Call it dissociation, combined with intense physical groundedness, and absorption in the minutiae of physical sensation.

It’s a state of not knowing who or where I am. WAYNE KOESTENBAUM: Trance, for my purposes, is this state of self-forgetfulness, absence, flight. SHOSHANA OLIDORT: We first met when I enrolled in a class you were teaching at the CUNY Graduate Center called “Trance.” This was around the same time you were writing what would become the first volume in your trilogy of trance poems, The Pink Trance Notebooks. Perhaps that’s because for Koestenbaum, it really does. Throughout our one-and-a-half-hour conversation, and the several email exchanges that followed, he was totally present, completely invested in the dialogue and in talking about this stuff as if it really matters. There’s a largesse about Koestenbaum, in the way he speaks and the way he writes, exuding an almost childlike excitement and enthusiasm. Koestenbaum and I met virtually, via Zoom, in late January, where, from our respective living spaces on either coast, we discussed the linguistic unconscious, Susan Sontag, and the poetic descent into the underworld. Koestenbaum’s current project is a trance trilogy, the second volume of which, Camp Marmalade, will be out this month. Cutting a silhouette around white space with his longtime preoccupations of art, desire, form, famous people dead and alive, the work in Figure It Out embodies Lukács’s definition of the essay itself as 'an autonomous and integral giving-of-form to an autonomous and complete life.' It is in the non-pause that Koestenbaum draws a portrait of a consciousness, free and at its most utterly alive.ECLECTIC MAY BE the best word to capture Wayne Koestenbaum, an acclaimed poet, distinguished professor, and cultural critic who has written on subjects ranging from Jackie O to Harpo Marx, and from Andy Warhol to humiliation. Koestenbaum’s writing, like his interests, is diffuse and gymnastic. What unifies these essays isn’t an exploration of a single subject, as has been the case in Koestenbaum’s monographs, such as Humiliation here, the collection’s title might be read as the writer’s wry, modernist incitement: Figure it out.

What looks like a fissure in a Koestenbaum essay represents a cognitive gesture. Indeed, it isn’t quite fragments that index his signature style but the mental choreography suggested in the intervening schisms. Koestenbaum’s pointillistic method relies upon synapses between text fragments. A recognition of skepticism about.form pulses through Figure It Out-and Koestenbaum’s work writ large.

Figure It Out by Wayne Koestenbaum