Ultramarine distills four years of Koestenbaum’s trance notebooks (2015–2019) into a series of tightly-sewn collage-poems, filled with desiring bodies, cultural touchstones, and salty memories. Beyond Proust’s madeleine we head toward a “deli” version of utopia, crafted from hamantaschen, cupcake, and cucumber. Painting and its processes bring bright colors to the surface. Through interludes in Rome, Paris, and Cologne, Ultramarine reaches across memory, back to Europe, beyond the literal world into dream-habitats conjured through language’s occult structures.
Click here to read a conversation with Wayne Koestenbaum on the Nightboat blog!
Reviews
Urges, observations, memories, directions, and aspirations scissor, smear, and echo one another within and between verses demarcated by austere, unbroken dashes. The book is filled with carbonated queries—philosophical, literary, homophonic, ontological—that burst and fizz on ultramarine’s oceanic, auratic surface. When Koestenbaum asks, “Isn’t art / a transcendent category?,” the answer can only be an emphatic yes.
If the voluminous allusions, usually divorced from context or analysis, are what a cerebral, queer, Jewish American culture vulture reared in the 1960s and ’70s would predictably fall for… they often bestow pleasures deeper than passing giggles, uncovering, as Koestenbaum does while reading Simone Weil, “the hurt, pocked portion / of being.”
Koestenbaum, unflinching as he observes and notates his interior, brings a heroic quality to this poetic feat.
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.
This project, which began with The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and continued with Camp Marmalade (2018), is remarkable for many reasons, not least of all for the distinct tonal differences (or: colors) between the respective volumes. Each collection of trance notebooks reflects the degree to which Koestenbaum is attuned to real-time realities while he composes. Initially drafted in cafés and on trains, these notebooks capture one man’s reflections and impressions as he is experiencing or remembering them.
The final volume of his “trance trilogy”—preceded by The Pink Trance Notebooks (2015) and Camp Marmalade (2018)—the collection is both a joyful language game and a bracing reminder that queer play is serious business.
Koestenbaum delves into paintings and the artistic process, using color as a metaphor through which to consider desire and memory.
In Ultramarine (Nightboat, Feb.), Wayne Koestenbaum sifts through four years of trance notebooks to stitch together a revealing collage.
Throughout the collection, Koestenbaum takes the tradition of queer ekphrasis to new frontiers of materiality and abstraction, focusing on the motility and viscosity of paint on canvas, the emotional intensity of given colors and forms.
Here Koestenbaum reflects on his various obsessions—color, kink, the Northeast corridor, Gertrude Stein—and his signature ‘trance poetics.’
There is a linguistic playfulness here that will appeal to some readers, as well as an insistence on modernity and the high-low duality of daily experience.
