Savage Pageant: Poems Book Review by Sarah D’Stair

Spectacle and the Art of Necessity: A Review of Jessica Q. Stark’s Savage Pageant

Reviewed by Sarah D’Stair

Savage Pageant: Poems by Jessica Q. Stark. 

Austin, TX: Birds, LLC, 2020. 

116 pages

$18.00

Artists often critique images even as they create them. Consider, for example, René Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, aka “This is not a pipe.” The painting both despises and worships the spectacular capacity of the human brain to connect proximate words and images. The image, the spectacle, the pageant (not to mention the novel, the film, the twitter feed)—their power is in their ability to influence by dissociation, to divorce us from the reality outside their own framing of the world, to overwhelm our reason and our imaginations in service of their own interpretive aims.

Many poets would stop there: Spectacle bad. Reality good.  But not Jessica Stark.  Her debut collection, Savage Pageant, is far too smart for such platitude. This splendidly complex series of ruminations on the nature of the spectacle presents as its central thesis: yes, the culture of spectacle destroys an organic connection to our bodies in the world. However, she argues, we need the spectacle to survive.  Her tightly-structured, deeply-embodied verse allows for the paradox: the image separates us from reality; the image allows us to live within the real.

Set against the backdrop of Southern California’s film industry, arguably the very epicenter of the American “pageant,” the collection is structured like a stage play itself, complete with multiple acts and intermissions.  Each act includes a genealogical timeline of Jungleland, a now-defunct zoo that supplied Hollywood with many of its wild animals, including, famously, the MGM lion. There are poems about the Los Angeles Pet Cemetery, the car crash that killed Jayne Mansfield, the White House’s very first film screening, a nuclear testing side adjacent to the Hollywood Hills, the first female lion tamer, and a lion named Jackie who survived a plane crash from inside her cage.  All this, and plenty of mauling.

Stark asks us to see everything we encounter as pageant, as moving images regarded and judged. In the titular poem, “Savage Pageant: A Genealogy,” the human pregnant form becomes a stage on which young girls, doctors, and even the mother herself play out their moral fantasies.  The words themselves are pregnant on the page, spaced out, cavernous like a womb, as when the young girls say:

Nothing is as…………..plain ……..or crass …………..as expecting:

The awkward roundness

of past sex ………… on………… a body-stage

and all that………… skin ………… x stretching x

Stark offers a symptomatic reading of what happens to our most basic processes—birth, death, hunger, attachment—in a society that values the spectacle above all else, that only knows itself through the crafted images presented to us.  This poem and others in the collection challenge us to ask: How do we understand our human animal selves under such conditions?  How do we understand other animal selves? And in such a culture, what do bodies become but a nuisance on the way to an aesthetic?  

Another poem, titled “Trace Leakage: Jungleland,” turns an Internet comment board into a pageantry of perverse nostalgia. Stark creates poetry from verbatim excerpts of threads on the “Weird California” website written by those who visited Jungleland before it closed.  “I remember going to Jungleland! It was awesome.”  And also, preserving the grammar, “I was there and saw the lion attack him.the lion was on a chain staked down the kid walked to close to the lion and the lion jump him and had his head in his mouth [sic].”  The next commenter writes, “wow what memories.” This skillful collage reveals the insidious nature of the spectacle; our memory of it becomes not what we saw, but what we long to remember. These people reminisce about a bygone era with blind nostalgia, a “leakage” that longs with joy even for a chained animal and a child nearly dismembered. Perhaps, the poem suggests, we need this distance the spectacle provides, for the reality would be far too traumatic to confront.

One of my favorite poems, “Zoltan Hargitay Was a Telephone,” brilliantly captures the shared trauma of spectacle across species lines. The poem narrates the story of Jayne Mansfield’s son, who, while visiting Jungleland, “was bitten on the neck by the lion.” Stark’s masterful and haunting repetition of that phrase forces the image to cohere to its reality: 

…………Zoltan ran from his mother, Jayne Mansfield, into the lion’s cage and was

…………bitten on the neck by the lion. Zoltan, able to fit between the cage’s bars with

…………his small stature, squeezed into the lion’s cage unnoticed and was bitten on

…………the neck by the lion.  Zoltan, having been left unattended for several hours

…………by his mother, Jayne Mansfield, was standing outside of the lion’s cage when

…………he was bitten on the neck by the lion.

A neglected child, a neglected lion—the two become one in a moment of mutual suffering. The boy’s bitten neck is “a telephone,” a device for two-way communication in which one creature makes known his distress to another. The flattened, almost prosaic language dissolves poeticism in service of an effect of plain-spoken misery.  The poem seems to ask, can there be poetry here in this place, this Jungleland where lions are shot for their hunger and little children are left alone by their mothers? 

The collection is punctuated with Google map images of Jungleland, now an inconspicuous-looking single-family home in Thousand Oaks, California.  The images provide successive close-ups of the land, telescoping it as an epicenter of sorts, the convergence of many forms of environmental trauma—a nearby nuclear reactor emission, discarded plans to reproduce “exotic” jungles from all over the world, the constant motion of the Ventura Freeway, the film industry and all its exploitations. The pageant is vortexed here in a vision of post-post-modern surreality, altering us at the molecular level as radiation does to anyone within its orbit.  Human and nonhuman animals alike seem unreal here, as they should in a culture comprised of photographs of photographs of photographs.   

Stark ends her chronology of Jungleland with a list of prices fetched at the auction of over 1800 live animals, again crafting a savage poetry out of a “savage pageant.”  Yet the poet challenges us to see the scene as more than a symbol of human disregard for animal lives. For symbol, too, is a form of spectatorship. We must ask ourselves what happened to these animals; we must envision their circulating blood, their thick limbs and tired eyes, their bodies pacing in cages, their three-dimensional sorrows. We must, but likely we will not. We will see them in 2D like caged animals in a television set, for whom we cry but only at what we see as make believe. Stark’s thesis is complexly clear: to see all of this— the abuse, the neglect, the sickness, the whole dissociative mess— to see it all as real, as truly real, would be, for us so steeped in fantasy, unimaginable.

Sarah D’Stair is a poet and literary critic. She is the author of One Year of Desire (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press) and Central Valley (Kuboa Press, 2017). She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She lives and teaches in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.