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Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
‘My head is my only house unless it rains’
Don Glen Vliet
Tenement Press is an occasional publisher of esoteric,
accidental, angular, & interdisciplinary literatures.
‘My head is my only house unless it rains’
Don Glen Vliet
‘Were a wind to arise
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
![]()
I’d make one of canvas and sticks’
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Bucknow Elegies)
I could put up a sail
Were there no sail
Bertolt Brecht, ‘Motto’
(Bucknow Elegies)
Rehearsal / 9. Wayne Koestenbaum
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![]()
Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘He Eats Hearts,’ © 2020
(elegant toplessness stoned in stairwell)
they hated my poem about
a dead baby
dead babies
in sonnets aren’t funny
I never said dead
babies were funny
imagine the
old man in wheelchair
falling over
will the
audience misperceive my
remark as anti-
Semitic and boo or
hiss it? don’t avoid
the screening just because
I’m afraid of being hissed
assemble an
entire life from found
scraps
could my life
begin with the fat girl
babysitting while Mom
and Pop see Odd Couple
for their anniversary?
kept
boy follows
two steps behind doddering
master whose Cockney
S/M imprecations
toward rental dog
we overheard
elegant toplessness
stoned in stairwell
flatterer tells me in
steam that young guys
must be “after me”
Band-Aid
on the other
Wayne in pool
looks like skin tag—
mistook him
for handsome workout
father with pudgy son
splodgy, ochre, dull
grey, pink-grey afternoon
he mentions me
once in vaguely sexual
context
says hello at deli,
surprisingly high
voice for a son
study
Diane Arbus for sake
of flirtation bait
pleurer I said as
dream in tango elevator—
expect chaos
applying makeup sedulously
while crouched on suspicious
floor
fear of
being marooned with
Rowan and Martin or
not being tall enough
to see Martin’s squinchy
eyes, his distress muted
by squinch
—remove
thy ass from my presence
Cleo removes her
Nairass
his ass
received verbal Nair,
semantic depilation
‘fold’ I
said to Madame Grès
face mauled by age
or angry dog in’
53 restaurant
very
pre-K of you he
said at breakfast
no discussion of
need or nipple, the
damned ore’s lumpen
presence in whose earth?
Bangladeshi porn found
in grocery bags at gym
your French bread tantrum
was it
lipstick on blind glamour
face repeating
the invisible city’s
remaining condoms
as if beauty were
the result of our efforts?
pancake on jaw
edge
—should not
they unplug my nose
and shout numbers into
a dead phone?
the
dead phone is mine—
—when someone
is pushed three times
out the express chute—
maybe a terrorist
Jane Fonda’s surprising
youth, running and
jamboreeing—
Jim is
the repeated desired name
but a hollow resides
where Jim once lived
LSD son
was Jim, a
suicide, or rumoured
to be a suicide in
S.F.
erotic fantasy
of the suicide nude
answering a Victorian
pink lady door
here in Baton Rouge they’re
picketing The Vagina
Monologues
stuffed myself on crawfish
étouffée and broccoli,
didn’t stop to
judge extent of stomach
fullness
his eyebrows deserve
dissection, elegy, troubadour
energies
why is my
coccyx always the tragic
Kundalini sore spot?
one more
bite of $3 vegetable
we
wonder why our emotional
and spiritual horizons are so
straitened, we realize
four serried trees are sublimely
waiting for me to announce them
not convulsive beauty
but not obvious beauty either
repose achieved as
landing strip where
dismal life attains
longawaited equilibrium,
and perhaps we extend the
‘high’ and realize getting
stoned is the origin of
literature
or getting stoned by
angry homophobic journalists
and townspeople
a pause
before I say yes despite
Elton John and not
fearing loneliness or
the buttfucked girlfriend
who took it up the ass
from the sadistic boy
because of pregnancy fears
this story told to me
as the height of her
humiliation or as an
extension of what my
cruel gay body and draconian
Rudolf Serkin will
power did
to her
breasts felt
up by third wheel boyfriend
and I realized I was
a noncontender
upside-down mouth seen as
zucchini bread giftgiving
and The Fox reparations
received on Third Street
and my surprise that San
Jose had a good used
bookstore because I was an
impossible snob
why always is my suicide
fantasy poised on mother
of baby I adore more
than dignity allows?
