nightboat books

[REVIEW] Ultramarine by Wayne Koestenbaum

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(Nightboat Books, 2022)

REVIEW BY C. FRANCIS FISHER

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The worst kind of reading can become a tussle for tyranny. It is this sort that turns people off of poetry – the feeling that the poet must shroud something important in complicated diction or syntax, dangling a carrot the reader must work to decipher. In this struggle, both author and reader vie for supremacy. The author obfuscates meaning with symbols or other poetic devices, and the reader penetrates the text, lifts its skirt, revealing its hidden meaning through analysis.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s Ultramarine, the third and final book in his trance poem trilogy, calls into question this struggle between writer and reader, or poses another question altogether. In order to read Ultramarine, one must relinquish control. These deeply personal musings are impenetrable if you try to understand every reference or connect each logical leap. Relatively early on in this 472-page tome Koestenbaum asks, “who dominates? or does / no one dominate? and is / domination not the issue?”

Koestenbaum intervenes into the question of domination by blowing it up completely. One is both completely inside the mind of the writer – as evidenced by lack of explanations, shorthand in place of names and other devices – and completely outside insofar as the text remains opaque to us – for example the first page includes a character denoted by “M” whom we will never know. In exchange for submitting to the tyranny of the text, the reader is endlessly entertained. After all, how many books ask “why isn’t smegma / more frequently discussed?”

The themes of these poems revolve around the body: sex, the performance of gender, alienation. The first poem in the book, “#1 [my prostate is a shopping mall]”  leads with a paradox: “I meant to begin / in Barbra’s voice / but I’m speaking in my / own voice as Ralph Fiennes.” Here, we have a speaker who starts at the point of failure and moves in to the self as persona or performance. From the outset the idea of the atomized self so popular in Western thought is no longer tenable when a speaker declares they speak in their own voice as the voice of another. We are always already influenced by the cultures around us; there is no possibility of purity.

The poem goes on to move through a dizzying array of thoughts before landing on “her discovery / of my cock began / to equal my own / apprehension of its / rumored existence.” The alienation of the self from the body becomes clear and collides with external anxieties: in the mind of the speaker other people talking about his cock is more real than his physical cock itself. The notion of self-formation the first poem offers pivots on an idea of influence.

In “#2 [do-it-yourself-placenta],” we arrive at a completely different manner of constructing the self. Here Koestenbaum offers a self forged through otherness. He writes, “closest companion / is my cough – I hug it.” It is through defect or disability that the self recovers from the alienation the previous poem expressed. What does not work in a normative fashion announces itself, thus bringing the self into the body. Later in the poem, “the turtle beheld / [the speaker’s] inhumanity.” The animal returns the experience of the speaker back to himself, allowing him to be seen the way he feels. These explorations in the ways otherness can behold the self point to the possibility of relationality.

Throughout the text, Koestenbaum returns to the performance of gender. Early on, when the reader is learning how to approach the text, he writes,

never taught

how to shave, a lost scene –

figuring masculinity out

by myself, and I never

figured it out

 Here, masculinity becomes something that must be learned–staged, repeated–rather than an innate quality. He goes on later to return to this scene:

waiting for father

to notice that it was time

for me to start shaving –

he never noticed – I wanted

him to buy me a razor

and shaving cream and teach

me how to use them

Desire meets the performance of gender. The speaker wants his father to acknowledge his burgeoning manhood and commend it by teaching him to become even more masculine. However, if we return to the previous scene, the reader already knows this recognition never happens. Thus, desire and manhood meet in a clash that emasculate the speaker, leaving him without the knowledge to perform his gender in socially normative ways.

Similar moments of confrontation and investigation pervade the text, for example “desire / intensified by talking / to my father.” The speaker sidesteps the incest taboo and Koestenbaum accentuates this reveal by breaking the line between talking and the subject, thus raising the reader’s level of surprise. Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another. Gossip, too, has a place in this world: “Peter / Hujar’s lover called me a sissy / intellectual, a dying breed.” By flattening the hierarchy between different forms of writing, Koestenbaum queers the form of the book. Further, he questions the idea of owning language. One short passage reads:

I cut hair

for the Shah of Iran,

I had an internationally

known hair salon on

Long Island, please

text me a photo of your

Vermont hot tub

This reads like found language, something said to the speaker, or overheard. By choosing not to place quotation marks around this language, Koestenbaum problematizes the notion of ownership.

Despite the self-interested nature of the journal form, this text brings in themes beyond the personal. Questions of antisemitism and the Holocaust arise throughout the text. “#8 [pumpkin childbirth]” ends “when the pustule / vanishes, a pock remains.” This seems to be a key way of understanding Koestenbaum’s project with history – that which is gone is never truly gone. Rather it leaves scars, wounds, the trace of itself on the body.

One hundred years after publication of “The Waste Land” and its ending invocation of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Koestenbaum reimagines the fragment. If Eliot’s magnum opus is made up of gathered fragments compiled into a dam to protect his life from some external force, Ultramarine attempts “to assemble life from fragments.” A century on, it seems all we have is fragments. They no longer protect us from ruin, rather they are the very thing that makes up our lives.

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C. Francis Fisher is a poet, translator, and critic based in Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Pacifica Literary Magazine, and the Columbia Journal among other publications. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. Currently, she works as the poetry editor for the Columbia Journal.

