Trance Writing

Wayne Koestenbaum's Camp Marmalade is the second volume of a proposed trance trilogy (the first, The Pink Trance Notebooks, was published in 2015). It is a long book, 409 pages of forty-two numbered and subtitled poems. Separating the trance notebooks into discrete numbered poems may not have been a formal necessity, but it makes the text more legible and more pleasant to read. Even the way the poems look on the page contributes to the reader's pleasure; each poem is made up of what Koestenbaum, reading at The Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, called "syntactical units," short phrases separated by a "crafty horizontal line." The line is indeed crafty—a short line the length of maybe six em-dashes, which gives the effect not of separation as a total distance from but rather separation as a little space between units. Because of the line, the units are segmented but can still communicate between themselves, a chain-link fence rather than a brick wall—quite neighborly indeed.

In fact, the units do communicate with each other. Certain preoccupations occur throughout the book: Jewishness, food, painting, neighbors (that word again!), celebrities, death, and celebrity death. While the book can, at first read, give the impression of everything happening all at once, upon a closer read the interests and obsessions (as some of them seem to be) become familiar in their repetition. What appears at first as an onslaught of references I couldn't possibly hope to place in a context becomes a pleasurable sinking into language. Koestenbaum acknowledges the shifting nature of the reading experience in the above mentioned recording in Houston, saying that, while the poems might appear to be a torrent of "unglossed proper nouns," he invites the audience to experience the "deluge as titillation and not terror."

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Approached from this angle, the language—its wildness, variance, and spread—is exciting. It can be read as both senseless accumulation and extremely careful catalog. As he writes "I am gloss and echo." Phrases like "mental weather" place us within the register of a therapist while "Lotta Lenya isn't Lot / isn't salt" serves both as an example of free-association phonetic play and a representation of the exhaustive depth of Koestenbaum's musical history or at least the vocabulary of that history. The use of the singer's name is not necessarily to prompt a search for meaning so much as the sounds of her name allow for Old Testament allusion. That is, languages—not only the poet's language, but the totality of vocabularies he has encountered—are presented, and the poet feels his way indefatigably through them. Koestenbaum seems to enjoy the thin space between disgust and delight. Or rather he delights in disgust. As Ben Shields notes in an interview with Koestenbaum for The Paris Review, "There's a lot in both trance volumes that many people wouldn't even put in their private diaries." The stanzas veer between incest and parental affection, youth, and decay—an elderly aunt soils herself at the dinner table, the mother has blood crusted on her lips. You get the idea. Despite this, I doubt the reader would find Koestenbaum a disgusting narrator or even find this to be a disgusting book. The book is seen through by Koestenbaum's tone (sweet, curious) and his willingness to be the underdog in his interiority. He seems resigned to letting his subconscious dredge up what it will—he is only here to keep the minutes.

Explaining his trance process for Shoshana Olidort with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Koestenbaum says, "Trance, for my purposes, is this state of self-forgetfulness, absence, flight. It's a state of not knowing who or where I am. Call it dissociation, combined with intense physical groundedness, and absorption in the minutiae of physical sensation." Later he goes on to say, "The mind surrenders to language's will." Koestenbaum surrenders to language's will throughout the book. There is a sense...