Wayne Koestenbaum's Stubble Archipelago

In the opening pages of the "Death-Bed" edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman fixates on eidólons:

I met a seer,

Passing the hues and objects of the world,

The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,

To glean eidólons.

Put in thy chants said he,

No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in,

Put first before the rest as light for all and entrance-song of all,

That of eidólons.

20 additional stanzas follow, each of which mentions eidólons. The word appears 23 times in this poem whose title is "Eidólons."

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An "eidólon" is "an idealized person or thing," or "a specter or phantom," and its etymological root lies in the Greek eidos, "form." There is something queasily universalist and disembodied in Whitman's deployment of the word, which is a strange word, a word that in ancient Greek literature referred to a kind of double or doppelgänger. Wayne Koestenbaum, too, felt this word was strange when he first encountered it, as he relates in "Trance Notebook #14 [cut it up and then project it]," from The Pink Trance Notebooks (Nightboat, 2015):

bought Creeley's edition

of selected Whitman

poems on Union Street

in the late '70s

and got stuck on the first

ode's weird word,

"eidólons"—

in a station wagon

parked on Union

I puzzled over "eidólons"

and rejected it

although "Eire," "dreidel,"

and "eiderdown"

lay buried

in that awkward

noun—

and now

I'm the kind of fool

who uses words like

"eidólon," unpopular

words with unkempt

beards—

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And here is where the slippage occurs, a slippage which connects us to the present, 2024:

I've never

once grown a beard

though yesterday

I came close

give stubble's

eidólon one more day

to blossom

into a semi-plausible

object—

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So the poem ends, and after the two poetry books that followed (Camp Marmalade, 2018, and Ultramarine, 2022, both published by Nightboat) and that together with The Pink Trance Notebooks completed what Koestenbaum has referred to as his "trance poem trilogy," we are now met with the blossomed and semi-plausible object of Stubble Archipelago (Semiotexte, 2024), the writer's latest collection of poetry (Koestenbaum is also a critic, novelist, artist, and performer). To be clear, the art-object that is this latest book is more than plausible—it is concrete, here, and lively.

What is the idealized beard, what is the image/specter/double/Eire/dreidel/eiderdown of a beard? This is the kind of stratal question asked of readers who comb the 36 sonnets of Stubble Archipelago, where people, places, and things are never just themselves, are always vibrating in ecstatic tension with the other words that surround them. 

And so, while of course "stubble" might literally refer to a five o'clock shadow, to the islands of hairs comprising the "stubble archipelago / wrapped around ocean chin" of a man the speaker encounters on the subway in "#13 [Bedside lamp reflection]," the word might also refer to "the cut stalks of grain plants left sticking out of the ground after the grain is harvested"—in other words: waste, dross, chaff. The worthless and highly flammable "stubble" of the Bible.

But if something is flammable (i.e. something whose chemical energy can be converted into heat energy), is it truly worthless? "What if my butt produced peanut butter," Koestenbaum asks in "#28 [The color yellow's]." Indeed, what if what was previously thought to be waste matter might be packed with fat and protein? What if it were life-giving? Poetry, and Koestenbaum's poetry in particular, performs such a feat deliriously and delightfully, for already—merely by our entertaining of his question—a butt in our mind is involuntarily producing peanut butter.

Indeed, little seems to be implausible in Stubble Archipelago. Nothing is off the table:

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How do you build an 18-story apartment building?

How do you love

an 18-story apartment

building you've barebacked, gurgling

underground sedge-water

as passacaglia continuo?

("#20 [My inexplicable bruise]")

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At first we are met with an "18-story apartment building," but by way of a cunning enjambment, we are then presented with a kind of fractalized re-rendering of it: "an 18-story apartment," a single apartment that is 18 stories tall (and/or an apartment containing 18 tales). And the same might be said of the book's sonnets themselves, for they are not ordinary sonnets.

