'Language is the glove into which I stick my hand, which permits me contact with the world,' says the writer and poet Wayne Koestenbaum.
is a pleasure seeker par excellence. The New York-based artist, performer, filmmaker, poet, cultural critic—and Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York—delights in the intricacies of language, carousing across staid grammars for the most vivid and vivifying forms of engagement. A staggering repertoire of writing attests to Koestenbaum’s unbridled yen for high and low.
NOOR: You mentioned your poems having little tributaries, and we might think of poetry—now this is Bernadette Mayer quoting John Ashbery—as a stream that you can always dip into. And John Stuart Mill once wrote that eloquence is heard, but poetry is overhead; you’re always listening from the other room. This name dropping I just did, as you mentioned, becomes quite personal, so reading, I’ve been thinking about a personal historicism.
KOESTENBAUM: I often call it self-sickness, disgust toward the self I see. There’s no self-pathologizing in this stance in the least. I’m not a special case and I’m not minoritizing my shame by saying that I have an excess of self-disgust. I look to the writers I care about, like Elfriede Jelinek or Dodie Bellamy, and in their works I locate a flowing production of text that is constant, masturbatory, purgative, and occasionally induces displeasure in the maker.
KOESTENBAUM: I’m remembering the first English paper I wrote in college, for a course on modernism. One of the possible topics was to do a close reading of Yeats’s poem “Byzantium.” I didn’t know how to start, so I wrote out the poem, and I left a lot of space around it, and I made a map, mostly of all the sound relations of the poem. I chose the path of painstaking autodidacticism.
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