my questions are my
father’s, precautionary,
nervous, dry, scape-
goated—like neighborhood
dog we
Jews feared
I’ve never seen such a
compromised set of
knickers or lowhangers—
his pedagogic
illocutionary lowhangers—
or
Festschrift on my behalf
including Princess Di
mourning’s profundity
—not sure why I’d
let him suck me off
his persistence reminds me
of Mary Ann at ditto
machine, stink of my
cruelty
—not sure why
grease clings to my jacket
or why liberation is
achieved in unlikely
locale
two boys
together in tub
when father leaves
bathroom (No More
Tears) and I experiment
with rubber ducks
the joke
(told on third-grade bus) of
snake as intercourse
the stalled Music Man
bus where my first dis-
obedience broke its waters
teaching Yahweh
about genitals,
grasping Yahweh’s glitter
and are
four recited nouns the
secret of his sudden
access to fountains?
Rosi-
crucian rose goldenness of
failed immortality?
lost thumb
of matzoh ball purveyor
spooning goulash
near Hildegard Knef
LPs for sale
in thick plastic sleeves
Wayne Koestenbaum has published over twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Ultramarine (Nightboat Books, 2022), The Cheerful Scapegoat (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents, 2021), Figure It Out (Counterpoint, 2020), Camp Marmalade (Nightboat Books, 2018), My 1980s & Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012), Humiliation (Picador, 2011), Hotel Theory (Soft Skull, 2007), Circus (Soft Skill, 2004), Andy Warhol (Penguin, 2001), Jackie Under My Skin (Plume, 1995), and The Queen’s Throat (Da Capo Press, 1993), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has given musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at the Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, the Renaissance Society, and The Poetry Project. His feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his literary archive. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.
︎︎︎ Back to Rehearsal
Back in the ‘remember when’ of 2016
In July 2016, Hotel asked me to make a recording of my poem, ‘(elegant toplessness stoned in stairwell),’ which is an excerpt from Camp Marmalade. And so, while seated at the piano, in my apartment's living room in New York City, I recited my poem and spoke-sang into my handy ZOOM recorder. Sometimes, to punctuate or accompany the reading, I played fragments from pieces by Robert Schumann, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Isaac Albéniz, Vincent Persichetti, and David Diamond. At other moments, I improvised rudimentary melodies upon which I could string the text’s syllables. None of this mélange—except for the poem’s words—was planned. I am grateful to Hotel for giving me the chance to improvise.
Koestenbaum, 2016
they hated my poem about
a dead baby
dead babies
in sonnets aren’t funny
I never said dead
babies were funny
imagine the
old man in wheelchair
falling over
will the
audience misperceive my
remark as anti-
Semitic and boo or
hiss it? don’t avoid
the screening just because
I’m afraid of being hissed
assemble an
entire life from found
scraps
could my life
begin with the fat girl
babysitting while Mom
and Pop see Odd Couple
for their anniversary?
kept
boy follows
two steps behind doddering
master whose Cockney
S/M imprecations
toward rental dog
we overheard
elegant toplessness
stoned in stairwell
flatterer tells me in
steam that young guys
must be “after me”
Band-Aid
on the other
Wayne in pool
looks like skin tag—
mistook him
for handsome workout
father with pudgy son
splodgy, ochre, dull
grey, pink-grey afternoon
he mentions me
once in vaguely sexual
context
says hello at deli,
surprisingly high
voice for a son
study
Diane Arbus for sake
of flirtation bait
pleurer I said as
dream in tango elevator—
expect chaos
applying makeup sedulously
while crouched on suspicious
floor
fear of
being marooned with
Rowan and Martin or
not being tall enough
to see Martin’s squinchy
eyes, his distress muted
by squinch
—remove
thy ass from my presence
Cleo removes her
Nairass
his ass
received verbal Nair,
semantic depilation
‘fold’ I
said to Madame Grès
face mauled by age
or angry dog in’
53 restaurant
very
pre-K of you he
said at breakfast
no discussion of
need or nipple, the
damned ore’s lumpen
presence in whose earth?