The poems of Stubble Archipelago may initially appear to be composed of very long lines à la Whitman or Ginsberg, but in fact the indented lines are not runovers so much as they are a kind of magnification, an expansion and complication of the poem’s structure at the level of the line. And all of the poems (except for the anomalies of #"6 [The artist sang]" and "#33 [Oranges and onions]") arrange such line-clusters into the stanzaic structure of quatrain-quatrain-tercet-tercet. Because the line breaks are intentional rather than in fealty to the right margin, the lines themselves seem to contain poems. "#35 [Space between shelved]," for example, has 14 lines, but it also has 44 "lines." It's a sonnet that contains 3.14 sonnets, as though language churns even in the negative space between the lines (between the shelves).

But what about that "gurgling [of] / underground sedge-water / as passacaglia continuo"? Or what of this line/stanza in "22 [Adorno gave me]"?

​Choose two nonfiction writers to pee on. Vogue elected

her to model "New

Narrative" Kohut-Bion-

splitting shrink

elegy glut.

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We could psychoanalytically plumb old Spanish musical forms as a means of connecting the disparate dots in Koestenbaum's poetry, and that is certainly one worthwhile approach. Another would be to listen to the poet when he says that Stubble Archipelago is (among other things) "an avenue for the reader to understand how to find nooks for making a habitat from daily detritus and cultural refuse." [1] How to make a home of stubble.

For there is much cultural refuse—cultural peanut butter—smeared across these pages, often in the form of densely layered names (of people, artworks, consumer products), so that the book sometimes reads like a fossil record. "#8 [O razor in]" provides an instructive example: "Conjugate Adorno: adorno, adorni, adorna, / adorniamo…" When Adorno's name is conjugated into an archipelago of adornment, we get the sense that all of the other proper nouns in the book comprise a rich network of ore, seams that Koestenbaum mines, conjugates, refines, and deploys for his own libidino-visionary purposes, from Big Macs to Willa Cather.

And adornment itself is of interest to this poet, how it alters the adorned and how it alters our perception of the adorned. Returning to "#13 [Bedside lamp reflection]," we see a "[c]hrysanthemum decal on trash chute neutraliz[ing] / user's Anthropocene / bad vibes," and we understand that a flower—even just the eidólon of a flower—is capable of eclipsing ecocidal guilt. The lending of beauty is always political.

As a counterweight to the dictional deliriums we have seen so far, it's important to note that there are moments in Stubble Archipelago when the speaker narrows the aperture of their gaze, moments of quietude as Koestenbaum downshifts his "diction as ecstasy catalyst" into a lower gear: "The lamp competes with the moon. / The moon bears / responsibility for what / the lamp neglects" ("#30 [The lamp competes]"). Or, a few pages later in "#31 [Ode to bromance]":

​Cavort, O babies of the canyon: a spring-song imperative, ex-

clamation, chord torn from

larynx-lyre's lingual clay.

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The larynx is important to Koestenbaum, for in his poetics the voice box (not the mind) is the locus of cognition—he told us so nine years ago, in the final poem of The Pink Trance Notebooks: "thoughts take place in / the larynx." And in the final three lines of that poem, we recognize, too, Koestenbaum's privileging of the prelingual cavorting of the "babies of the canyon," as the speaker lets fly a kind of banner of artistic intent: "I remain an indirect, / untimely investigator / of the gurgle and the cry." Often, curiously, it is the speaker's own voice box towards which their investigations are directed.

And it makes sense that Koestenbaum locates thought within the throat. In a 2020 conversation with Maggie Nelson, on the heels of the release of his essay collection Figure It Out, he mentions offhandedly that he has been walking around New York City and dictating peripatetic sonnets into his phone. [2] Those sonnets, of course, would go on to become the sonnets of Stubble Archipelago, so that this book is less a transcription of mind than of the voice itself, and in reading it we are intimately privy to Koestenbaum, musician that he is, sight-reading his own thoughts as they emerge full-throatedly in song—a blossoming, plausible object.

Surely we are lucky to have this dispatch from a larynx-lyre, for Koestenbaum is a poet who, collapsing perception and composition into a single act, maps out all of the far-flung islands that fascinate him, a poet who ardently magicks into existence the ecstatic procedures by which those islands might be strung together.

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1. "Wayne Koestenbaum on Poetry, Puberty, and Purgation," Tausif Noor, INTERVIEW Magazine, 12 March 2024

2. "Wayne Koestenbaum, 'FIGURE IT OUT,' w/ Maggie Nelson," Skylight Books Podcast Series, 8 July 2020