Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  with no extraordinary power,

  reconstitute the world.

  Disavowed theatrics accord Rich a tone of oracular power.

  In public readings, Rich recited her own poems with indelibly sonorous clarity. No listener could fail to be haunted by her deliberate voice, with its trace of a Southern (Baltimorean?) accent. A voice at the podium and a voice on the page are not the same thing; but the grain of her voice can unlock her poetry’s sometimes Cartesian heart. Listen to Rich hearing herself—testing herself, investigating her own capacities—in such phrases as “water-drop in tilted catchment” or “gentleness swabs the crusted stump.” Precisely calibrated poetic speech is a poultice.

  In “Storm Warnings,” the first poem in her first book (A Change of World), published when she was twenty-one years old, she describes herself as a clairvoyant “knowing better than the instrument / what winds are walking overhead.” She became the instrument who could register the tempest’s oncoming force. Storm—as planetary crisis, as political revolution, as sensual upsurge—was her vocation. If you have never read Rich, begin with “Storm Warnings.” Read it aloud. Try to imagine a country where a poet like Rich is the lauded anchor a populace could trust, in its quest for policies more solid than superstitions.

  (2016)

  I DON’T UNDERSTAND SHAKESPEARE’S SONNET #154

  I don’t know who the love-god is or why he’s asleep. I don’t know why a branding iron inflames his heart. I don’t know why chaste nymphs shop for keepsakes and then throw their souvenirs in the Thames. I don’t know why, ransacking a shtetl closet, I found cocaine in a mink coat’s pocket (as if the laden article were a relic from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story I’d misremembered). I don’t know why the pianist lit a votive candle: to aid her seduction of my chaste worthless body in the mountain chalet? I don’t know why Dad came down with Legionnaires’ disease and re-proposed to Mom, though she’d long ago exiled him and pronounced him false. I don’t know why Buster Keaton (my nickname) desires no one, only a cocktail sign neon-lit in the Nevada desert. I don’t know why virgins keep their virginity, or why ephebe butts are considered cute near graduation time, or why it is the responsibility of bucktoothed coloraturas to apostrophize a novice rear’s rotundity. I don’t know why the painter put her prosthetic arm on the seminar table and then asked a pert question about blindness, or why I sang “Suicidio!” off-pitch as substitute for vespers. I don’t know why my Sunday School teacher Mrs. Forkash was prettier than the previous year’s Sunday School teacher, or why minor differences in prettiness are as solemn as state secrets. I don’t know why taking a bath with my brother provoked no hard-on, at least not a hard-on I can remember, and I remember every hard-on, especially the kitsch ones, the nepenthe ones, the hard-ons that have the power (even in retrospect) to eviscerate my will to survive. I don’t know why after kissing the ailing man my lips felt tingly and chapped, as if I’d covered them with Tabasco sauce. I don’t know why the sick man allegedly found his trick in the library basement, and why I imagined that the death-bringing trick was well-hung. I don’t know why smallpox on blankets creates genocide, but I know a genocide when I see one, and I’m the poet here; I’m the loser who gets to decide how the poem ends.

  (2014)

  MY BRIEF APPRENTICESHIP WITH JOHN BARTH

  In fall 1980, when I was twenty-one years old, I moved to Baltimore to study fiction writing with John Barth. I finagled a cheap apartment on East Eager Street. Among my dwelling’s quirks was a hole in its bathroom wall. Through that aperture I could see into the adjoining apartment, where my neighbor often walked around nude. One evening I visited this naturist; he showed me his gun collection, arrayed on a coffee table. There is no good reason to mention that detail here, except that I remember it as vividly as I remember everything else from my year in Baltimore, and because my East Eager Street studio, with its vistas and its squalors, seemed the dank antithesis of what I experienced at Johns Hopkins University in Barth’s classroom, where I underwent an easeful, daunting, and lucid initiation into prose’s Eleusinian mysteries.

