Chants of the Erotomane: On Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Stubble Archipelago”

Stubble Archipelago by Wayne Koestenbaum I’M ALWAYS WARY of claiming this or that critical statement, to be unearthed in this or that essay or letter or diary entry, should serve as a passe-partout to a writer’s project as a whole. And I don’t want to make that claim here either—or at least, not exactly. But when Wayne Koestenbaum observes, in a passage from My 1980s & Other Essays (2013) on the American symbolist Hart Crane, that the “point of queer poetry may also be to make murky, to distort,” it feels like half a revelation about his own work. “His aim was not to neutralize or domesticate desire,” Koestenbaum continues, “but to present it as failed: desire equivocates and betrays.” Koestenbaum is a polymathic poet, with the polymath’s manic analytic powers. He seems to toss off kernels of compressed analysis as if it were second nature, managing to do so in a way that’s precise and scholarly and yet somehow excruciatingly personal, all at the same time. There is a brightness and incisive clarity to much of his writing that seems to run counter to his self-professed interest in a queer tradition of murkiness and distortion. That he so often manages to combine these tendencies successfully is a testament to the sheer energy of his writing, and to the nature of desire itself. What attracts Koestenbaum to the meaning-machine of desire is that it peddles truths that truly blaze, that exist purely and authoritatively, but only for a brief time. The truths of desire, in other words, are all-consuming and immanent—until they’re not, and we’re returned to the murk of formless longing. Admittedly, making categorical statements about a writer as stylishly protean as Koestenbaum can be tricky. He seems bent on getting every form he takes up to perform itself, stretching outward into something new. Many of the self-styled fables in The Cheerful Scapegoat (2021), for instance, read like prose poems with a streetwise, surrealist slant. “Green is an underrated color—it can include viridian and grass and jade and ocean and tiredness and a near-death experience at 4 p.m. […]

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