Henry King Gets It: On the Kafka Sutra

Poetry wars? What poetry wars? Henry King has written a very insightful review of my book The Kafka Sutra in which he gets at my sense of poetic pluralism better than anyone else I've seen.  Here's a bit from the middle:

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The poems are formally varied, with fixed forms such as the sonnet and sestina alongside varieties of free verse. In both, Archambeau frequently uses repetition: the necessary repetitions and recombinations in “Sestina: What Chester Kallman Did to Poor Old Auden” are echoed in the free verse of “La Bandera” and “Hieratic Perspective:

I went into the cathedral that was for me alone,
where the guide who was also for me alone,
and of me alone, spoke to me alone.

A century ago, these forms—fixed and free—were red lines within the poetry world, dividing it into antagonistic groups; but they have since been assimilated and ranged against later developments of the avant-garde, from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E to Conceptualism. Archambeau experiments with the latter aesthetic in the collection’s third section, “Two Procedures”. The first of these, “Manifest Destinies, Black Rains,” rings changes on an 1852 description of Washington D.C. from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine and a passage from Masuji Ibuse’s 1965 novel of the Hiroshima bombing, Black Rain, in nine unmetered quatrains:

A magnificent country, whose commerce whitens every sea,
whose most majestic railroads and canals, like great arteries, hang down,
broken, in tangled profusion—
I had a terrifying feeling that one or another of them must be live, fierce.

Here, it seemed, the human mind was destined to develop its highest powers.
Here, it seemed, in the inexhaustible country they inhabit.
Magnetic nerves, with the rapidity of thought, bore intelligence to distant
extremities. I had a terrifying feeling
the mind was destined to spark and tangle: fierce and white.

The difference between this kind of poesis and the Audenesque sestina is less a matter of kind than degree, and brings into question the supposed antitheses between this one and “the other kind of poetry.”

The whole review can be read in the latest Notre Dame Review, or online as a pdf here.

Another review of The Kafka Sutra, by Piotr Gwiazda's in the Chicago Review is here.

And if that's still not enough for you, here's Stu Watson's review in Queen Mob's Teahouse.

Robert Creeley, Poetry Warrior

Great news! The new issues of two of my favorite literary journals, The Laurel Review and The Notre Dame Review, have dropped from the sky.  The latest Laurel Review is a special prose poetry issue, and includes two pieces from my forthcoming remix extravaganza, The Kafka Sutra (in which the parables of Kafka are retold as if they were a Sanskrit sex manual).  The Notre Dame Review features a raft of great stuff, as well as "Robert Creeley: Poetry Warrior," a little something I wrote about The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, a very fine edition prepared by Rod Smith, Peter Baker, and Kaplan Harris.  It begins like this:

            “The book,” wrote Robert Creeley to Rod Smith, who was then hard at work on the volume in question, Creeley’s Selected Letters, “will certainly ‘tell a story.’”  Now that the text of that book has emerged from Smith’s laptop and rests between hard covers, it’s a good time to ask just what story those letters tell.  Certainly it isn’t a personal one. Creeley was a New Englander, through and through, and of the silent generation to boot.  Yankee reticence blankets the letters too thickly for us to feel much of the texture of Creeley’s quotidian life, beyond whether he feels (to use his favored idiom) he’s “making it” through the times or not.  Instead, the letters, taken together, tell an intensely literary story—and, as the plot develops, an institutional, academic one.  Call this story “From the Outside In,” maybe.  Or, better, treat it as one of the many Rashomon-like eyewitness accounts of that contentious epic that goes by the title The Poetry Wars.
            If you, like me, you entered the little world of American poetry in the 1990s, you found the Cold War that was ending in the realm of politics to be in full effect in poetry.  What had begun as a brushfire conflict between rival journals and anthologies in the fifties and early sixties had settled into an institutionalized rivalry, with an Iron Curtain drawn between the mutually suspicious empires of Iowa City and Buffalo.  The longstanding Iowa Writers Workshop found itself in a geo-poetic stalemate with a younger, more radical opponent, the Poetics Program at SUNY–Buffalo, which Creeley helped found in 1991, and which formalized Buffalo as the institutional home for poets who rankled at the idea that history had ended with Robert Lowell.  For many young poets, it seemed one had to pick a side, and treat the rival camp with deep mistrust, if not contempt.  For others, it all seemed a bit pointless, especially the rhetoric of resentment emanating from Buffalo, perhaps the best-endowed poetry program in the nation at the time.  Reading Creeley’s Selected Letters, which begins with a wartime letter from Creeley to his family and ends with an email he sent two weeks before his death in 2005, we get a view from the trenches of the postwar poetry wars, from their beginnings to a time when they were fading into literary history.  We get, too, a vivid picture of the outsider status, or non-status, of innovative poets like Creeley in their formative years (“we do not have any status as writers in this country” he wrote in 1956).

The whole piece is available in print and in a pdf online here. 

Coming This Fall: The Kafka Sutra

Behold! The cover of my next book, The Kafka Sutra, due out this fall from MadHat Press.  The title sequence is one of the odder things I've done—a rewriting of the Kama Sutra as if Kafka had written it; or a rewriting of Kafka's parables as an ancient Sanskrit sex manual.  Accompanying the series are artworks by Sarah Conner, such as this:

Thanks to Sarah; and to Moxie (the scariest belly-dancer in Chicago) for modeling for the cover; to Kriss Abigal for her amazing photo, and to Valerie for work on the layout.  This is my favorite cover yet among my books, in part because the "belly dancer in a top hat" look captures something of both Kafka and the Kama Sutra.