  This essay is composed in “crots,” a rare term I learned from Barth. A crot is a separable unit, like a paragraph, without connection to the units before or after it. Each crot is its own event. We leap from crot to crot, at liberty; connections arise through juxtaposition, not through direct statement or overt linkage.

  Before moving to Baltimore, I prepared by reading Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse. Its pages shone with strange juxtapositions. “Plush upholstery prickles uncomfortably through gabardine slacks in the July sun. The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationships, set the scene for the main action, expose the background of the situation if necessary, plant motifs and foreshadowings where appropriate.” So went the title tale, its haute postmodernity my first taste of the new pleasure to be taken in warm coldness. I read Barth’s specular “Life-Story” at a café in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while drinking French roast coffee made in a French press machine. From Barth’s book I learned a word that would become my touchstone: glossolalia.

  The first day of the seminar, Barth introduced us by mentioning each student’s exemplary trait. One of my classmates had won a fiction prize from Mademoiselle. What was my signature accomplishment? Barth said, “Wayne has high GRE scores.” I remember thinking, “My scores aren’t particularly stellar.”

  “Not particularly stellar” is an apt description of the fiction I wrote that semester. Barth never directly offered verdicts; he commented punctiliously on matters of form, tone, diction, perspective, and plausibility. He never said “not particularly stellar.” That phrase is my own.

  Barth informed me that I was a surrealist. Maybe he never used the word surrealism, but he indicated that my stories emerged from an indwelling force, my portable furnace of dreams and fantasies, whose byways were not easily converted into convincing narratives. He encouraged me to read John Hawkes, whose novels prodded me to practice a more fluent oneirism. From Barth’s diagnosis of my surrealism, I understood that he was drawing a distinction between two kinds of writers—those who believed in the experiential world of phenomena, and those who believed in the imaginary, unseen world of noumena. (I’m botching the philosophical terms.) Barth helped me realize that I was a carnivalesque numen-seeker rather than a canny constructor of stories. The home I would find in the erotic turgidities of the unconscious—even as exemplified in a French press coffee machine—was a location that Barth, in his subtle way, guided me toward, by recommending Hawkes and by diagnosing my dream-prone impracticality.

  Barth told me that I had good grammar. I gathered from this comment that I participated in the concrete, phenomenal world through linguistic impeccability, even if my motives and inspirations were chthonic. I had not yet made the transition from Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood. Barth introduced me to a world of experimental, chimerical literature that could rely on schemes as well as on serendipity. By commending my grammar, Barth obliquely gave me the go-ahead; on the surface at least, my stories were clean.

  That semester, I was trying to live wildly; the nuts and bolts of my wild living I’ll save for another essay. Some of those excursions leaked into my fiction, though usually messed up by melodramatic exaggeration. One of my stories opened with a sexual murder—my attempt to be noir and to express allegiance to an erotic underground. Barth wrote in my opening paragraph’s margin: “You’ve certainly got my attention here!” I took his comment to mean that I was overdoing it; maybe he was amused by my Sadean gesture’s punk audacity, despite its purple coating.

  After learning that Barth liked opera, I developed a fantasy of becoming, overnight, a successful tenor; in my flight of fancy, I starred in La Bohème at a summer festival on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. The fantasy acquired a disturbing intricacy: in one version of my pipe dream, I imagined trying out a Puccini aria in the seminar and seeing Barth’s face light up
with admiration as he realized that though I was no great shakes as a fiction writer, I had a knack for singing verismo.

  The final day of the fall seminar (my last day studying with Barth, who would take a sabbatical in the spring), he brought his drafts and notebooks to show us what a novelist’s raw materials looked like. I’d never before seen a famous writer’s manuscripts; nor had I ever thought with sufficient concreteness about writing as a physical event that leaves a trail of material traces. Barth’s show-and-tell episode introduced me to the addictive mysteries of what Derrida called “archive fever,” a temperature I’m still running.

