Like the bemusing queerness of Joe Brainard, Wayne Koestenbaum’s aesthetic contains and redefines any medium he happens to chance upon. An established poet, Koestenbaum has also left his mark on the contemporary essay for his pyrotechnic ability to praise, to pick up an author’s works, like James Schuyler’s, and find something even better than just the most astute thing to say. That is, how art makes you feel. How we desire. Sharing his many hats as poet, painter, scholar and academic, his new poem is drawn from a sequence published this month by Nightboat, The Pink Trance Notebooks. In them, as below, Koestenbaum concatenates and concentrates the world to its most monadic units of precious junk, stray memoranda, elusive and sensuous at-hand-ness. Replacing the author’s habitual diaries he had kept for three decades, these new poetic crumbs and quizzical pre-thoughts underlie as well as underline a consciousness committed to beauty, in the hypersalient form of the Barthesian punctum. Thinking is Koestenbaum’s poetry, and as such, it welcomes life’s incompletions, its messy or mottled ongoingness, our sense that art is less about formal consummation than constant interruption, hesitation, that ballsy belief that living is never enough.
Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
TRANCE NOTEBOOK #21
[surreptitious nookie with a large astronaut]
he held this pen and
therefore polluted it
______________
rubbing his finger
gay along lip as at
Castro Theater seeing
Giant
______________
two
penises together in photo
lead to penises together
in Winnipeg, syllogism—
______________
starting from
Paumanok is fine but where
is Paumanok and why is
it fish-shaped?
______________
lining up the
anti-Semites
______________
breast of
shrink in dark near
Thai Orchid—mind
and lit obelisk or observation
scene in Rebel without a Cause
______________
smell of AIDS in Ramrod
the young poet said
______________
hurts
wrist to shake hands with
a pervert
______________
is
Whitman pro-onanism
or anti-onanism? obviously
both, Whitman is
pro-bowel
______________
writing in a Greyhound bus
station in a tiny pad, doing
character sketches as warm-up
for fiction
______________
I took disco
dancing lessons near theater where
Airport played, Baskin-
Robbins afterward, kiss
or not kiss at the door
______________
Warren Beatty’s big
cock as seen by sister Shirley
MacLaine
______________
stern
urinating at airport,
a pilot shaking it out
______________
beard of cousin proclaiming
Horowitz’s “Arabeske” (Schumann)
ambrosial
______________
father’s “inner” precludes my
use of “inner,” father and son
can’t both use “inner”—
______________
Wagner and Whitman
in cahoots vis-à-vis crowd
consciousness, Frankfurt School
______________
use
book covers as canvases for
structured figure/ground
experiments
______________
copycat suicides rampant
in Europe, Werther’s
Muttersprache
______________
cough cough in Munich is
racist code, they cough when
they sense difference, they
cough when they need to expel
the other, they cough when
they are uncomfortable—
______________
God stood on the mount
and said please remove
Safeway supermarket
from your memory
______________
nightmarish
sex in cars, quick
gropes on BART
______________
underarm hair is turbulence
______________
Idiot
epilepsy mentioned in conjunction
with élève and Spontaneous Me
______________
gunshot wound
mentioned in jest
______________
rush is Rausch,
Rausch isn’t quite trance
______________
ressentiment said
the admirer of Nietzsche
despite crazy son, crazy wife,
bad aortas
______________
red Converse
sneakers as signature of
early nostalgia
______________
Unica Zürn found
sexual stimulation in a void
______________
she told me never again to
mention vagina though she
acknowledged that by over-
mentioning vagina I was
attempting to be
a vagina projectionist
______________
pancakes as incest and trips to
SF to buy school dresses
for the weeper—
______________
Botticelli essay researched
in Jesuit library
______________
I lean on the
sentence as if it were
a stranger’s leg or arm,
I lean upon the object of
the verb as if screwing it
______________
reading Bleak House and
Pure and the Impure on
cross-country flights, lying
to the Bible teacher
______________
anger at my son,
my non-son, my objectification
_____________
strange insistence on
making surreptitious nookie
with a large astronaut
______________
fomerly epiphanic relation to
the vomiting episode
______________
she
threw herself out a window
not because Hans Bellmer
tied her up or maybe yes
because Bellmer tied her up
______________
father’s
messy handwriting, legal pads
in conservatory library
______________
mortadella
or turkey for 99 cents, a
roll for 25 cents, no mustard,
no lettuce, no tomato
______________
stretched Ginsberg mouth
of poet son, imbecile nose
of automatic writer
______________
make it clear to Cher
that I consider her
a trashy runner-up
with a trashy grandmother
______________
will the
red sneakers be thrown away?
do the red sneakers require
forgiveness?
______________
my mother made bastard
chicken for supper
_____________
stop saying “you’re
sexy” to guys who won’t reciprocate—
_____________
stop chasing epiphenomenal
forefathers, Dutch Jews
in 1612
______________
“—ate” words
refer to extrojection
(expectorate, regurgitate)
______________
“—ize” words
refer to introjection
(moisturize, internalize)
______________
this porn photo
of skinhead is up your
alley because of menorah
frame
______________
much
I say is fantasy but
imprisoned filmmaker
is fact
______________
English poetry has spent
1,000 years counting
to ten, then
starting all over again,
iambic pentameter
a meditation hook
______________
tomato stain on hustler’s
t-shirt
______________
he taught me about suicide
and recommended Dostoevsky
in the Rambler station wagon
_____________
Mr. Beebee taught mother to
drive the Rambler
slowly to Santa Cruz
_____________
father’s secretary pretended
to be moved by Tillie Olsen
_____________
Stonehenge transported by
Museum of Tolerance
to Ottawa
______________
save our
ability to say “cloud,”
save our glances and cuckoldings
______________
give us strength to endure
the nonhorizontal
______________
be ocean not cloud, be
land imminent
______________
no surface to call
dominant, no horizontal
plank to reign
______________
L’Immoraliste
as gift, Steppenwolf as intro
to drug consciousness and literary
refinement and pubic
hair triangles
______________
stability
achieved though we are
momentarily sideways
______________
broken lip on Fourth of
July threshold
______________
mother’s awareness of son’s
sperm, Shabbat pride
______________
Schiele’s refined perverts
help us survive
______________
Smucker’s jam,
rye toast, yellow eggs with
white irregular saltless lumps