Bangladeshi porn found
in grocery bags at gym
your French bread tantrum
was it
lipstick on blind glamour
face repeating
the invisible city’s
remaining condoms
as if beauty were
the result of our efforts?
pancake on jaw
edge
—should not
they unplug my nose
and shout numbers into
a dead phone?
the
dead phone is mine—
—when someone
is pushed three times
out the express chute—
maybe a terrorist
Jane Fonda’s surprising
youth, running and
jamboreeing—
Jim is
the repeated desired name
but a hollow resides
where Jim once lived
LSD son
was Jim, a
suicide, or rumoured
to be a suicide in
S.F.
erotic fantasy
of the suicide nude
answering a Victorian
pink lady door
here in Baton Rouge they’re
picketing The Vagina
Monologues
stuffed myself on crawfish
étouffée and broccoli,
didn’t stop to
judge extent of stomach
fullness
his eyebrows deserve
dissection, elegy, troubadour
energies
why is my
coccyx always the tragic
Kundalini sore spot?
one more
bite of $3 vegetable
we
wonder why our emotional
and spiritual horizons are so
straitened, we realize
four serried trees are sublimely
waiting for me to announce them
not convulsive beauty
but not obvious beauty either
repose achieved as
landing strip where
dismal life attains
longawaited equilibrium,
and perhaps we extend the
‘high’ and realize getting
stoned is the origin of
literature
or getting stoned by
angry homophobic journalists
and townspeople
a pause
before I say yes despite
Elton John and not
fearing loneliness or
the buttfucked girlfriend
who took it up the ass
from the sadistic boy
because of pregnancy fears
this story told to me
as the height of her
humiliation or as an
extension of what my
cruel gay body and draconian
Rudolf Serkin will
power did
to her
breasts felt
up by third wheel boyfriend
and I realized I was
a noncontender
upside-down mouth seen as
zucchini bread giftgiving
and The Fox reparations
received on Third Street
and my surprise that San
Jose had a good used
bookstore because I was an
impossible snob
why always is my suicide
fantasy poised on mother
of baby I adore more
than dignity allows?
my questions are my
father’s, precautionary,
nervous, dry, scape-
goated—like neighborhood
dog we
Jews feared
I’ve never seen such a
compromised set of
knickers or lowhangers—
his pedagogic
illocutionary lowhangers—
or
Festschrift on my behalf
including Princess Di
mourning’s profundity
—not sure why I’d
let him suck me off
his persistence reminds me
of Mary Ann at ditto
machine, stink of my
cruelty
—not sure why
grease clings to my jacket
or why liberation is
achieved in unlikely
locale
two boys
together in tub
when father leaves
bathroom (No More
Tears) and I experiment
with rubber ducks
the joke
(told on third-grade bus) of
snake as intercourse
the stalled Music Man
bus where my first dis-
obedience broke its waters
teaching Yahweh
about genitals,
grasping Yahweh’s glitter
and are
four recited nouns the
secret of his sudden
access to fountains?
Rosi-
crucian rose goldenness of
failed immortality?
lost thumb
of matzoh ball purveyor
spooning goulash
near Hildegard Knef
LPs for sale
in thick plastic sleeves
Wayne Koestenbaum has published over twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Ultramarine (Nightboat Books, 2022), The Cheerful Scapegoat (Semiotext(e) / Native Agents, 2021), Figure It Out (Counterpoint, 2020), Camp Marmalade (Nightboat Books, 2018), My 1980s & Other Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), The Anatomy of Harpo Marx (University of California Press, 2012), Humiliation (Picador, 2011), Hotel Theory (Soft Skull, 2007), Circus (Soft Skill, 2004), Andy Warhol (Penguin, 2001), Jackie Under My Skin (Plume, 1995), and The Queen’s Throat (Da Capo Press, 1993), nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He has given musical performances of his improvisatory Sprechstimme soliloquies at the Hammer Museum, The Kitchen, REDCAT, Centre Pompidou, Walker Art Center, The Artist’s Institute, the Renaissance Society, and The Poetry Project. His feature-length film, The Collective, premiered at UnionDocs (New York) in 2021. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and a Whiting Award. Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired his literary archive. He is a Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center.
