Model Homes

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum knows how to drop the language in the blender of the imagination and hit frappe! The 13 ottava rima cantos in Model Homes present a neo-Freudian tale of the goings-on in the poet’s present home and various events from his childhood. Modulating a voice that is urbane and ribald, melancholic and wry, Koestenbaum puts a memorable spin on the status quo notion of domestic arrangements.

Wayne Koestenbaum holds a Ph.D. in English from Princeton University. He was co-winner of the 1989 Discovery/The Nation poetry contest, has published three books of poetry and three books of prose, and writes frequently for The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books and other periodicals. He lives in New York, NY.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Wayne Koestenbaum has published five books of critical prose, including The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and three books of poetry, including Ode to Anna Moffo and Other Poems. He is a Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Koestenbaum steps into his cheekily arriere-garde ottava rima with all the ease of an Augustan slipping into his bath. That he wants to play with the bubbles (and sometimes himself) instead of telling others how to bathe just means that he’s 21st-century, not 18th; that the bubbles are thick and fun but pop fast just means I’m 21st-century too, searching for the right drawer to store verse that addresses the reader with this level of lightness, prolixity, sociability and wit.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

What an utter, unmitigated delight! I literally had a silly grin plastered my face a lot of time while I was reading this, and I devoured it greedily as one would a fluffy beach read rather than my usual measured sips of poetry.

I'm so sick of the oppressive pall of faux solemnity and unmerited gravitas that looms over a lot of contemporary poetry. Life is funny sometimes, even in the midst of adversity! Maybe there should an advanced seminar on that concept in MFA programs.

I think that maybe 20% of this book-length poem consists of the author looking forward to his upcoming lunch break or snack, fantasizing or strategizing about what he's going to eat, and then lamenting it afterward -- so basically the poetic equivalent of cinema verite'. Another 20% is him pondering his inscrutable, unhappy stymied-poet mother and imagining how she's going to react to the book and whether it's fair of him to plunder his relatively privileged childhood for angsty poem fodder. Another 20% is frustration about his inability to bring his vision for the poem to full fruition and anxiety over whether the end result is actually nothing but a steaming pile of self-indulgent doggerel.

And did I mention the whole thing is written in an old Italian form, ottava rima? *heart eyes*

I'll admit that the charm of the whole shtick kind of began to wear off for me as I neared the end (but I say that about almost every book I read, and full disclosure, my attention span is such that I am constitutionally unable to watch a film whose duration exceeds 90 minutes). Also, I appreciated some of ribald and bawdy observations, but the sheer avalanche accumulation of them began to feel a little excessive for my personal sensibilities over the course of the book. I guess I started to feel slightly depressed about the flesh-obsessed vision of male interiority he presented.

Overall, this book is an amazing achievement and such a breath of fresh air in comparison to all those hilariously self-serious tomes of poetry out there today.

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...she'd barred the door, locked out
My parents, whose Yahweh-style retaliation
Was ridding her door of its obscene pig snout..."

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finished this on a train last night and I couldn't get it's rhythm out of my head. This is the first poem I've read looking for the ottava rima going in -- I'd never thought anything of that form before since it usually resolves into an unassuming iambic square on the page with full rhymes ending every line, but Koestenbaum revives it with sometimes speech-inspired (sometimes maddening) line breaks, internal rhymes, slant rhymes, etc. and uses it, as he says right in the poem, to cross the line between poetry and prose. He wonders if he's committing some literary offense by doing so, but I've always been fascinated with that blur, and I liked the poem best when it stayed in the fuzzy area. I haven't read much poetry that does so, and certainly nothing else that sustains a struggle with that "line" for nine cantos.

Something about this form also lends itself to Koestenbaum's subject -- not necessarily the people and events in the poem but the subject of his professed half-shame at writing these explicit, accusatory things, and his worries about the confines of poetry. The shame of course disappears completely at times, which I think is due to the freeing power of the form. And that addresses Koestenbaum's second concern, about the meter limiting him, and though we know that he raised a good question about meter, the poem puts it to rest. He talks about revising stanzas, making them fit and rhyme. It can be exhausting work but it always squeezes out the best of you. It's funny that the ottava rima first became popular in English only to mock heroic poetry. Model Homes is a great combination of mockery (of the man, of his situation(s), and of his poetic tools) and celebration. Even if it is kind of a twisted celebration. I find myself wanting to use his brand of ottava to clear my mind of unclean thoughts. There's something about it that (as Wayne shows us) makes a poet able to spill things onto the page that he would shield from view as he wrote them, even in an empty room.

I read some stanzas with rhythm in mind, enjoying the sounds of them. Others I read while forcing my brain to not give any line break or punctuation and kind of pause or consideration, and these read so much like prose. Some stanzas were easier to understand this way. Koestenbaum certainly has a handle on grammatical shift, and moves his modifiers miles away form their modifieds (without losing us), and flip flops subject-verb-object English wherever it sounds good. I appreciate his craft.

As far as non-formal elements go, I found the super-visceral and sexual lines sometimes off-putting, but I'm sure that's on purpose. I don't picture Koestenbaum trying to shock-and-awe anyone. And like I said, these are the things that come out of people when they settle into a comfortable rhythm, when they find a comfortable "receptacle" for whatever bodily and writerly fluids need catching (and he seems to have lots of them). I tried actually imagining some of the nastier sounding lines -- it actually makes them less nasty. Everybody poops, you know?

Finally, as a mother I was put off by some of the mommy-ambivalence. I know there are crazy mothers out there, and it's good when their sons can find a way to express their childhood fears and traumas without violence. It's silly, but when a mom reads a thing like that she just hopes to God she doesn't look that way to her son. I always wonder about sensational mom-portrayals (like Christine Crawford's, which Koestenbaum mentions).

Anyway this poem was a great read, an inspiration for any poet who's been too embarrassed to write, and a really cool revival of a renaissance form that I don't think any Anglophone since Byron has taken (half) seriously.