Ultramarine
In Ultramarine, the third volume of his “trance” diaries, the poet, essayist, painter, queer gadfly, erudite aesthete, and conflicted moralist Wayne Koestenbaum assembles 474 pages of brief thoughts, dreams, and observations, in short lines of roughly three stresses, to uncover what he calls—in French, as if uncharacteristically shy about such sincere directness—“le magique / esprit du monde outremer /vraiment espace de la /mort ou de l’amour” (the magical / spirit of the ultramarine world, / really a space of / death or love). The goal is the ravishment of displacement:
to become one’s own
mind’s companion—not to dwell
inside the mind but to stand
near the mind as its
watcher, listener, confidante,
scribe […]
Those receptive to his paradoxes and disjunctions gain a kind of polymorphous admission to Koestenbaum’s “pink gouache consciousness,” which applies the “minim method / of Seurat or Pascal” to induce a “vertigo of too many nuances,” from which a reader might “choose the nuances you love / and settle down with them.” I especially loved his representations of ephemeral cultural phenomena, like this rapturous musical observation:
Poulenc’s “halo of pedals,”
voice’s clarity against
suddenly dissonant
temporary sweetness you’re afraid
will engulf you
If the voluminous allusions, usually divorced from context or analysis, are what a cerebral, queer, Jewish American culture vulture reared in the 1960s and ’70s would predictably fall for—with a special fondness for transgressive dream thoughts, like Anne Frank getting pregnant by Heidegger, and the appurtenances of certain iconic actresses (Barbra Streisand’s see-through Oscar pantsuit) and opera singers (Anna Moffo’s nose job)—they often bestow pleasures deeper than passing giggles, uncovering, as Koestenbaum does while reading Simone Weil, “the hurt, pocked portion / of being.” Ultramarine amply succeeds in animating the reader to move into the sphere of the poet’s otherness, to “scramble the jamais, upset the always / tranquilize the never […]”