Also, thanks to the great David Kirby, who says this on the back of the jacket:

I’m pretty sure I was the only one reading poetry as I waited for my car to be serviced, but certainly I was the one who rocked the other customers out of their torpor with a belly laugh – not an unrelated occurrence, since I was reading Robert Archambeau’s addictive poems and had just gotten to the one in which men are told they can either become a husband or the lover of another man’s wife; naturally they all choose the second option, and the result is that soon there are no more wives. Then again, a rich irony suffuses all these poems. If you’re heading to the dealership and are looking for brainy, funny lines delivered with a rueful sigh, The Kafka Sutra is definitely the book for you.

And the immortal Andrei Codrescu, who says:

Archambeau has found the cartilage that keeps the body flexible and life Kafkaesque by inventing a musical technique that keeps life’s surging anarchy personalized through the universally usable Kama Sutra.  I’m using it right now!

And to the gracious Maxine Chernoff, who writes:

Reading Robert Archambeau's vastly engaging book, The Kafka Sutra, I feel as if I have gone on several vacations, a safari, and a trip into imaginative space: his far-ranging mind "riffs on, or remixes, replies to, or makes deeply unfaithful translations of what others have written." The book has sound, technique, wit, grace, staggering inventiveness, and above all generosity: from supplying Kafka with a deeply sexualized "new" body of work to celebrating luminaries from David Bowie to John Milton it is all splendidly here, in aces.

And, last but by no means least, to Wendy Doniger, Sanskrit scholar, Kama Sutra translator, and Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions, University of Chicago who, after reading The Kafka Sutra, said:

Archambeau’s absolutely hilarious Kama Sutra spoof made me howl with laughter! 

MadHat Press is to be held responsible for my crimes against literature.

More from The Kafka Sutra: The Laurel Review's Prose Poetry Issue

Great news!  The latest issue of The Laurel Review is about to drop, and it amounts to a new anthology of the contemporary prose poem, edited by the redoubtable John Gallaher.  Nin Andrews! Maxine Chernoff! Dan Coffey! My Lake Forest College colleague Joshua Corey! Arielle Greenberg! Kate Greenstreet! Piotr Gwiazda! Philip Metres! Craig Morgan Teicher! Keith Tuma! G.C. Waldrep! And many more!

Included in this embarrassment of riches are two prose poems of my own, "Leopards in the Temple" and "The Ball Rider," both from a larger series called "The Kafka Sutra" (which lends its title to the book of my poems coming out later this year, The Kafka Sutra, from MadHat Press).  The premise of "The Kafka Sutra" is simple: what if Kafka had written the Kama Sutra?  It's a kind of détournement or rewriting of a number of Kafka's parables and stories (here, "Leopards in the Temple" and "The Bucket Rider") to make them into instructions for sexual pleasure.  Or, since this is Kafka we're talking about, sexual frustration.  Here are some from the series, published a while ago in The Cultural Society, with accompanying images by Sarah Conner.

El Kafka Sutra

Sé qué usted es pensamiento. Usted es preguntándose cuando "El Kafka Sutra" estará disponible en Español. Pregúntese no más, el amigo - gracias a los esfuerzos de la buena gente en Mexico, Ácido: La Revisita publicado una traducción Español. Pero qué si no en México ¿consigue una copia? usted pide. Afortunadamente, el texto está disponible en en internet en Español!

Tengo gusto de Ácido, que (en la versión impresa) se ilustra maravillosamente. También tengo gusto de cómo describen el &NOW como un "movimiento," qué sonidos muy emocionantes. Y tengo gusto especialmente de cómo me describen: "maestro de poesía contemporánea en el Lake Forest College de Chicago": Maestro! Olé!

Apologies, by the way, to anyone appalled by what I'm sure is only semi-fluent Spanish on my part. Soy solamente un pinche gringo, after all...

The Kafka Sutra

No doubt you're well aware of the mysterious process by which Franz Kafka wrote certain passages of the Kama Sutra. But did you know those long-lost texts have been recovered and meticulously translated by the present humble blogger, and had their original illustrations restored to pristine conditions by Sarah Conner? No? Well, wallow in ignorance no more! Check out sections from that most evasive of texts, The Kafka Sutra, now available for viewing at The Cultural Society. Just click on "texts" and scroll down to the prose section.

Other contributors to the latest issue of Zach Barocas' Cultural Society include Michael Heller, Dan Beachy-Quick, Janet Holmes, Graham Foust, and many more.

The Kafka Sutra, Live!

We're just past the middle of the spring semester in my leafy corner of academe, and you know what that means, don't you, class? Yep, that's right: this is the time of semester that devours my soul and crushes my spirit. One side effect of all this is that my blog has been reduced to a string of short entries and announcements, and today's entry is no different — but if you're in Chicago, I really do urge you to check out the event I'm annoucing: a show at the Chicago Printmakers' Collaborative that runs from tommorrow through late May. It features work from a host of young, hip printmaker types, including Sarah Conner, who has worked with me on a series of prose poems/prints called The Kafka Sutra. The prose poems are kind of what you'd guess they might be from the title: Kafka's parables rewritten as if they were the Kama Sutra. Conner's prints go beyond being mere illustrations to the writing, I think, and can stand on their own without the text — but booklets featuring some of the prose poems will be available at the show, so come on down and get your neo-Kafka on for free. The show is at:

4642 N Western Ave
Chicago, IL 60625
(773) 293-2070