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.

The Chicago Review on The Kafka Sutra

Whatever the reason—his insightful writing on Polish literature for the TLS, his poems, or the kind of courtesy he showed when we both tried to get into the same taxi on a cold Belgian morning 20 years ago—I've long admired Piotr Gwiazda. And now he's said some kind things about my book of poems and literary oddities, The Kafka Sutra. He's said them in the latest issue of The Chicago Review. His piece begins this way:


Robert Archambeau’s new book of poems The Kafka Sutra differs from
his previous book Home and Variations (2004) in the degree to which it
explores the possibilities of appropriation as a literary device. Appropriation,
moreover, becomes a hermeneutic tool in Archambeau’s hands. A poet and a
critic—the author of Laureates and Heretics (2010), The Poet Resigns (2013),
and the forthcoming Making Nothing Happen—he employs it to compose
his poems and to perform criticism on his textual sources. Entertaining and
intelligent, The Kafka Sutra shows Archambeau’s in-depth engagement with
this widespread, increasingly dominant poetic practice.
The title sequence at first quite implausibly grafts several of Kafka’s
enigmatic parables onto the subject matter of the Hindu classic Kama
Sutra. Describing it elsewhere as “one of the odder things [he’s] done,”
Archambeau promises, at least in theory, a merging of existential anxiety,
sensual fulfillment, and didactic intent. The result is indeed odd, but not
entirely foreign to anyone who has ever had the experience of reading
creatively more than one book at a time. The sequence is also disarmingly
playful and funny, as are the accompanying illustrations by Sarah Conner.

The full text is available here. 

If you can't get enough commentary on The Kafka Sutra, have a look at Stu Watson's "Reflections on Recent Poetry" over at Queen Mob's Teahouse.

In Which I Host A Deranged Literary Cooking Program

Some interesting reflections on my most recent book of poems, The Kafka Sutra, are up at the Queen Mob's Teahouse site.  Stu Watson has a number of nice things to say, but the one I'm thinking of keeping for a future blurb is "one at moments can almost imagine Archambeau as the host of a deranged literary cooking program." Read all about it here!

Sheena and the Sugar Book

Sheena, the Ramones inform us, is a punk rocker.  She wasn't always, though—I once tried to combine the history and prehistory of the various Sheenas and proto-Sheenas of pop culture, and the poem, "Sheena is a Punk Rocker," appears in my book The Kafka Sutra.  It's also been reproduced online here, by E-Verse Radio.

In other news: Johannes Goransson! Or, more specifically: Johannes Goransson's The Sugar Book! Or, more specifically still: my short review of The Sugar Book in The Boston Review is now online as part of their "Summer Poetry Reading" feature. (It's also in the print magazine, if that's more your thing).

Finally, I'm now the Associate Editor of The Battersea Review, which has been going strong and staying eclectic since 2012, with contributors like Charles Bernstein, William Logan, A.E. Stallings, Adam Kirsch, Marjorie Perloff, Stephen Burt, and many more.  The fall issue will focus on Spain, and the issue after that on British Modernism.  You know you love the stuff!

Kafka Sutra World Tour, Spring 2016!

The jets are waiting on the runways, the engines of the motorcade hum in readiness: the Kafka Sutra world tour, 2016 edition, is about to begin!

The first stop: Louisville, Kentucky where, by popular request (okay, by arrangement with the conference organizers) I won't be reading from The Kafka Sutra, but delivering a paper called "Ransom Revised: John Crowe Ransom's Journey from Dialogism to Dogma."  YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO BE THERE! It's at the University of Louisville, Humanities 108, at 2:45 on Saturday, February 20th.  Also on the bill: Mark Scroggins, talking about Geoffrey Hill, and Sally Connolly, discussing elegies written for Ezra Pound.

Then the tour loops back home to Chicago, Illinois, where I'll be reading from The Kafka Sutra side by side with Larry Sawyer and Nathan Hoks, who will read from their new work.  This will be at the Uptown Arts Center (941 West Lawrence Avenue), Friday, February 26, at 8 pm.  If you are one of those deeply hip sorts who only navigates with reference to legendary jazz hangouts, that's a block east of the Green Mill.

Next, the traveling circus heads to Concord, New Hampshire, for a Poetry Month spectacular reading on April 4th at NHTI (details to follow).  

Those who attend all three events will be given a hug of sympathy and a quizzical look.

The Kafka Sutra: On Amazon and Live at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop

Hot news! The Amazon listing for my new book of poems and literary oddities, The Kafka Sutra is now up and running.  Just in time for the launch of the book, along with two other new titles from MadHat Press, tomorrow at the Grolier  Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Mass.  

Here's the text from the Amazon listing:

What if Franz Kafka, that master of frustration, failure, and despair, had written the ancient Sanskrit sex manual The Kama Sutra? Robert Archambeau explores this question in the illustrated series of parables that begins his collection The Kafka Sutra. Other questions behind the pieces in this book concern glam rock, fatherhood, Afro-Caribbean and Belgian Surrealism, Conceptualism, Hiroshima, the sad lot of the English professor, and similar vital matters of these, our troubled times.

And here's my severed head, advertising the book launch.  See you there!

The Kafka Sutra, Available Now!

Hey hey! The Kafka Sutra is now available for pre-order at the MadHat Press website!

A bargain! A great gift for all occasions!

With images by Sarah Conner and a cover by Kriss Abigail! Get 'em while they're hot!

Andrei Codrescu likes it! Daisy Fried too! Michael Robbins wants all copies burned!

Can all these blurb writers be wrong? Find out!

The good people at MadHat have also posted a short bio correctly describing me as having the world's least interesting trans-national identity.

Archambeau World Tour: Live at the Poetry Foundation and the Grolier!

Where, you ask, is the place to be on the evening of Tuesday, September 15th? From 7:00-8:00 pm in Chicago it'll be the Poetry Foundation, at 61 West Superior, for a free reading featuring Mary Kinzie, Alexandra Pechman, Nicole Nodi, and some guy named Robert Archambeau, who will read from his new (indeed, released that very day) book The Kafka Sutra.

There will also be a small installation of images by artist Sarah Conner from a series of prints she made to accompany The Kafka Sutra.

Here, by the way, is the cover of the book, including blurbs by a number of worthies (click to enlarge the text to readable size).

If you can't make it to Chicago in September, how about Boston (well, Cambridge) in November? I'll be reading at The Kafka Sutra's east coast launch November 14th at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop on Harvard Square at 7:00 pm.

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.