[Semiotext(e); 2024]
Handed a microphone, Wayne Koestenbaum asks, “Am I audible?” I’ve heard it last October at a marathon screening of his short films “The Collected Phone Calls of October Castelnuovo Spielhaus,” at his lounge act earlier this year in the Francis Kite Club where he swan sung art songs to the tune of the old masters and announced there, my own literature professor, “literature is so passé”—and at the launch event for his new book of poems, Stubble Archipelago, one humid March day this year at 192 Books in Chelsea, New York. There’s an irony there, for a man who has written over twenty books, cracking and re-cracking the chestnuts of the syllabi of a culture that “mingles the high and low” (to use an automatic phrase of the critic): opera, silent film actors, Jackie O., virtuoso New York (summer) School displays of queer theory and, especially in his poetry, practice too. He paints and makes films occasionally combining the two (with the paintings serving as sets): neon Klee and Miró linework in strokes so thick that they threaten the rarified domain of shape.
“Am I audible?” is a question about audience—it contains the winking understanding that he is not the author of what really matters. The Screen Tests of Andy Warhol, subject of a 2001 biography by Koestenbaum, are a prime artistic predecessor here: a series of close-up portraits, mostly of members of the downtown ‘60s scene, slowed to the speed of scientific attention and producing a frankly dermatological image. There’s a special kind of time capsule quality there, not just an invocation of the issue of “the viewer” but what is really contained in the material existence of an artwork. Even originally, one must have gotten the feeling of finding a scrap of wooly mammoth DNA in the permafrost, seeing Edie Sedgwick blink once. The pathos of Stubble Archipelago comes from the same place in a different medium, the same place of Noah’s ark too: saving words. You could almost believe it was possible to get Chelsea out of this book, devoured already by real estate; maybe we could even have Lana Turner again.
What else is the poem to do? It’s 2024, and it could not be clearer that poetry missed its moment to change the world. And any poetry that does not reckon with that fact—poetry after Auschwitz, after Hiroshima, after COVID—can’t be credible. Some contemporary American poems perform the easy elision of straight shame, some ape the zeitgeist of politics and come out as stump speeches. Warhol had a nose for the future, his gamble was to reject the hermetic rejection of the avant-garde’s old role and embrace mass culture, pushing through it; it echoes Marx’s move, if you can believe it, seeing his utopia on the other side of capitalism as opposed to in another direction. In Warhol’s late style, he produced images pretty much only of the hammer and sickle, with one or two crucifixes thrown in. The poems of Stubble Archipelago mark a turn from the automatic writing of the Trance Notebooks, Wayne’s previous poetic project, to the manual: they occasionally even strut in the presumption of a sonnet, crafted things crammed to the point of the cream inside their mold. From “#36 [Methought her quibble]”:
What hallows a sidewalk? Discards.
Bra, blender,
vase, teddy bear,
ashtray, Monopoly.
Rode an orange folding bike past
the factory where they raise
mice for medical experiments.
Which rides off into the poem’s sunset, a treatment of something as classic as a formative childhood memory. This is Koestenbaum’s Late Style. In his study of the same name, Edward Said writes that a late style’s prerogative must be to “render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them.” This hard lean into that contradiction is announced by even the choice of publisher, Semiotext(e), with its reputation of heavy hitting from the Left, and the cover’s delicate and sober deployment of the semiotics of the thirst trap: a BTS photo, a self-portrait from the set of Wayne’s film New King Lear fitting Semiotext(e)’s convention of the combative provocateur author photo cover. The word capitalism appears on the first page of this book. It’s a side of Wayne so easily overlooked in the cornucopian aesthetic that I’ve heard Wayne himself call “the cram.” From “#30 [The lamp completes]”:
Misread “financial advisor” as “funeral advisor,”
“Renaissance Hotel”
as “Resistance Hotel.”
Dreamt of NYC bombed, burning; scrutinized my
belongings, said goodbye
in panicked clear-sighted flashes.
But what remains is Wayne’s unbeatable sense of the proper noun, which he knows as intimately as Brancusi knows the shape of an egg. Wayne drops names with the ploop of bonbons—the proper noun is the secret of the poet’s art, the most condensed form of its associative mystery, words that hang glorious and flabby over the corset of their meaning as the unavoidable crow’s foot or mole in a screen test; and Wayne, digesting Frank O’Hara, has mastered the excitement and control of their distribution across the page. His lingual tumbles of bravura are a self-reflexive signature in place of a blush. Listen, from “#21 [Foment the railroad]”:
Nancy Drew kvelling, “I’m the most voluptuous
Palmer Method heroine,”
chalkboard’s air-raid siren
phonetic Valkyrie
groin-V atemporality—
yet Iwo Jima Gregory
Pecking me into Eichmann
trial self-soiling.
