Matt Starr is hurling gnarled carrots across the parking lot-facing patio of a bookstore in Echo Park and everyone is loving it. He stands on a small, raised platform. He implores the audience—bespectacled types, types wearing Mennonite-looking skirts with Adidas Sambas, types wearing second hand designer from The Real Real—guys, c’mon! I have more! He tosses a carrot to his intern at Dream Baby Press, an alt lit house of which he is the co-founder. He tosses one to his boss at Substack, for whom he does events. We’re here at Stories Books and Cafe, thousands of miles from his home in Manhattan, New York, to catch Matt Starr’s carrots. And, of course, to listen to him read from his new book of poetry, Mouthful, out now via Dream Baby Press. 

Per the Dream Baby Press’ Substack, Matt Starr is here to “make literature a little more exciting.” Per Matt Starr, who grins when I ask him about the performative aspect of his poetry, he’s here to “to lower the barrier.” Starr does so in a remarkable way; there’s a delightful frivolity to his words, poems bursting with coy sexuality and touching open heartedness, that is vivified in his enactment of them. Starr has thrown readings like the one at Stories at various locales across New York City, in places like the basement of a Sbarro at Penn Station, or at the Church Street Boxing Gym (during which he brought out a Drake lookalike). The most fantastic part of Starr's poetry—which is, by the way, a delightful read in its own right—is in the way he shares it with others. Starr is charming, accessible, amiable; and, by proxy or perhaps by natural right, so too is his poetry.

“I started writing poetry eight or nine years ago,” he tells me of his foray into the literature field. Starr has been in and out of the news cycles for a while, pre-poetry debut. He recreated Annie Hall with old people (worth a watch if you have 40 minutes). He made a series of videos as an Amazon Delivery boy, shouldering an absurd mountain of boxes while he meandered around New York City. He engineered a small media hysteria around a fashion trend called “babycore”. He collaborated with Planned Parenthood on a Museum of Banned Objects. This miscellany of a resume aside, Starr began to write poetry and it stuck with him. 

“I feel like tiptoeing around all of that was poetry. I've always made it so difficult for me to pull off a project. Poetry is the closest I've gotten to being able to improvise like a jazz musician. It’s been really important to me to be able to work quickly. Jonas Mekas would always talk about the poetic act. When I look back, that's what all of these projects were—they were poetic acts. And now I can do that in a literal sense with poetry.” Starr tells me. 

Mouthful began to take shape years ago. Starr talks about going on runs in Central Park; about beginning to grasp the delirious feeling of falling in love with someone new: “It’s about freedom, I guess,” he says. “I would be shirtless, yelling into my phone and I could say the craziest shit and nobody was around. I'd have, like, two sets of friends I would call at like 8am to say these poems to.” This colloquialism, an earnestness usually only achievable between lovers and close friends with their shirts off and skin exposed, is the joyous nucleus within Mouthful. Starr’s work has oft been touted as erotic, but he seems to want to sidle away from the generality of the statement. “Yeah, people say it's erotic,” he admits, “I say it's erotic, but really what I think I mean is, like, I don't hold back. It's so important for me to like to go all the way. I'm not interested in leaving space to be interpreted per se.”

“When you're falling in love or you're lusting after someone, you just want to consume them. You want to do things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Just get in this animalistic mindset where you're just, like, ‘I want to be disgusting and beautiful together.’  It's not like your normal way that you think, but when you're with this person, it just brings out this, ‘yeah, I want to pee all over my pants and just watch our pee puddles, like merge together’” he asserts, not laughing. He’s referring to a poem in the book where two lovers pee their pants in the subway together. 

There’s a lot of potty-mouth talk in the book. It’s funny, and endearingly tender for a body of work that includes a woman masturbating with a carrot [hence the aforementioned carrot toss]. “It was important for me not to feel, [provocative], I personally don't think anything I read is as shocking like I think. There is the edge, but it's really soft. I think that's why people call it sweet,” Starr says. He draws inspiration from Drake’s goofy stage persona, and Sex and the City's palatability. “People were connected [to the show at the time] because everything that these women were going through and talking about was everything people were actually going through. Whether whatever your gender was, like, we were going through it,” he laughs.

It’s nice to know that someone like Matt Starr, who wields a formidable amount of power in the indie press scene, cares about the way people receive his poetry. It’s nice to read a work of poetry about love and getting older and feeling young and realize that the world is kind, and it's silly, and it will allow you to be honest with yourself. 

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