Camp Marmalade

A kind of hyperactivity also reduces your chances of being humiliated; moving targets are harder to hit. In any case, Camp Marmalade avoids humiliation chiefly by never settling down. It straddles genres, becoming neither a work of poetry or prose (although it rejects neither). Divided into 42 sections, each sub-divided into small “morsels” of language, the book seems to avoid a thematic focus. Camp Marmalade can be started and stopped at any point. This is another strategy to evade or minimize humiliation.

Wayne Koestenbaum plays it cool in his poetry to the degree to which he thinks rigorously with his prose. There appears to be a universal substance at work, at play. In his laboratory of criticism – infectious meditations on Warhol, Jackie Kennedy, opera stars – Koestenbaum boils down artists and public figures he admires to essential qualities primed for emulation.

If one asked “what is the point of poetry?” there would be an infinite number of answers. But Koestenbaum’s most recent trance books offer a particularly compelling response: poetry is about facing what you don’t want to face and what you’ve always wanted to face at the same time.

Like the marmalade of its title, the book situates itself on the liminal stage of being suspended, always on the verge of becoming something else and yet also floating, a live-streaming signifier of its own velocity. Koestenbaum, who is no stranger to self-disclosure, here assembles something more performative and also political.

Interview with Felix Bernstein for Bookforum

Interview with Ben Shields for the Paris Review

Interview with Shoshana Olidort for LARB

Excerpts at Numéro Cinq

Even in trance writing, Koestenbaum is devoted to the formal artifice of the poem… This visual stretching and rearrangement is an important feature of the work. More so than the framing provided by those crafty horizontal lines, the near-mirroring imbues the work with plasticity and flexibility that puts the reader at ease to recognize and consider whatever she wants to.