, poetry of the sublime. You will not find these poems in anthologies, but you should, you really should. Tell the anthologists: time to make some corrections to the history of poetry.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book I am reminded what a consolation poetry is. The world is often hard or forbidding, yet there are other worlds we can make for ourselves or escape to in poetry.

Hamilton allowed himself to be free, to be unique, independent of any outside gaze. Really, simply to be happy and to allow himself to be enchanted by ordinary things like birds and moons and wheat. The poems are short and structured simply; they hop from stone to stone.

His enchantment is contagious and inspiring. It’s a strength to allow yourself so much enjoyment without care for the mood to the times, general trends, the exclusive societies of writers, academia or anything really except your own apprehension of the world and experience.

They Are the Scarlet Birds

Why, they are the birds
That wanted to come to life and sing again
That only the poets knew of

Why, they are the scarlet birds that everyone said
Were too scarlet ever to be remembered again

Why, these are the places to be remembered,
And whenever these birds are to be remembered again,
Singing

Why, they are the scarlet birds and the bright flowers
No longer with us

But these are the empty places remembered
And shall be no more birds singing

But they’ll sing in your hearts, poets,
They’ll sing ever again

They are the scarlet birds, and the bright flowers,
That ever came to be, and to sing again

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had a long relationship with the work of Alfred Starr Hamilton, and even tried to look him up via phonebook and internet at one point. His poems are compulsive, but as they forge through the compulsions, they somehow sidestep that trajectory and make discoveries. These strange, get-under-your-skin poems are not quite like anything else:

Ride

for this has been our last bequest
how little do you know of our old fashioned silver spoons
how little do you know of the snowflake in the jar
how little do you know of the ride in the valley
how little do you know of the thread that rides
through and through our old fashioned silver spoons
how little do you know of our painstaking over the years
how little do you know of the donkey on the end of a spoon
happily, how little do you know of preserving our sedge
we are only bled and gone

[IAN MARTIN · Rating 5 out of 5]

my favourite book of poems. full of smallness, loneliness, wonder, and mystery. formative for me.

[Douglas Penick · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is not so much needed to say. This is a very mysterious book alive with shy beauties and awkwardly new-born ways of seeing As Ben Estes and Alan Felsenthal say in their introduction:

"prepare to enter a house of metaphor, where life is a poem and in it there is always more to be discovered. Hamilton's is an extremely gentle language cultured in loneliness, the product of encountering a world while staying away from it. His poem is miraculous in its humility, inviting as ever, and filled with warmth and concern for its readers."

Here are two poems:

VINELIKE

even a green leaf
turned and toiled

and said to the twig
that turned to the trunk

at length that pulled at the living roots of the matter
that pulled and toiled to the end of its vinelike travels.
*

SUNBURST

I was urged
I couldn't say no
I didn't say no
It was stronger than myself
I was going to do what girls do
I was going to be a beautiful nurse
I flowed with the sunburst on the classroom window
I tied a ribbon in my long brown hair
I began my life's ambition
I began my soul.

[Sarah Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Example of a favorite:

"Mary O'Rooney"

Are you swept daily at a Looking Glass?
Have you your books at a bookshelf
That stared back at you?, That you came upon
A stairway that led three flights upstairs
Are you contented if you ever could be?
Are you a member of a dark room?, swept daily

(those last two lines...)

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dizzying yet melancholic collection of poems. Stripped of reality and full of wordplay and repetition. Short and sweet poems that will take you miles away.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small, strange, quiet, generous poems with the whimsy and musicality of song lyrics for an imagined art college rock band. Some poems seem almost linked as Hamilton explores recurring images (daffodils, parlors, moons, stars, clouds, colors, mirrors, months, and so on) - there is a hermetic but not sealed quality to the poems, a distinctive world that you enter like a peaceful room or a mysterious clearing in the woods.

[Bobby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very nice collection of short poems by a not-so-well known poet. The breadth of topics is quite impressive, as are the different styles of poems. Some of the poems are rather mystical (reminding me of Rumi); others playful (almost as silly as Dr. Seuss). But pretty much all are easy "to get" and appreciate, unlike much of modern poetry which seems to be deliberately obtuse.

[Meredith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fine editors at The Song Cave have given us another gem, the poems of an unsung American mystic. Exquisite, inspiring, heroic, heartbreaking.

[Wayne David Hubbard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of the many I have read, this is one of my favorite books of poetry.

[Caleb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alfred Starr Hamilton is an overlooked American original.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Someone at The Song Cave sold me this book by saying Alfred Starr Hamilton is their favorite poet of all time and now he might be mine too

[Paul Vermeersch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This is truly like nothing else.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are sweet, innocent, magical, and dreamlike. Each poem is a play on the sound, rhythm, rhyming, and repetition of words. It really sounds like the author, Alfred Starr Hamilton, is playing with words like a child. The actual meaning or story of each poem often got lost in this playfulness. Many times, it seemed like the author was just riffing impromptu without purpose or intent. I liked this because some poems would meander around a theme slowly and then a quick turn of phrase would happen. Hamilton was a recluse and self-described simpleton. You can tell this is true by the photo on the book's cover. It shows the author looking into the camera with stiffened arms positioned unnaturally at his sides and almost smiling in the same way my 6-year-old looks when we tell him to pose for a picture...awkward. But when you read the poems, it makes sense that this was the person who wrote them because they are almost childlike. Below is one of my favorites called Cinderella that I read to my son.

were you ever a little reindeer
out in the clear
not too tiny a reindeer
but a little reindeer
and the way was clear

were you ever a little reindeer
out in the rain
not a big rain
but a little rain
and the way was clear

and you had your umbrella with you
not too big an umbrella
but a little umbrella
and your name was Cinderella

wonderfully you were invited
to a ceremony
not too big a ball
but a little ball
and you had your umbrella with you

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

The collected work of a little-known American poet, one who is far too-little-known, in my opinion. While Hamilton had some work published during his lifetime and a fair amount of serious critical attention, he is considered, wrongly I'd say, an "outsider" poet whose main merit is as a curiosity instead of as a leading poet of the later twentieth century. In the latter consideration he should stand, as he provides in these pages work that is unique and steps outside of what his better-known peers have accomplished. He moves between the lines of the very personal (without being confessional, coying, or overly self-aware) and the non-narrative, articulate, examination of place and thing removed from any false or forced context. He can in a few words consider a small detail of something or dwell on much larger issues, but none of the self-stuck speaking-to-the-reader approach too common in poetry after 1950 is present in his poems. And that is very refreshing.


I reviewed this book for Coal Hill Review and my review in full is here:

http://www.coalhillreview.com/?p=21047

[Colin Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I brought this book home to sit with my copy of Eugene Jolas' Planets and Angels. The two books are now friends.

[Winter Sophia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unique & Mysterious Beauty!