“The magazines would say I’m fascinated by celebrity, but you and I know I’m fascinated by luminousness and exemplarity, by self-fashioned lives.” The poet, critic, and novelist Wayne Koestenbaum has an impish, beguiling habit of making you feel like an intellectual conspirator. “You and I know”—don’t we just, even in the brief confederacy of an afternoon Zoom call.
Koestenbaum arrives swiftly at a conversation’s key term, the secret word that will unlock all. The word “luminousness”—somehow less uptight, more embodied than “luminosity”—aptly describes his new poetry collection, Stubble Archipelago. In 36 sonnets he stages various scenes of eccentric noticing, furtive public desire, shameless name-dropping, verbal confusion, and outright admiration for more or less famous bodies and minds. So many shining facets to a Koestenbaum poem—it glints, it shimmers, it scintillates.
In a much duller alternate universe, Koestenbaum, who was born in San Jose, California, in 1958 and studied literature at Harvard and Princeton, might have become merely an innovative scholar or theorist. Or a celebrated poet of keen formal ambition and scurrilous thematic repute. Or a gadfly commentator on pop culture. Instead his career has been a high-low adventure that sometimes touches the mainstream but is marked above all by idiosyncratic pursuit of his own passions, however obvious, indecent, obscure, or elevated.
In The Queen’s Throat (1993) he converted his obsession with the opera singer Anna Moffo into a study of gay-male affinity for opera. In 2001 he published the best (most condensed, most delirious) biography there is of Andy Warhol. His playful takes on art, music, literature, and life have been collected in My 1980s and Other Essays (2013) and Figure It Out (2020). Stubble Archipelago is his 10th book of poetry.
Forced to define his mercurial aesthetic, I would say that Koestenbaum “elopes” with language, lets himself be seduced and led away by it. He tells me that he suffers from “a susceptibility to the charisma or the perfume of the single word or the single proper noun.” While writing the poems in Stubble Archipelago, he could easily get hung up on a verbal detail such as pli, the French for fold, and its proximity to pleat, and find himself in a fugue state “daydreaming about all of that.”
Innuendo, filiation, hunch: these are essential elements in the Koestenbaum style. They take him further out along the pleasure pier of thought and word association than an academic critic is meant to go, or most poets will risk. As he puts it in Figure It Out, “I have a problem knowing when to pause. I catapult into irresponsible acts.”
The excess is partly in his language, partly in the poet’s filthy mind. The new sonnets tend to fold, buckle, or concertina down the page, making a poem longer than its traditional 14 lines, which have become small stanzas. Koestenbaum is addicted to kennings, an ancient poetic hyphen trick: “Wind-torn sex-club, only one patron, urine beer / muscle trophies, disco / requiem, guilt-sirop / honey-cyclone, fisting- / corner naught-world.”
“I catapult into irresponsible acts.”
Stubble Archipelago drifts happily between avowedly queer spaces and the subways, streets, and coffee shops of New York, where (the book’s title is already a visual clue) the poet fixates on the textures of passing bodies, fleetingly spied erotic sprites: “Coveting your metallic sneakers, svelte flood- / trousered Puck outpacing / my origins-of- / totalitarianism lech amble.”
When I ask if such intimacies feel risky to him as a writer, Koestenbaum says they don’t: “I feel so surrounded by my saints of perversion”—among them the novelist Edmund White, the poet Frank O’Hara, and the art critic Gregory Battcock. His work is full of unmelancholic acknowledgement of those queer artists and writers who have gone before him. Some of his most glorious essays have been about these figures: the world-eating energy of Susan Sontag, the love of nuance in Roland Barthes.
In Stubble Archipelago, Koestenbaum says, it is often a matter of telegraphic mentioning of names rather than elaborate homage, a “casual learnedness” that not all readers will catch because they may not recognize the writer Lucy Lippard, or the composer Michel Legrand, or the performance artist Charlotte Moorman. But that is just fine: “You either know or you don’t, and if you don’t know, the list is going to be over soon, so don’t beat me up just because I made a list of names.”
These lists don’t feel exclusive—more like gaggles of alluring strangers at a party. For all the flash and dare of his prose and poetry, Koestenbaum is a supremely generous and democratic presence on the literary scene, which perhaps explains why he is so loved in a field not immune to petty rivalry.
The list of his prominent admirers includes Maggie Nelson, whom he taught at the City University of New York, where he is a distinguished professor of (deep breath) English, comparative literature, French, biography and memoir, American studies, and film studies. The critic Parul Sehgal has compared him to Gertrude Stein, Lewis Carroll, and Samuel Beckett, and celebrated his flamboyance: “If his excesses irk, it might be useful to wonder where and how you acquired your limits in the first place.” Rachel Kushner has hymned his “unusual combination of erudition, elegance, irreverence, and, in welcome measure, a touch of sleaze.”
Koestenbaum tells me he is preparing for a performance a few nights later. “The Group Tickling Experiment” will involve a new film by Koestenbaum, who will also play piano and even sing. In recent years, there have been more of these ancillary activities and lounge apparitions, the poet and critic blowing off the “unpleasant internal atmosphere” that accumulates with the labor of the sentence. Perverting yet again our expectations of what a scholar and poet might be. The thing about perversions, Barthes once said, is that they make people happy.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. He is working on Ambivalence, a book about education
