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

There is a brief but memorable scene in Thomas Hardy's novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, in which the heroine, Elizabeth-Jane Newson, deeply fatigued from long hours attending alone at her mother's deathbed, wonders in her spent state: "why things around her had taken the shape they wore in preference to every other possible shape." Suddenly, the particular forms of the objects furnishing the room where she sits strike her as being incongruous, as having been imposed upon them at random, and she imagines that they endure their prescribed roles and assigned places "as if waiting for the touch of some wand that should release them from terrestrial constraint." The poems of Alfred Starr Hamilton (1914-2005) may be seen to apply the touch of such a wand, challenging the ontological stability of the quotidian world, liberating objects and events from their static, utilitarian definitions into multiple and mysterious meanings.

The transformative influence of Hamilton's poems is exercised upon the reader through techniques and motifs, unsettling and disrupting our standard understanding of the world around us. Reader expectations of linearity and ordinary comprehension are immediately thwarted by recurrent eccentricities of punctuation and capitalization, idiosyncratic syntax, and fragmented sentences shifting between the familiar and the fantastical. There are puns and allusions to fairy tales, Bible stories, ancient history, American history, nursery rhymes, Christmas carols, lullabies, The Pilgrim's Progress, Hiawatha, the Alice books by Lewis Carroll, a 1934 bestseller novel, an obscure 1940s comic strip, and popular songs of long ago. And Hamilton piles on the anaphora in his poems, slowly wearing down whatever anticipations readers may have harbored of some form of clear dramatic or thematic movement in the text. Often the repeated phrases at the beginning of successive lines take the form of questions in the manner of surreal koans: "Was it a bud at the back of the bosom / that bled and bled all summer long?" "Why didn't you say a pumpkin on top of the wall?" "Are you swept daily at a looking glass?" After incremental variations of such phrases, the anaphoric trance is then broken by quick, lyrical leaps that startle and charm.

Hamilton's pronouns are sometimes curiously nonstandard: "I wondered of the floorwax," "the pursuit upon happiness," "I know of a big cloud that is shaped for an elephant." Similarly, certain of the complex verb tenses he employs further contribute to a decentered, dreamlike climate in the poems: "I wanted daffodils to have been picked off the moon," "I wanted to have been a butterfly / That floated away in the lake distance," "We shall have been enchanted," "I don't know why I pursed my lips / That can have told the story." And, for good measure, one more eccentric verb: "Tomorrow night I walked to a dark black star." Also characteristic of the poems is the way in which they launch themselves from or suddenly swerve into the unexpected and the mysterious, testifying to a sensibility inhabiting the world in a manner vividly askew and highly individual. Hamilton sees things differently from the way in which they are commonly seen by others, perceiving and comprehending the world from another vantage point, with other—personal, poetical, visionary—points of reference.

A few words, then, concerning the life of Alfred Starr Hamilton. According to a biographical statement he wrote to accompany a selection of his poems in the anthology, Quickly Aging Here (1969) he grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, and after high school spent some years on the road, hitchhiking, he says, through 43 states. During World War II, he was drafted into the US Army, and served for about a year, stationed on the West Coast. He claims to have been discharged by the army after going AWOL. (Hamilton boasted of having received a Dishonorable Discharge, but my guess is that he was granted a medical discharge for psychological reasons.) Subsequent to his stint in the army, he seems to have returned to his parents' home and then, after their death, lived a solitary, inconspicuous, penurious life in boarding houses in his home town.

Hamilton was a prolific poet, sometimes writing as many as ten poems a day. (A great many of which have subsequently been lost.) During his lifetime his work appeared in a handful of little magazines, and a collection of his poems was published in 1970 by Jonathan Williams of the Jargon Society Press. Williams also wrote a piece on Hamilton for the New York Times (April 13, 1975) in which he made a plea for some form of economic support to be extended to the impoverished poet. Williams urges an arts council or private foundation, a university or private individuals to undertake to aid Hamilton in any way possible.

In his New York Times piece, Williams describes Hamilton's current living conditions as follows: "Mr. Hamilton is 61 years old. He pays $40 a month for a linoleumed cell in a rooming house. He goes to the A&P on Saturday night for the bargain chicken pieces, picks up cigarette butts, smokes a little Prince Albert, gets clothes from the Salvation Army." Hamilton would seem to have been in some way what today would be designated as neurodivergent. He spent his last years in a nursing home, still writing poems by pencil into notebooks given to him by the kindly nurses. (A selection of these last poems is included in this volume.)

Recurrent among Hamilton's poems is imagery drawn from the natural world. His poems are inhabited by clouds, rain, thunder, snowfall, the seasons, morning sunlight and sunsets, the moon and stars, mountains and the sea, roses, daisies, forsythia, lavender, daffodils, clover, thistles and sedge, crickets and snails, birds and butterflies, ants and beetles, crawfish, squirrels, and even rhinoceri. Conversely—significantly—no mention is made in them of automobiles, airplanes, trains, radio, television, films, or the like.