  The first day of the fall semester, Barth told us four important things—lessons I’ve never forgotten. Boastfully I repeat these credos to my students: “John Barth once told me . . .” And now I will pass on these lessons to you.

  The first lesson: Barth said that we needed to figure out our aesthetic position. He referred to us as apprentices; the most important part of our apprenticeship was deciding our stance toward narrative art’s basic tenets. He never said, “Your task is to become a better writer.” Improvement was not the goal. Our aim was to take a stand on the issues that governed contemporary literary production. Would we be realists? Fabulists? Minimalists? Would we invent a style that corresponded to no prior model? (I remember him saying, as a gesture of praise, “Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetic map.” I, too, wanted to be promiscuously nonsectarian.) As if figuring out whether or not to embrace atheism, we would search within and we would investigate without; we would ruffle the universe’s feathers with our stylistic questionings. After a long voir dire, we would conclude: “I believe in the power of nouns to represent things.” Or: “I will be Molly Bloom, afloat on arioso.” Or: “I will write plain sentences, governed, like Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa, by rules.” I read Alphabetical Africa after hearing Barth mention it. I never became wholeheartedly Oulipian, though an aura of constraint surrounds everything I write, however untidy it seems on the surface.

  The second lesson: Barth told us that we needed to decide whether we believed in stained glass or Windex. Stained glass writers considered their texts to be embroidered opacities that concealed reality. Windex writers believed that language was a transparent glass that gave unflecked access to the face of things. Stained glass versus Windex is still the way I divide the literary world. Toward stained glass my loyalty remains, though today I feel very Windex. And yet I’ve spent so many years devoted to stained glass that even my Windex moods contain a latent opacity. Even when I try to be transparent, my intrinsic tropism toward ornamentation turns clarity into cloud.

  The third lesson: Barth invoked a golden age (the early 1970s?) when his students had been obsessed with experimentation and had produced hybrids, parabolas, nonce contraptions, nutcase devices. I pictured students bringing milk crates to class and demanding that the crates be considered fictions. Now, Barth said, students had returned to realist fiction. His tone, as he gestured toward that golden age of revolutionary praxis, was ironic though wistful; perhaps he was relieved now to be facing a class of tame fictionists. Fictionist, I believe, was his word. Fictionists—like structuralists or paleontologists—occupied an arcane guild, guarding trade secrets, and devoted to sacred intricacies of manufacture. As apprentice fictionists, Barth proposed, we could afford to leaven our Wagnerian ponderousness with a Nietzschean taste for pranks.

  The fourth lesson: read Aristotle’s Poetics to learn the foundations of dramaturgy. Even the most experimental stories—Barth mentioned the works of his similarly named peer Donald Barthelme—obey the rules of dramaturgy as codified by Aristotle. Dramaturgy meant recognition scene, tragic flaw, and reversal of fortune. I doubt that my writing reflects the gravitational pull of dramaturgy, but I have never stopped thinking about that word and its power to summon the seriousness of the tale-spinner’s vocation. I may not pay sufficient attention to the unseen structures that govern narrative, but I try to be serious. Right now I am in the midst of a sober anagnorisis.

  How tight and electric the atmosphere in Barth’s classroom was, how vigilant the air, how clarifying the climate! (Think of Katharine Hepburn swimming in the matutinal Atlantic.) Our seminar’s atmosphere reflected how rigorously Barth had mused about the craft of fiction, how unsentimental and empyrean were his mental paradigms. “Empyrean” makes it sound as if sacrifices were entailed—when in fact the pleasure of Barth’s pedagogy came from his contagious sense of how liberated we could be from inherited structures, how open the art of fiction was to our intrepid accidents, as long as we remained heedful of ancient dramaturgical foundations, pillars upholding the temple. (The classroom may have been in the basement, but my aspirations were in the cupola.)

