Our Defining Stains

Emmeline Clein interviews Dream Baby Press co-founder Matt Starr about his debut book of poetry, “Mouthful.”

By Emmeline CleinAugust 26, 2024

• Poetry

• Gender & Sexuality

SLINKY, SLIPPERY, MOIST as moss: Desire surprises, dictating your next move before you even realize you’ve wanted. Have you ever yearned in a Sbarro? Been ashamed in the Natural History Museum? Wondered what a pop star’s body count is while wandering CVS? Shoplifted from Sephora, or loved someone who did? Stared into the void, and then into your crush’s medicine cabinet? Eaten fast food when what you really wanted in your mouth was something—or someone—else entirely?

Matt Starr’s debut collection of poetry, Mouthful (2024), bites off more than one might think the anthropomorphized teddy bear on the slim tome’s cover could chew, ensuring that questions like these cycle through your mind for days after you read it. Starr interrogates shame, greed, celebrity, sex under body fascism, economic precarity, fatphobia, innocence, coming-of-age, psychopharmaceuticals, body modification, bulimic boys, swole girls, and Marge Simpson’s sex appeal—to mention just a few of the topics these poems touch.

Mouthful is the first book published by Dream Baby Press, an independent publishing house whose event series has invigorated literary life in New York City, injecting dirt and eros into readings, which they host everywhere from magic stores to Burger Kings. Earlier this month, Matt and I met over cold brew during a New York heat wave to talk hysteria, Henry Miller, optimism, stains, Shel Silverstein, fan fiction, literary fiction, breakups, and more.

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EMMELINE CLEIN: One of the first words that came to mind when I read these poems was “hysterical.” I use that word with all of its cascading connotations: hilarious, a little unhinged, and confessional in a vein that’s often coded as feminine. I also found that the humor in here is incredibly earnest and ultimately optimistic, which sits in such stark contrast to so much of the highly nihilistic and ironized humor present in a lot of contemporary literature. All of that is to say that I want to talk to you first about tone—what were you attempting here on a voice level?

MATT STARR: That was so beautiful—I mean, I love even hearing you describe it as feminine. It’s funny, and we’ll get to this later, but I know what I was watching and taking in while writing this, and it was such feminine energy: Sex and the City (1998–2004), which became my personality for a few years.

Happens to the best of us.

As well as romantic comedies. It’s so interesting that you picked up that feminine quality because that was the energy that I was feeling at the time. Earlier in my career, I remade Annie Hall (1977) with old people in their eighties and nineties. We were asked to turn it into a docuseries and that became my life for three years. (The pandemic hit and shut down the show.) Then I moved to the Upper West Side and that opened up the world of Nora Ephron, rom-coms, Hugh Grant … So what I was taking in is really reflected in this book. It was a sweet and horny energy. But at the same time, I was also riddled with shame around desire, and for me this book is working through so much of that. I think I do it through humor—I’m a pretty optimistic person.

A dying breed out here.

So there’s a lot of earnestness. But this book, it’s about desire. The poems are reflections of things that happened or fantasies that, at the time, I wanted to happen. And I wrote them post-breakup, living in my friend’s place on the Upper West Side in a little room.

There’s definitely a daydreamlike ambience. The words “desire,” “sweetness,” and “shame” really jumped out to me in your answer to that question. They were all things I was thinking about as I was reading this book. So many of your poems are—to get down and dirty with it—ultimately dirty, yet also retain a certain sweetness. Maybe it’s a horseshoe effect where they’re so naughty they’re nice, so dirty they’re adorable. I think the way you engage with desire and shame attempts to metabolize shame into something sacred—something to be kind of sought after and seen in a softer light.

Well, there are two types of shame in here. There’s bodily shame, which I’ve felt my entire life, and sexual shame. I was painfully aware of my body at such a young age—for years, I wouldn’t wear pants in the coldest winters because I thought my thighs looked fat. As a chubby kid, I was put on Adderall, at seven, for 20 years, and that made me a binge eater and destroyed my relationship to food. Around 2020, amid a breakup, somebody told me to watch the Brené Brown special, and I had a revelation: this is what shame is, and how you eradicate it is through communication. That really flipped a switch on for me; these poems became my shame communicators.

