Eric Nelson's Eulogy for David

A few people have asked me for a copy of the eulogy for David I gave at his memorial service on May 18. I’m posting it here for those people and for any others who might want to read it. EN

LUCKY: A eulogy for David Starnes by Eric Nelson

A couple of years ago as I was walking the breezeway from the Newton building classrooms to my office, I was startled by a sudden blast of synchronized yelling that was incomprehensible but, judging by the tone and intensity – wildly profane. I turned to see a group of students standing on the grass outside Newton just as the yelling turned to group laughter, smiles, backslapping. The students were facing David, who held a camera in his hand.
Later I asked David what that scene was all about. He told me that at the end of every semester he took a photo of his classes, and that he prepared them by saying, “on the count of three, everybody yell your favorite curse word.” From that day on, at the end of each semester I looked forward to being treated to the joyous, cacophonous, wonderfully irreverent sound of David’s students letting loose a primal whoop of profanity as he snapped their picture for posterity.
It was classic David – first in his closeness to his students, second in his wry, subversive sense of humor, and finally in his ability to bring people together and keep them together.Which, of course, is what is happening today as we all come together, some of us from as far away as Washington State, California, Vermont, Colorado, Michigan, and Virginia, to be with David and with each other to share our stories – to remember what he meant to us, to grieve together, to be joyous together, and, if necessary, to yell out our favorite curse words at the unfairness of what happened to him.
One of David’s and my favorite students, Kayvon Gerami, said to me in an email – every Writing major who didn’t have him is deprived. Kayvon is right, but as I said to him when I wrote back: not just every Writing major, but every person who didn’t know David is deprived. So I want all of us here, and all of those who knew David but could not be here, to celebrate the fact that we are the lucky ones – the ones who knew David and whose lives are better for it; we are the ones who keep David’s idealism, grace, generosity, humor, eloquence, compassion and artistic spirit alive and active in the world.
Talking to David was always a deep and resonant experience. I think my best memories of David are of the two of us – sometimes the three of us when either Richard Flynn or Peter Christopher was with us – driving to pick up or drop off a visiting writer at the Savannah airport, or at a college in Macon or Valdosta. Or the times we made the 3 ½ hour drive to Atlanta just to hear a poet give a reading and then turn around and drive back to Statesboro the same night so we wouldn’t miss our classes the next day.
One time in particular, David and I decided, pretty much at the last minute, to go to Atlanta to see then poet-laureate Billy Collins. The trip up went fast because we talked nearly non-stop about – what else – poetry, music, teaching – the triumvirate of our conversations. I remember we thrashed out the problem of who was the better band, Beatles or Stones; which Joni Mitchell album was the best; which Ian McEwan novel was the most powerful; whether or not Billy Collins’ poetry would stand the test of time.
We went to the reading, stopped for a late dinner on the way out of Atlanta, and then began the long drive home, still talking, talking, talking. We talked so intently that when I suddenly realized that I had long ago missed the exit for Statesboro and we were only a few miles from the Savannah city limits, we had to yell our favorite curse words loudly and repeatedly.
I don’t know what subject we were on when we missed the Statesboro exit, but obviously it was incredibly engrossing. By the time we got ourselves turned around and back to Statesboro, we’d added almost two extra hours to our road trip. I remember saying to David: we must never tell anyone that we did this. But I guess it is ok now to confess openly what all of us know: being with David took you – literally and figuratively – to places you didn’t expect to go.
I met David in 1998 when he was a graduate student in my poetry writing workshop at Georgia Southern. He was working on his M.A. in English at the time, but it wasn’t long before David became less like a student and more like a co-teacher. The stunning beauty and quality of his own poems, along with his careful and caring responses to the poems of the other students (all of whom were in their early twenties at most) made David’s opinion highly valued by everyone, including, or especially, me.
Although he was the student, I learned a great deal about teaching from David. While he and I almost always agreed on the strengths and weaknesses of a poem under discussion, I found myself often wishing that I had framed my remarks more in the manner that David framed his. He was honest in his comments, but he always found a way to be supportive, non-judgmental, and illuminating.
It was still early in the semester when I commented to a student that her poem contained striking and original images, but that the poem was so fragmented as to be nearly incoherent. David’s comment about the poem was that it reminded him of pieces of brightly colored beach glass found randomly on the sand, each piece intriguing and interesting in itself, suggesting its own story, but the shards hadn’t yet been taken home, examined, cleaned, and put together into a collection that all fit together.
As he spoke, his eyes and hands gestured in a way that transported all of us to the beach to see, to pick up, to inspect and pocket each piece of glass. When I glanced at the rest of the class, I noticed that all of them – and me – were nodding our heads in understanding. I have always thought of that time as the “what He said” moment, for after that day I would wait for David to comment on a poem, and when students turned to me for my response, I often simply pointed to David and responded, “Yeah, what he said.”
In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that David used the analogy of a “collection” to talk about that student’s poem. As most, if not all, of us know, David was a collector – a collector of small, exquisite, delicate things that did not require much, if any money, to collect. It was as if he collected those things that were overlooked by the rest of us – things that seemed too insignificant or valueless – but in David’s eyes, these were the things that needed the most attention and the greatest care. As Mary Marwitz said in passing one day this week, “nothing was too small for his affection.”
First at his townhouse on Valley Court and then at his house outside of town, David became the curator of mini-museums and museums of the miniature. He had collections of postcards, of seashsells, of feathers, of birdsnests, of family photographs, of old fountain pens, of Lone Ranger ephemera, of baseballs he found on his walks at Mill Creek Park. And of course, there was his beloved collection of music, especially the old LPs that he looked for at yard sales and junk stores. And also his books, which not only filled his bookcases, but were arranged on tables and other flat surfaces like heirlooms.
I wonder if David’s life wasn’t itself a collection, a collage of sorts, of the kind we saw in the visitation room earlier this morning – the photographs from different periods of his life, different jobs, different people, David with a beard, without one, in his James Dean pose, his Clint Eastwood look, his Merry Prankster abandon, his tweedy professorial posture – all of these images appearing before us not in any sequential or chronological order but in the circular, reiterative way of a life lived fully -- the images and the poetry overlapping; the young David and the older David standing next to each other, touching each other, seeping across time and place to show us that his life was all of a piece.
Whether he was returning to the land, as he did in the 1970s, or returning to the classroom, as he did in the 1990s, his idealism remained constant; and his greatest collection – his circulating collection of acquaintances who became friends, friends who became lovers, lovers who became friends, friends who remained friends – that collection grew and grew.
As we know, the things we collect reveal much about who we are. Clearly David’s collections tell us of his love of nature, of art, of literature, of music, and, I think most importantly, of friends. We are lucky to be one of David’s carefully selected, developed, and nurtured collections. It spans generations and geography, and it will endure for a very long time. And so will David.