  Barth in seminar had the absorption and efficiency of a logician. I’ve never achieved, as teacher, his intensity of focus and his air of supreme relaxation. In the spirit of Wallace Stevens’s “supreme fiction,” Barth as pedagogue conveyed a delight in abstraction’s Apollonian suchness. When I think of him at the seminar table’s helm, offering his gentle sagacities, I envision a seasoned equestrian, who can ride without haranguing. Good pedagogy reproduces D. W. Winnicott’s notion of a holding environment, a necessary enclosure provided by a parental figure’s indestructible presence. Barth created a holding environment, though it wasn’t sappy. We were held in place—within a serene justness of accommodation—by his reticence, like the modesty of a charismatic host who will not direct his guests toward any specific choreography of seating or promenading. We were free to move and write as we pleased, but Barth’s principles—modernist at core, practical as the Bauhaus, with rococo Scheherazadian playfulness piled on top—environed us with an impression that we were ambling through a cloister’s open-air arcade, an architectural setting in which contemplation, quietness, sanity, and devotional single-mindedness determined how we positioned our roving imaginations.

  From Barth in person I learned what I had earlier gleaned from the poems of Ezra Pound: simplify. Moisten, Barth said, was the right word to use, not moisturize. He described moisturize as an unattractive neologism. I am guilty of many semantic sins, along the lines of moisturize. But I always try to maintain fealty to the principle that moisten represents.

  (2015)

  TWELVE ASSIGNMENTS

  1.

  Play a recorded piece of wordless music that you know very well. Listen to it once. Then, turn on a microphone that can record your speech, and listen to the piece again. Deliver an impromptu monologue while the piece is going. Afterward, transcribe your soliloquy.

  2.

  Go to a museum or gallery and choose a work of art. Stand or sit in front of it. Write for ten minutes (without stopping). You needn’t mention the work of art.

  3.

  Take notes while talking to someone on the phone. Afterward, transform your notes into a story.

  4.

  Find a telephone book. Write a poem using as many names as possible from the yellow pages.

  5.

  Watch a silent film. (Suggestion: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.) While watching it, take notes. Transform your notes into a composition.

  6.

  Ride a city bus. Get a window seat. Write down any words you see out the window. Go home and transform those notes into a two-page piece of writing.

  7.

  Write about the potatoes in Chantal Akerman’s film Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Or you can write about any other specific object (or category of object) in any film.

  8.

  Buy or borrow a copy of the longest book you can find. (Suggestion: Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy.) Begin reading it. Start anywhere you want in the book. After a half-hour of reading, write for ten minutes; include, in what you write, at least one phrase from the long book you chose to be your composition’s incidental catalyst.

  9.

  Make a list of names—first names—about which you have negative feelings. Choose one of the
names—or more than one—and take fifteen minutes to write about the negative associations.

  10.

  Begin to collect objects of a certain kind. Matchbooks. Pennies. Empty Kleenex boxes. Or something more beautiful, esoteric, captivating. After you have collected enough specimens—whenever you believe that point has been reached—write a brief inventory of the objects.

  11.

  Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed. The act could be merely verbal.

  12.

  Take a pair of scissors, and cut out—very quickly—some random shapes from found pieces of paper, cloth, plastic, or other flexible materials. Assemble a small village of these fragmentary shapes. Write about that village, its inhabitants, its secrets.

  (2015)

  IV

  SIX STARS

  1. Swimming with Nicole Kidman

  A few days before the Oscars, I swam next to Nicole Kidman. This is not a lie. We occupied adjacent lanes. She was really Nicole: I’d seen her ID card at the lifeguard’s station. The star’s skin, underwater, was pearly blue-white. While swimming, she wore a loose shirt (for modesty?) and kept her head above water, to protect her nascent hairdo from chlorine and dissolution. A few days later, at the Oscars, her hair was swept back and up into a tight chignon, like a caboose, but aloft. I am not in love with Nicole Kidman, nor am I in love with her hair; but I am in love with the fact that I saw her in person underwater and that a few days after this encounter she appeared at the Oscars.