Rodney Koeneke, Body & Glass

the new poetics

Snake, be quick—excuse of words

to make me sharp and want to write

waits in metaphors sleepless taunt.

People, use stones! Compose things

Slow to weeds sounds boys invent

from drone’s new lows. Saxifrage

in young stands lovers meet behind

nervous to dismiss significance

Ur-names meeting Ur-things

in the flowers, bees reconciling workers

to their combs. Quiet, writing

don’t strike ideas I let be composed

but through that flow of breath that is not

my breath, split ore from rock

that’s not my ore, my rock.

The latest from Portland, Oregon poet Rodney Koeneke, an early member of the Flarf collective, is the collection Body & Glass (Wave Books, 2018), following on the heels of his Etruria (Wave Books, 2014), Musee Mechanique (BlazeVOX Books, 2006) and Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003). There is something reminiscent of Ottawa poet Stephen Brockwell’s work in Koeneke’s tone and tenor in these poems, one that writes self-aware, methodically and deeply curious, seeking the poetic and the lyric through scientific method, and the scientific through the poetic and the lyric; especially one that seeks, through the tight, narrative lyric, answers to what might never be possible to know. As the poem “schottische” begins: “You are old but / if possible I’d / like to keep // Moving […]” Or this, the final stanza in the four-stanza poem “young historian’s scoring rubric,” that reads:

Analysis is solid, and done

in a historical way, but free

from all history—balloon on

a tether with girl in a picture

primary evidence let fly away.

Composed with an incredible, subtle sharpness, his is a poetics, and even a politics, that embrace both optimism and exhaustion, as he writes to open the poem “urdo made easy”: I am fed up with this world / And want to be somewhere else[.]”

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Rodney Koeneke

Rodney Koeneke’s latest poetry collection, Etruria, is just out from Wave Books. He’s also the author of Musee Mechanique and Rouge State, as well as four chapbooks. He studied history at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford, and currently teaches it in Portland, Ore.

1 - How did your first book or chapbook change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? rob, it’s been so long since my first book—over 10 years—that I can’t quite remember. I suppose it was affirming, like it is for anyone. Then you go back to the silence to pull out more poems, and the book’s like a snapshot on your desktop of that vacation you took that one year.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? Stung by a bee on the lip as a youth.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes? I tried to answer this one for you rob, but it varies so much from poem to poem that I couldn’t make an accurate generalization.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? My three books so far have been collections of poems, few longer than two pages. “The book” starts to happen at around 50 poems I can live with.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? Readings help find the 50 I can live with. Don’t all writers enjoy readings? They sure enjoy readers.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? What is a poem? What can poetry do?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? I like thinking of Skelton at Diss, shaking fists at Wolsey. “Ware the Hawk.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? Essentially difficult?

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? No one listens to poetry. Wait. That’s got a nice ring. rob, feel free to use that somewhere.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal? Prose is a snow machine; poetry’s snow.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? A typical day begins with routine, which I try to keep poetry free from. 

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? Other poets.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? Other poets.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? I went to Google for this one to meet David W. McFadden, and it tells me “his poetry critiques the commercialism and shallowness of modern society.”

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? O rob, that’s a dangerous question! You’ll get one of those panicky Academy Award-type speeches that keeps cramming in more and more names, but somehow omits mom and dad.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? Question 17.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? Plastics.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? Seems I’m made to do lots of something else, as opposed to writing.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? Against the Day. Solaris?

20 - What are you currently working on? I just finished a chapbook for Oakland’s Hooke Press that Brent Cunningham’s editing. It’s called Seven for Boetticher and Other Poems and it’ll be out later this year. I’m also at work with the great Team Wave to help Etruria find its way in the world.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Rodney Koeneke, Etruria

Everyone knows that O’Hara is great, but who loses much sleep over

            Pasternak?

In Russia, where the poem is still valued

as a succession of more or less beautiful lines, creation

is also regarded as the province of the Devil. Life and its regulation

belong to dumb forces, which collect at a shining point the green

            translator would probably

render as God, while spontaneity erupts (to borrow a favorite Russian

            image) like a fish

breaking out from the ice, flopping from the water to thrash and heave

            in air. (“Toward a Theory of Translation”)

Following two prior trade poetry collections— Rouge State (Montpelier, OH: Pavement Saw, 2003) and Musee Mechanique (Buffalo NY: BlazeVOX [books], 2006)—comes Portland, Oregon poet Rodney Koeneke’s Etruria (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2014). In a sequence of poems that at turns feel conversational (almost in the “I did this, I did that” way of Frank O’Hara), Koeneke’s Etruria is composed around and through a series of ideas. He manages the form of the poem as a way to work through considerations of the world in short essay-like meanderings: imagine Anne Carson’s Short Talks (London ON: Brick Books, 1992), but with line breaks, and lines that extend until there is simply nowhere else for them to go. Poems such as “The Real Aeneid” read as short self-contained monologues, yet suggest that the poem might be excised from a much larger compositional canvas that doesn’t need to be written. The idea of translation appears to be the thread that holds the collection together as a single unit, even the poem “The Real Aeneid,” for example, presenting familiar information in a new form, a new language, or the poem “ghazal,” that ends with a chastisement: “Rodney, no translation is ever satisfactory— / be foreign only to its disappointments[.]” The entire collection can be considered an argument through translation, exploring the shift of words and facts into English from other languages, retelling familiar stories, and some that are explicitly unfamiliar, such as the poem “Billet-don’t,” the opening stanza of which reads:

You and your schoolmarm grammar. Me and my fake Greek.

To court me in this language of a Finnish peasant fucked improperly

at the equinox: Mieleni Minum Tekevi—I am driven

by my longing, languid as East Kansas, my teeth grow soft

like Chicklets, sad casualties of night.

The title poem at the end of the collection, as well as the title of the collection itself, references the ancient home of the Etruscans, located in what is now central Italy, highlighting a further tension in the collection between what was, and now what is, and what gets lost in the “translation” of telling and retelling, until what was once known isn’t recognizable at all. Koeneke opens the collection with a quote from D.H. Lawrence’s posthumously-published collection of travel pieces, Etruscan Places (1932): “Far more probably, the city itself lay on that opposite / hill there, which lies splendid and unsullied, running / parallel to us.” The collection provides a compelling collage of movements, translation and explorations through perceptional shifts, retellings and clarifications, such as the opening lines to the poem “Tristia,” that reads: “Go, little book, to her, where I can’t enter / and serve as her doorjamb, or bookshelf prop, or coaster / or a clean spot on the floor for her to drop[.]” And yet, the title poem, perhaps attempting to pull everything together at the end of the collection, feels unnecessarily overloaded. Despite the strength of the rest of the book, the poem “Etruria” somehow provides a looseness that wanders a bit too much in parts, losing the thread of the poem, the ending of which reads:

Wars gets forgotten and are replaced with new ones,

disaster is palimpsest to modernity’s radiant texts.

Then we become precipitations of our speech acts,

extensions of form, Etrurian courtiers fanning this phenomenal

with the soul’s broad palms, whose flats

and pronouncements got so shrill and boring

in its sick years, before we contrived to invert its astonishing structure

and put the nose back squarely before the Sphinx. Now everyone’s

relatively happy, with lots of theoretically interesting things to say about

just about everything. Capitals invoke letters and cities,

theaters are redolent of pretense and of wars.

I think we’re more comfortable with not always being rational

despite the unsettling sense that Reason is on the march somewhere

like History and Progress and Science and time

advancing on the Bourbons of Etruria,

drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk drunk.