(photo by erica kaufman)

Saturday was a terrific start to our section of the Segue Series this year. I always enjoy working with Erica, and her introduction for Wayne Koestenbaum was terrific as usual. Though it was a packed crowd, the fact that few of the series regulars were in attendance was evidence to me that we are genuinely doing something new and different. Among these people was my friend the poet Matt Rotando, who was in town visiting from Tucson and giving a reading from his new book The Comeback’s Exoskeleton from UpSet Press at the Bedford Lounge in the SUBO Building at Brooklyn College on Monday, April 7 at 2PM. Matt was totally amazed by both of Saturday’s Segue readers. He couldn’t help noticing how “Marjorie Welish started out by reading several poems from Word Group in which the arrangement of words on the page had consequences for the rising and falling pitch of the poet’s breath while reading. Indeed, for a writer who produces such analytic lyrics with that flat or shallow space of tone, Welish is surprisingly embodied and animated when she reads, making various bodily cues and feeling the analysis of feeling. It was very mimetically anti-mimetic. She followed these pieces with a reading from the first section of Isle of the Signatories, and these poems were more abstract, exploring more specific tropes around themes of inscription and memory. Particularly memorable was a long passage from ‘Unfolding Yes’ which juxtaposed numerous assertions about the beginning date of modernity against an Enlightenment discourse of ordering history: ‘Unclear – see me.’ This poem spliced together written lines from different contexts that the poet then read almost as if it were a collage of different voices arguing and interrupting each other.”

I was impressed that Matt found Welish’s reading to be such a vivid experience. Matt also introduced me to his mom, who “thought Wayne Koestenbaum’s reading was a true highlight among recent events in the New York poetry scene.” Matt’s mom was particularly fascinated by how “Koestenbaum started out by reading several poems from his book Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, and in these works an ostensible narrative continually yielded to elaborate and hilarious digressions. Koestenbaum’s outrageous sense of humor and comic timing lies chiefly in the loving linguafranca of these analogies which create multiple layers to the text at hand. He retains fragments of the story frame in a pop sensibility while simultaneously bringing the reader’s nose right up close to the act of language becoming metaphor, so that something as small and innocuous as a pudding cup can take on a sinister significance: ‘Pudding sees itself / as brazen. I perceive it / as possessing the odorless, refined / atmosphere of a eunuch evangelist.’ This poem, from Koestenbaum’s work ‘No My Talk is Not About Hannah Arendt’ from the Queering Language issue of EOAGH, was among the second group of poems he read that evening. I was particularly delighted by the charismatic way that Koestenbaum performed, leaning into the mike and earnestly whispering with a tinge of camp intimacy.”

I said to Matt’s mom, really? You got all that from his performance? “Not only that,” several audience members called out from behind me, “but the highlight of the evening was Koestenbaum’s reading from his new (he reports, at this stage 1,500 page)  book in process on Harpo Marx. The conceit of this fascinating project was to do an ekphrasis of every movement Harpo Marx made in every Marx brothers movie. These pieces were original and wild, the slow motion narrative and the repetitions suggesting a slightly obsessive dreamlike symbolism through close description. But their conversational quality and offhand gestures kept them from turning into some kind of overly stern Shklovsky experience: ‘Harpo is not someone I would trust with nuclear secrets.’ Wayne Koestenbaum’s lush anamorphoses are unlike anything else in contemporary literature.” I replied to these people: what liberated, active, and participatory readers you are! But before I could finish speaking they were gone, and I was left standing in the middle of my blog in my pajamas with a cup of tea and a muffin, ready to get some rest and do it all again next week.