I’m the Marmalade: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum

In the fall of last year, I found myself in Tenth Avenue’s 192 Books, chatting with a stranger. The man (whose enviable green coat had temporarily distracted me from his visage) was thumbing through a copy of Gertrude Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation. This volume was, we quickly learned, a shared obsession. I was about to ask the man’s name when I suddenly realized there was no need: it was the critic, poet, novelist, performer, and academic Wayne Koestenbaum.

A few weeks later, I traveled to Koestenbaum’s nearby apartment to sort through manuscripts, long-forgotten first drafts, personal notebooks, and correspondence as far back as his undergraduate years at Harvard. I had begun cataloguing a daunting portion of his collected works—from academic journal articles to Vogue magazine columns—into a comprehensive bibliography. (The bibliography was the distillation of Koestenbaum’s literary archive, purchased last year by Yale University.)  

To handle a writer’s work in this way puts one in the privileged position of speaking with the writer about it. The release of Koestenbaum’s new poetry collection, Camp Marmalade, which was published last week, provided another occasion for us to talk of his work. This excellent book is the second volume in a trilogy of what the author calls “trance writing”; the first is The Pink Trance Notebooks. Put simply, the approach allows language to move freely through Koestenbaum as he improvisationally explores subjects dear to his heart. The language that appears does not often adhere to expected thematic, syntactic, or logical patterns.