Students of Wayne cannot help but wonder at his method. Integral is what Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye,” the “flâneuring” that Wayne needed to do, that he had to wait for the pandemic to go into hiding to grow this book from. The figure of the flâneur was born from the same forces that pointed towards its obsolescence—the buzz and sour breath of the crowd, the flash of the street peddler’s wares or scammer’s silver tooth, the shaded alley of illicit opportunity or winking trick: these were the targets of society’s plan when the famous boulevards—French literally for “green balls” in reference to the hairdo applied to announce the street trees’ assimilation to the human order—opened up; Haussmann’s solution to the era of barricades, wide enough for an army’s forced march from Versailles if the capital complained, space enough to see each other and wring poems from anomie. Behind the gigantic sheets of glass produced for café windows were these staple figures of modernity, men and—as the record has recently been corrected by Lauren Elkin, women—who gazed out the window display inverted as if the panoply of the street was on sale. How easy, then, to succumb to the anonymous and have poetry’s purview reduced to recording ever more insightfully the outrages of anyone-who’s-paying-attention’s alienation. Wayne writes, “Corner café: fantasized shoplifting / smoked cinnamon milk / chocolate bar” but his turn comes in the line’s completion, which perverts alienation into intimacy, or at least something potentially a little kinky, “and getting caught.”
The unlimited contingency of poetry is underestimated by the heroic examples of, say, an Emily Dickinson, who at a semi-public desk in Amherst, eighteen inches square in mahogany, made metaphysics into its most articulate expression and also made friends, or those countless vagrant Bohemians exploiting the salad days of luncheonette credit or low rent. The nineteenth century Parisian advances in urbanity migrated along the course of Empire’s center and continued in the New York of the twentieth. “The grid reproaches the flâneur,” writes James Sanders in his study of New York in the movies, Celluloid Skyline. The grid is an advance on the boulevard: Paris is only New York lying down, its one sparkling erection literally useless. When Norman Mailer ran for Mayor of New York in 1969, he proposed knocking the city off its grid and rebuilding it to align with the arc of the sun in springtime. That was before he made himself unelectable with an expression of his famous egotistical vulgarity, and out of cowardice, by stabbing his wife. But he showed an understanding of how culture comes about, that the best thing you could do for the arts in this town was give the cafés and tenement windows morning light for the poets and painters. I was eating in the backyard of a bagel place last week and they were pumping music through tinny speakers mounted on the back brick wall next to climbing kudzu. My notebook sat unopened next to my cream cheese coated wrapper. Just that little niggle on my attention: it squashed a whole poem. The truer the poem, if we can even deploy such a thing as truth in poetry today, the more fragile it is, contrary to pompous popular notions of the masterpiece: the best poems can be crushed by the slightest cynicism, smothered by the unstoppable forces of Big Stupid, dissolved immediately by the tiniest exposure to the logic of the marketplace. Despite their nominal bravado, the poems of Stubble Archipelago still shiver like dandelions in the icy gusts of commerce—an alternative architecture.
The celebrated motion of modernity, which opened up a little space of guilty freedom for the flâneur to loaf amidst necessity, has gobbled the outside on which it depended: the little holes in the seamless invisibility of the barbaric systems that feed and serve us. I have tried, myself, people-watching at the M&M store which replaced a perfect porno theater on Broadway, gone before my time: I left empty-handed. Wayne’s discrete advance on the flâneur is a militating against this empty-handedness: first with cram, whose lineage is the Talmudic over-elaborations of the overt, a tradition of Freud, Schrödinger, and Derrida; but also in what we can call the militant of the social, evidenced in the gentle art of name dropping but necessitating the serious work of manning the role of man-about-town. From “#9 [Regret’s a Clod]”:
Lemon zabaglione curve of me creates
a nonsensical
reason to dream backward.
Faux pas to ask for a blurber’s copy: they dropped
my praise for the book.
No shame to be an
omitted mouthpiece.
Why shouldn’t seraphic stillness fill me, as if yr
meat in the bathroom were
messianic time’s momentary
emissary cracking me open?
Probably its lineage is the art of cruising, which cultivates a fertile sense of social nuance and erodes heroically the most blighting force of our time, stranger danger. The result, in Stubble Archipelago, is one of the greatest and most rare feelings literature can produce, one that has only reached these heights before in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas: that your interesting friends are about to come knocking, laughing, crying at your doorways. Come in!
Daniel Horowitz is a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, studying twentieth-century poetics and aesthetics, crossword puzzles, the NYC Klezmer revival, and the status of natural beauty in modernity. He teaches literature, and teaches children how to garden. You can find more of his writing, thinking, and sci-fi on his pseudonym’s blog, Oops All Darlings, and you can follow his instagram @da.witz.
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