Celebrity plays a really intriguing role in the way your poems position shame—in relation to physical bodies as well as romantic relationships. There’s an intimacy with figures both famous and fictional that runs parallel to your own interpersonal romantic relationships. So many of these poems are ultimately love poems written in a mode that is almost reminiscent of fan fiction, both in their engagement with parasociality and in the way you trust your reader to understand your references, to engage in a form of shared desire, and, in doing so, relieve each other’s taught shame around those desires.

Fan fiction was also recently new to me. I’m like 20 years late to everything: Drake, Sex and the City, rom-coms, Harry Potter, fan fiction. So, I discovered fan fiction. And I love how these online writers don’t hold back, and it’s written by a specific fandom for themselves. It’s so dirty, but it’s so fun. Ultimately, it’s somebody working through their own fantasies. It inspired me to write into some experiences that at first glance might inspire embarrassment—for example, the poem about pee, or the one about the carrot, or one about the pink sheets …

Your work is really invested in uncovering the physical detritus of yearning, right? You have everything from period-bloodstained sheets to urine-stained pants in these poems, and you take that type of stain and juxtapose it with the strain of stains we’re taught to feel such extreme shame about—like a few extra pounds on your body—in a way that reveals the absurdity of all our attempts to perhaps optimize and mechanize ourselves away from our leaky physicalities.

Stains, conceptually, to me, are what define us. So, thinking of stains as both ephemeral and permanent proof of a fleeting feeling. Or finding beauty in something that for someone else might inspire shame. When we first met, my girlfriend gave me a Ziploc bag with an unopened silver nail polish in it with “Shoplifted by Mackenzie Thomas” Sharpied on the front. That’s my most prized possession. Good and bad, stains are still what makes you, and I needed all my stains, including the memories of not being able to wear tight-fitting pants.

So much of the shame our culture teaches us to feel is predicated on strict gender scripts. I think your poems rip up those scripts and reveal how fluid bodily shame experiences are, the way that abjection flows through our culture and risks drowning us at such a young age. I love your poem “Off Script,” where boys are bulimic and girls are lifting. I wanted to ask you about how you were thinking about engaging with archetypes around masculinity, especially as they intersect with body dysmorphia and appearance-based forms of shame that are often trivialized and siloed off as “women’s issues.”

As a kid, around five, six, seven, I was so drawn to the men and boys on television, but the line was so blurred—did I want to be him or did I want to kiss him? With the opening poem, which is one of my favorites, about the two brothers playing with the power drill and the hot dogs, they both know and don’t know that what they’re doing is provocative. They’re stealing this power drill from their dad, but it’s still really innocent. And I think that really encapsulates how I saw that blurring of lines—there’s so much naivete in this book and that’s a lot of how I see the world sometimes. There’s a real innocence. Like Chance the gardener from the film Being There (1979). When I sit down to write, the most exciting way for me to think about the world is through a naive lens.

There’s an innocent orientation towards desire here, and there’s also a sense of childlike wonder in many of the poems. The poems follow you from around age seven up until now, and the way you write about aging really engages with notions of adulthood in a playfully combative way. I was wondering if you were purposefully thinking about refusing linearity, and if you were trying to engage with aging overtly—or if that just ended up coming through as you looked back on the varied forms your desire has taken over the course of your life.

I think there were two timelines here. In March 2020, when I really started to focus on writing and stopped working in TV—and what I forgot to say before is that the impetus of this poetic outburst, in part, came from the fact that when you’re making TV, it’s your idea, but with 50 other people’s opinions. Also, I was making a TV show about old people in a country that hates old people. So, there was already so much stacked against us. But when I started writing poetry, I realized I could just say whatever I wanted. I was also single for the first time in a long time, and was actively taking stock of myself and had space to reflect in a way I hadn’t in a long time.

There were two periods that I was interested in, one being my initial, youthful desire, and then, you know, I’m 35. The porn I found in my neighbor’s closet as a kid was so different from what is on the internet now or what I was downloading on the internet in between. I was going back and looking at how and when my desire was shaped. With prose, timelines function differently; with poems, it can be punctuated sharply. It can be like a shotgun. Freedom was a real theme in this book. I think a real overarching theme besides desire and shame is freedom.

