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.