Camp Marmalade

by Wayne Koestenbaum

Camp Marmalade takes the freedoms of trance utterance--unfettered verbal association, explicit auto-ethnography, erotic bricolage--and applies a more stringent sense of time-as-emergency to this liberation-oriented poetic method. Part diary, part collage, part textbook for a new School of Impulse, Camp Marmalade assembles a perverse and giddy cultural archive, a Ferris wheel of aphorisms, depicting a queer body amidst a dizzying flow of sensations, dreams, and sex-and-death distillations--whether sugary, fruity, bitter, expired, or freshly jarred.

Genres: Poetry, Queer

400 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2018

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

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was passionately converted to Koestenbaum years ago, by reading Moira Orfei in Aigues-Mortes, the best queer novel no one has ever heard of. Since then, I’m signed on, I read it all. Camp Marmalade, like Pink Trance Notebooks, is a set of poems made of aleatory, horny, erudite fragments. I very much enjoy reading in this way. Especially when I am tired or dismayed, it helps to stare at small clumps of words that aren’t making obvious attempts to gang up on me. (My hero in this genre is Robert Lax.)

These trance poems remind me a little of Gertrude Stein and Joe Brainard and David Markson, with scores of people wandering in and about, and the fragments disappearing as soon as you read them. He’s also clearly inspired by Friederike Mayrocker, an Austrian poet and experimental fiction writer that I never would have heard about if not for reading interviews with Koestenbaum. (She wrote a crazy, dense, marvellous book called ‘brutt, or The Sighing Gardens’ that I found both difficult to read and totally impossible to stop reading. It’s a phenomenon. God, I loved it. Do seek it out.)

I admit that I enjoyed Pink Trance Notebooks a little more than Camp Marmalade, though I am grateful for both. Maybe because it was a new experiment, I thought there was a little more energy in Pink Trance, a little more invitation. In this book I sometimes I felt he was saying, “I am Wayne Koestenbaum so I can do anything!” Which is true. If he publishes his grocery lists I will spend my grocery money on them. And yet -- I wish he wouldn’t remind me. The end of the book, the last poem especially, #42, is just a tiny bit more arranged, more composed, and I liked that shift, having just a little more to go on, a little more construction, just for the pleasure of it.

Please excuse the unseemliness of what follows. I am someone who dropped out of society to read more. (It was a relief to everyone, I promise.) Endlessly reading -- and of course writing as well -- I found myself asking, “Who gets to be avant-garde?” It seems to me there are about 5 persons now. Off the top of my head: Koestenbaum, Diane Williams, Ben Marcus, Gary Lutz, Maggie Nelson. (Of course there must be many more and please do send me a note with their names, because I want to read them!) And naturally, these people support each other, write blurbs, write forewords, go about being celebrated. In New York mostly. Is there any other way? Are the rest of us doomed?

Let’s pick someone from the generation before, whom I worship: Joe Brainard. Remember “I Remember”? How awesome was Joe Brainard! And, yet, someone was there (Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman etc.) to see him, encourage him, to recognize that the small, odd thing he did was a real, and great, and worthy thing.

Again, forgive the unseemliness. As someone living in a subterranean room in Jalisco -- there’s really no chance of anything, is there? Nothing happens without a community and no community means no chance. That is sometimes difficult for me, and no doubt must be difficult, too, for many other people who are, like me, writing their strange books for no one. May we end up, in spite of ourselves, like Robert Lax -- a charismatic and connected hermit!

As it seems likely that people reading odd books like this one may also be writing odd books of their own, if you happen across this message in a bottle, and feel in need of community, please do send a note, as you see fit. I would be grateful. And I apologize to the fabulous Mr. Koestenbaum, for essentially inserting a personal ad into a review of his innovative and merciful book. I am here, ready to read what comes next, whatever form it takes.

[Cecilia Stelzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

"a novel demands
concentration on
consecutiveness—poetry
entails fussy
babysitting of minutiae"

I read this whole book aloud. With this book and Pink Trance Notebooks, I finished without really remembering what I just read, but while I read, I was very deeply in the text and happily transfixed.

[Kyle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a trance. Reminds me so much of Joe Brainard's "I Remember," in how the contextlessness of each piece provides a kind of context for all of them. See also:

"too tired to give the context
that might make the
detail matter, and now its
undescribed context falls
murdered and neglected
into the pit"

And:

"what good is our knowledge
of how to sift, if
we can no longer
find the halo
whose luminous enigma
drove us to divide
useful from useless droplets?"

[MARISSA! · Rating 2 out of 5]

michael and i have agreed that we would ruN if we ever met this professor. this book of poems is a concrete translation of a fever dream; i definitely expanded my vocabulary but c*m did not need to be mentioned on every other page.

[a r g]

liked, didn't love

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

similar to the first volume of this trilogy, many parts were excellent, and many other parts were dreadfully boring.

[Josie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Our greatest living poet.