The Special

In his book of poems, The Special (2014), David Stavanger explores the disjunction between daily life and mental illness. The book stems from Stavanger's struggle with mental illness and his professional experiences trying to manage and treat these kinds of conditions. The book’s disjunctions occasionally move beyond mental illness to encompass the strange nature of life and meaning, chronic illness, relationships and their dysfunctions, and the idea of death—both as a desire and as a fact of life. A performance poet, Stavanger has moved his writing onto the page for this debut collection, which won the 2013 Thomas Shapcott Award.

Stavanger's poems play with form, to better explore the strangeness of daily life, and to offer a playful, often darkly ironic tone. The forms he uses include free verse, prose poems, centos—poems that are written entirely from borrowed lines—and found poetry, among others. He also includes news and pop culture in his poems, using newspaper articles and cultural criticism on music and art to jumpstart poems or to add to their atmosphere. One poem is structured as a questionnaire from the dating site RSVP. Overall, the forms are challenging and playful, often more playful than the darker undertones of their content.

Stavanger's poems have a deadpan tone about them, as Michele Seminara discusses in her review of the text. She argues that the poems are deadpan in part because of their connection to mental illness—they emulate the kind of flatness that comes from walking through the world with deep depression or similar mental disorders. The flat tone contradicts the playfulness of the forms, in some moments offering a film-noir style narration, like a hardened 1920s detective. This is clear in the poem “sleep, hit me,” inspired by a David Lynch film: “c. stay in the car. hard to the wheel. wait for my call. don’t answer the phone. hit the horn. never break. matches lit burn.”



The poem “survey” also plays with this flatness, exploring the idea of mental illness and how it changes internal dialogues. Stavanger talks about this extensively in his poems, exploring how internal dialogue is influenced by mental illness, and how it changes one’s perception of the world. In “survey,” he writes:

“11. To be human is to
a) wear the right name tag
b) shower daily
c) give what you can’t give
d) fold back into the white”

Stavanger's poems explore the mundane and the lyrical, jumping between the exploration of life and its purpose and the pains of daily life with mental health problems. These poems allow Stavanger to explore form in a way that is impossible in performance poetry, and to consider how the page offers another mode of expression and further nuance in developing poetic voice.