Do you spook easily, Starling?
Last month I experienced a flash of poetic clarity that delivered itself signed and sealed care of one of my favorite horror movie classics: The Silence of the Lambs . During my probably twenty-seventh viewing, that steady refrain of "Starling" throughout the script just lit up all over the dialogue for me, her name/species bouncing from the mouths of male mentor/villain Hannibal Lecter to male mentor/hero Jack Crawford. These lines addressing "Starling" over and over seemed to me the perfect jumping-off points for a new mini-series of poems, addressing Agent Clarice Starling as both young woman in a male-dominated world chasing a killer of women and small bird eluding threats both wild and domestic. These lines will become my poem titles and these poems will be nested inside the Catechesis manuscript as a different variation on the same themes I've already been writing toward. Here are the movie lines I have gleaned so far to use for these poem titles: