When I asked the ever-congenial David Starkey how he’s feeling, he responded, “Like I’m being pulled in different directions.”
That’s in part because his first grandchild was about to be born, but the deeper reason is that David is quite the renaissance man: He’s a poet, playwright, college professor, director of SBCC’s Creative Writing Program, textbook author, television show host, and publisher of Gunpowder Press, which publishes poetry books. “I have my hands in different pots,” he tells me with a smile.
Most impressively, he’s written several full-length collections of poetry, including It Must Be Like the World (Pecan Grove, 2011), Circus Maximus (Biblioasis, 2013), and Like a Soprano (Serving House, 2014), an episode-by-episode revisioning of The Sopranos television series. As for the latter, he approached the original source as it was Shakespeare. “I took notes as I rewatched each episode and tried to capture the moments that were best for a poem,” he explained.