[REVIEW] The Old Philosopher by Vi Khi Nao

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The Old Philosopher
Nightboat Books, 2016
73 pages

REVIEWED BY LESLIE CATON

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Body, earth, family, global politics, and God pushed thoughtfully through a meat grinder with memory and sex blades: this is the work inside The Old Philospher, winner of the 2014 Nightbooks Prize for Poetry, by Vi Khi Nao. Before I go on, I need to admit I’m not usually a poetry reader–I’m unsettled when I don’t have confident answers to the question what’s this about? The poetry I gravitate toward is concrete and essayistic, like Mary Ruefle’s “The Bench.” Khi Nao’s previous work, including her novella Swans in Half Mourning, retains a consistency in form that anchors readers and makes space for the imaginative. Philosopher, although packaged in a poetry casing, is anything but consistent. It reads like essay, fiction, or poetry by turns, but provocative images and themes pull even a reluctant reader from challenging poem to story to lyric essay and everything in between.

The book begins with a brief poetic meditation on identity and gender in “dear god I am god” then moves deeper into nature and the uncertainty of prayer as the sun is god as “a child / who pretends to pray” in “Fog,” then into the mind of rock itself as a fatalistic chunk of limestone with a working-class vernacular–“See ya around, pancake faces”–prepares to be turned into a retaining wall in “AA Meeting for A Limestone.” Though the subjects of these poems are dissimilar, thematic threads pull them together: in “dear god” the narrator is washing herself “in dew;” in “Fog,” god is a “daffodil twirling in dew;” in “AA Meeting” the limestone laments his last day “being drunk sitting by the river.” Water lets these unlike pieces flow; in the first two poems we dip our toes, by the third we are drenched, convinced we should suspend our disbelief and just read.

Language is cut and combined in startling ways, mixed into new forms as each piece builds on the next. Nao mixes all kinds of innovation from the literary charcuterie: experimenting with space, punctuation, narrative voice, line, meter; even prose that reads like short-short stories. While this kind of sometimes-jarring motion from one form to another could feel contrived, Nao deftly uses these stylistic leaps to keep the reader off-balance. She leaves a hand on our shoulder, though, by repeating and recombining themes and images: the concrete of body and earth, the uncertainty of memory and God, biblical stories as vivid as our own histories, dark human moments feeding the political, and the grounding pull of sex. This echoing is necessary to steady the reader as form, content, voice–almost everything–shift through the book.

The importance of the thematic and linguistic through-line is demonstrated in the move from “Biblical Flesh,” a three-page block of poetic prose about the betrayed lover to “Hay Bale & Asphalt,” one page of poetry spaced carefully from margin to margin about love or a woman being run over by a policeman outside a restroom (for me, an uncomfortable ambiguity):

and wait     for your 3rd lover to arrive     and read you back
the torturous verses    concealed in packages of salt inside you     Then you turn
to Lot’s wife and ask,     “Was      the view worth it? Is it      still gorgeous?”
(“Biblical Flesh”)

 

She is grass, legume, fodder drifting beneath the field      of
gametes
The man is a mixture                                                   of
bituminous
(“Hay Bale & Asphalt”)

Body and elemental earth exist in a liminal space in these poems, demanding that we consider what else is similar, what else transcends potentially imagined boundaries. As recurrence of theme, image, and language carries from piece to piece, a sense of continuity develops, earning the reader’s trust. And this trust is absolutely necessary by the time we get to “Pastoral Threshold,” where we are thrust into a supernatural political short-short story narrated by a leader of the United Arab Emirates in a modern take on the biblical story of Uriah the Hittite. The casual, patriarchal malevolence in this poem is stirring; after the narrator explains how he sent Uriah to Syria as a UN Inspector to die and to take his wife, the ruler tells us, “Days after his death or rather his assassination, she was squirming in my arms, under the opulent bed sheets of the Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi where I housed my lust.” While this prose poem (or short-short) could easily stand on its own, as with the other disparate works in this book readers must trust Nao’s sure hand and take the time to reorient with each piece or be lost to confusion.

Nowhere do readers’ efforts pay off more richly than when Nao takes slices from her memory and shapes them with image, combining elements of previous poems that become revelatory. In “My Socialist Saliva,” the political is pressed into the personal through Nao’s childhood in Vietnam. Again the borders between nature and the physical is questioned. On the back of her mother’s motorcycle, breathing the “aromatic rain of rambutan and coffee beans,” she tells us:

My mother rode me on land coated with     rambutans
Rambutans were like little ball hearts growing red hair
The earth of Long Khann was swollen with such cardiovascular beauties
My little heart was a little engine
Of red earth–the streets of my childhood were walking to & fro

And then the violence of the Viet Cong carves into the narrative, surreally introducing the political into the body:

My grandmother’s body, a helicopter
ran through her in Saigon
Its heliocentric blades cutting through her skin & bleeding crimson fence wires
That demarcated the pastoral field of her elbow from the suburb of her bicep

The chopping up of convention, the blurring of form and genre, and the haunting resurgence of the deepest common themes resonate through this work. Like the way Nao grinds up poetic tradition, she butchers expectation to make something delicious. She makes us work, makes us think. I can’t say what, exactly, this book is about. But it reads like life often feels: confusing until we take the time to breathe and let meaning coalesce from the strangest places.

 

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Leslie Caton is a freelance writer and essayist. Her essays have been named Notable in The Best American Essays and finalist for the Norman Mailer Two-Year Non-Fiction Prize.