A sense of liberation from so many strictures is definitely a powerful force motoring these poems. While you are training what you called a naive lens on the world, you’re also looking at it from a very clear-eyed economic perspective in many of the poems. While you’re exploring and exorcizing bodily shame, you are also writing about forms of shame that capitalism inculcates within us—like in the poem where you write about celebrities insuring parts of their bodies for thousands of dollars, or the poem where you talk about sharing an SSRI prescription with your mother for insurance reasons.

Well, when you’re poor, you can’t not think about it. I freelanced for a decade, but it’s like, I’d make a chunk of money and then live off that for … I’d stretch it as far as I could. I didn’t realize you could be an artist and have a job at the same time. And now I feel like an idiot and advise everyone that you can do both and it’s actually better. But I didn’t have money for so long, and so many people around me did. So that dichotomy inspired a lot of inescapable thoughts I’d carry around with me and feel ashamed. Any poem about money or economic status is directly pulled from that time, and I barely cracked the surface of that because there’s so much shame there.

But to return to your earlier question about linearity, when I was putting the poems together, I realized what I was most interested in was the through line of desire, and how desire evolves over time. Finding the humor, as well as the humility, in that evolution … and I think that might be how I ended up concluding with the orgy poem—which was only somewhat intentional. I thought it was a really sweet way to go out, where the last line is “ready to go to sleep.” In the wake of all the shame these poems have worked through, and in the wake of all the connections they depict, we’re now ready to go to sleep. I liked the idea of a bedtime story, a fairy tale, a fan fiction.

That trinity of genres you just mentioned all hinge on communalism, are all forms that are shared, co-created, passed down, and ever-evolving. These poems, like fan fiction, are mythic yet simultaneously uber-modern, and rely on a belief in an audience that shares a unique literary ethos—one in which an orgy almost becomes a community building activity.

All of which brings me to Dream Baby, the press you co-founded that is publishing this book. Dream Baby itself is unlike anything I’ve seen before—your focus thus far has been on hosting erotica, poetry, and fan fiction readings across the city in eccentric, offbeat locations, open to anyone, with as much emphasis on casual forms as on casual encounters. Can you tell me a bit about the origins of Dream Baby and its ethos now?

I wanted to start to perform my poems publicly and I couldn’t really find a lot of opportunities to do that, which was part of the impetus to start my own thing with my friend Zack Roif. We were both obsessed with the 1970s and ’80s punk scene, less the aesthetic than the DIY ethos, so when we were thinking about what kinds of readings we wanted to throw, we immediately thought of the old punks we love. Our first reading featured the writer [and singer] Lydia Lunch. Then we wanted to find a space that would be iconically New York City. So we asked ourselves, what are the spaces we revere?

There’s an East Village gay porn shop that I worked close to and it just felt like part of a New York that doesn’t really exist anymore, so we threw our next reading there. We called it the Perverted Book Club. It wasn’t a book club, it was just a reading, but about 400 people showed up. I read Beatles fan fiction; somebody passed out. People are passionate about fan fiction. For the reading after that, I used to live on the Upper West Side, and I would always pass the Penn Station Sbarro—we looked it up on Google Maps, and it’s considered one of the most depressing spaces in New York City. So we did a reading there. Hundreds of people came and The New York Times covered it.

For us, the most important thing was that our readings should be totally accessible. The only barrier to entry is showing up. We didn’t know 90 percent of the people coming [to Sbarro at Penn Station], which I really love because it wasn’t a scene. Slowly, after we threw a bunch of events, people got to know one another. And I think we have built a really lovely little community—now, we host a writing club in a three-story Burger King. I hear from a lot of my writer friends that they are drained and exhausted, writing just to churn out content that isn’t fun for them to write, and they come to the writing club and have a great time. There’re no rules. It’s just for fun. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.

For our readings, the writers we ask are often overlooked or not even perceived as writers. We discover people online, people who have meme pages, who are seeing literature in a way that maybe isn’t taken as seriously by others. We don’t take ourselves too seriously, but we take them seriously.

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Matthew S. Starr is a comedian/writer and the co-founder of Dream Baby Press. Mouthful is his first book.

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Photo credit: Anna Maria Lopez.