Wayne Koestenbaum

BM I’m struck by how Ashbery in Flow Chart figures as a beau idéal for you. I think of this passage from the book’s third section, which you recently recorded for the #CollectiveAshbery project on Twitter: “the development was muted, then fudged; but one had been warned to play / within the enclosure on the off chance that something slightly singular would occur.” What kind of model does the book provide, with its fudged developments and singular play?

WK “Fudged” is a perfect Ashbery word: its commonness, filth, and quaintness. Its “u” takes on the “u” of the preceding “muted,” and deepens—lengthens the “u” into a more vulgar sound—what goes by the name of bassesse (lowness), a word that Rosalind Krauss took from Georges Bataille and made the most of. In composing the trance trilogy, I was aiming for detours into bassesse, too—or, rather, I accepted the eruptions of bassesse whenever I was lucky enough to receive their calling card. Bataille, writes Krauss, “insisted that the job of informe is to ‘bring things down in the world.’” Like Andy Warhol’s happy notion of downgrading as a source of joy (to de-skill is to escalate pleasure), I made it my business in Ultramarine not to court the low—not to dive for it, make a case for it, cop a feel from it—but to permit it, and not excise it. I generated much more material, in drafting Ultramarine, than I ended up keeping in the finished book, but I confess that I tended to retain, and not omit, the passages that go the route of the “fudged”: incest and micturation and other tricky issues.

Flow Chart, yes, is the book for me, the role-model text, the prod, the muse, the gate, along with Friederike Mayröcker's brütt, or The Sighing Gardens (1998) and all of Gertrude Stein. Paul Celan, too. In reading the final proofs of Ultramarine, I suddenly understood that the book’s secret strategy, somewhat unconscious, had been to merge some of the methods of Stein and Celan as a way of articulating (or demonstrating, or suffering) the effect of atrocity on language. I know that sounds very big, very unearned, but I think I found myself cruising different languages, in Ultramarine, and moving toward weirder, jammier condensations, kennings, coinages, and portmanteaus as a way to make Celan and Stein come to terms with each other, befriend each other, meet somewhere in the middle. It was as if I were behaving as posthumous middleman, in Paris, bridging these two Jews who underwent, in their different ways, in their bodies, the wreckage of language. That’s another way of saying that in composing the trance trilogy I wasn’t just fooling around, though I hope it will be also acceptable to the muses and the judges that merely fooling around is no crime, no stain on the conscience.

BM That’s very clarifying: atrocity eviscerates language—wrecks its guts, to use a base phrase—and bassesse is one possible secretion to emerge from the wound. Peril is sown into the endeavor, but there’s also possibility and pleasure. In my mind, this relates to the concept of “fag ideation,” introduced in The Pink Trance Notebooks, which illuminates how queerness can lubricate language and loosen the grasp of normative logic. How does Ultramarine extend from or complicate the notion of “fag ideation”?

WK “Ideation” is a fancy, difficult word, a psychological word. I have a fondness for the “-tion” family, to my detriment. Cognition, ideation, instrumentalization, compartmentalization, fragmentation, juxtaposition, diction, precision, humiliation, commiseration, anticipation, ossification, reification, scarification.

Not much “fag” in that list. “Fag” is a difficult word, too. A word we should avoid. But it’s so sweetly monosyllabic, so Eliotic, so almost palindromic—fag gaffe—that I fall into its clutches frequently. James Bidgood, creator of the marvelous 1971 film, Pink Narcissus (wrongly called “campy” in his New York Times obituary), practiced fag ideation by channeling porn topoi and methods into a “higher” stratum of picture-making, only slightly above that of porn. (Though of course porn is already plenty “high,” a form of hallucinating without the aid of substances.) If the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Bidgood had collaborated on a film about the phenomenology of gay male daily fantasy, they might have produced Pink Narcissus. And so they did. If you fold Merleau-Ponty into the “author effect” of Bidgood, you get a cinéaste producing fag ideation.

BM Fag ideation allows you to link together queer experiences and queer feelings across great gulfs of time and distance. It transports you and your reader to somewhere beyond the commonplace—is that right?

WK Fag ideation, yes, carries me to France; whenever Jean Genet stops being literal, he enters the precincts of fag ideation. Fag ideation permeates Ultramarine because it employs language spill—words spilling into each other, contaminating each other—to produce, in the form of serial poetry, a version of what cross-hatching creates in drawing: shadow, volume, perspective, depth. I demonstrate my ideas and my memories and my images not just by denoting them, describing them, evoking them; I demonstrate my “material” by cross-hatching language, interfering with its transparency by condensing it, splicing it, fragmenting it, discombobulating it. I know that sounds like a generic description of any contemporary poetic project. Let’s hope that, on the wings of fag ideation, I give a pink—or ultramarine—spin of my own to this collective project, yours and mine and ours, of persuading words that they should be ashamed of themselves for being so tasty, so multivalent, and sometimes so ordinary. Is it a species of fag ideation when I mention a “Hostess apple turnover”? Is it fag ideation when I say “long ago I asked / ‘is Lana Turner a monad’?” Or: “Molotov cocktail / in the key of / Dorian Gray”?

BM Your books empower the reader to flex new muscles, offering creative prompts and moments of gentle instruction (“The object . . . must provide / concrete lines and curves to mimic”) even as they depict you as a student “searching for a teacher / (aware that no / teacher will suffice).” How do your roles as instructor and artist intermingle?

WK Today I’m teaching (in a seminar on the essay film) Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), three short films by Ja’Tovia Gary, Carolee Schneemann’s Fuses (1967), and Theodor Adorno’s essay, “The Essay as Form.” Mostly I’m eager to hear what the participants in the seminar will say about this bundle of cinematic goodies. In Ultramarine I’m a student of my own language and the language I find on the wayside. Somewhere in the Venn-diagram overlap of my language and the wayside language is the “teeming brain” (Keats) of a linguistic consciousness always waiting to be gleaned, always gleaned already by other poets, always waiting for the buckets and spoons and tongues and habitats of other gleaners, acolyte gleaners, fatigued gleaners, ever-awake gleaners.

Last week in the essay-film seminar I taught (“taught” and “I” are both up for grabs—i.e., contestable, risible, spoof-able) Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), Jacquot de Nantes (1991), which is about her husband Jacques Demy’s childhood, and her documentary short Black Panthers (1968). Nowhere in the cinematic or literary universe can I find a rendering of my own childhood dreams more exact than Varda’s tribute to her late husband’s precocious cinephilia—cinephilia in a void—a child upstairs in the attic making animation films long before he had any practical reason to imagine he could become a filmmaker.

Where is pedagogy in this mélange I’m making for you this morning, Brandon? Through teaching, I find the impetus to love more strongly the artistic impulses that I already love, yearnings enshrined in Schneemann’s Fuses, for example: the will to self-document, the wish to estrange certainty by filming it and thereby “ruining” it (to ruin certainty is to make it more beautiful and striated with complications), the hope that—by deciding to write down this instant the strange configurations that this instant is taking on—we can striate the instant, millefeuille the instant. Can I make “millefeuille” a verb? Picking up a camera or proposing to write down the unspooling, “teeming” river of what is now occurring (which is to say, not what really is occurring, but what words are erupting in tribute or response to the instant’s figments) seem instructive ways of making do, bearing witness, even if in a crabby mood or a state of blur and indecision, to the words arising from that blur: words I’ll later try to make clear. Ultramarine never quite clears up the blur. Clearing things up isn’t my métier. But I like to make the blur as punctual and concrete and festive as possible.