Issues of war, injustice, and inequality are sometimes touched on, as well as perennial poetic matters such as time, loss, and longing. But intrinsic to Hamilton's vision as a poet and implicit in the majority of his poems are two mutually reflective themes: perception and impercipience. The latter is the product of the logic-bound, language-bound mind, of conceptual fixity and superficial apprehension of the world. We ignore, Hamilton suggests, the golden light of dawns and sunsets, the gold of ripe corn and autumn leaves, grasping instead after the gold of worldly wealth, the gold "that starves you" ("Gold Standard"). Our thought and speech have sustained "the lexicon wound" ("Crossroads"); reductive words and categories blind us to mystery and grace. It would not occur to us to consider "another word for bluebird" ("Quest of the Month of Maine") or to search for "the word for a snowflake / that stayed on a man's overcoat" ("Crossroads), nor yet another word for "hornet's nest" ("Cornucopia"), or to grope for "another word in the mist" ("Maine"). We have failed to "befriend" the living world around us; instead, judging things, objectifying things—even clouds—until "they had no life or meaning" ("An Apple, Organizationally"). We have, Hamilton deems, built "fences" around our senses, set "padlocks" on the gates of our awareness, placed our sensibility in "handcuffs" ("Didn't You Ever Search for Another Star"). Having disenchanted the world, we are left straddling "heaps of humid affluence" ("Judith and her Maidservant"), never having become truly alive, but merely "lifelike" ("Little").

As noted above, Hamilton is keenly alert to the natural world, regarding things with affective attention, finding in them beauty, meaning, and value. Natural phenomena are for him living presences, infused with sentience and with spirit, with their own forms of consciousness, intelligence, and intentionality. A frequent device in Hamilton's poems is anthropomorphization, or ascribing human awareness and behaviors to the animal world and to what are commonly thought to be inanimate objects. Leaves speak to twigs in his poems, lake waters feel thirst, a cardinal can talk to a cricket, the deep sea laughs, the sun sings. Further to overturning the constraints of ordinary perception, Hamilton's poetic imagination transforms the familiar world, seeing in commonplace things new imaginative possibilities. The moon may be ironed and kept in the closet, speech can be smoky, stares can be lavender, a tree is an amber stairway, clowns wield whips, tall buildings follow you downstairs, white mice invade the moon, light exerts itself and roars, nymphs dream of angels while angels dream of nymphs, you might be disclosed as or even discover yourself to be a Scythian mountebank, thunder can be constructed out of a blade of grass, and on the moon a dropped dime may be found. With words unconstrained by custom and habit, portals of wonder are opened, whole worlds are conjured.

Hamilton's poems tend to be short, rarely exceeding 15 lines. The titles, too, tend to be only one or two words. There are also a handful of poems in the collection consisting of only a few lines. Concise, elusive, strangely luminous, they resonate in the mind, like something at once familiar and faraway, long forgotten.

Here are some samplings of such poems:

FOR A FIREFLY
if ever
an evening star

A CARROT
I wanted to find a little yellow candelight in the garden

DIM GOLD
Dark violin music plays over
Some dim gold letters tonight
That are kept in your hat

There are also poignant poems of personal disclosure, such as "Night," which reads in part:

I was a stranger
I was always moving about
I knew there was lightning on the moon
I hammered golden letters against the wilderness
I hammered golden letters against the night
I held this light to myself
I had so little to say to all the rest

 

With its incantatory repetitions, syntactical disruptions, and unexpected connections, the poetry of Alfred Starr Hamilton calls to mind a passage in a book by Aldous Huxley titled Literature and Science (1963) where the author writes admiringly of certain poets who permit themselves in their poems to break the "traditional chains of dictionary meaning, syntactical and logical order." In doing so, Huxley goes on to say, their poems open "unsuspected windows onto the unknown," evoke or create "potentialities of experience hitherto unrecognized or perhaps nonexistent," and discover "aspects of the essential mystery of existence, which otherwise would never have emerged" (pp. 33-35).

Sharing, through the lens of his poems, Hamilton's guileless eye, affords us just such visionary glimpses as Huxley describes. Latent shapes, hidden identities of things are made visible to us. What passes for the real in this world begins to ripple and shimmer a little before our parched eyes. If for this relief, this release alone, these poems are well worth reading. There are, Hamilton states "birds too scarlet ever to be remembered again" ("They are the Scarlet Birds"). Birds that are too scarlet would, of course, challenge settled definitions and designations. If birds of this feather were to be seen, then they would have to be expunged from memory. But poets, he tells us, remember and hold dear the memory of them, providing in their poems a habitat for birds too scarlet. Beyond accepted perceptual models, Hamilton's poems suggest—beyond the humdrum and the inert, beyond the trimmed and fitted—there is a world of mystery, wonder, multiplicity, charm, and surprise. These poems participate in that world and summon us to do the same.