Like his work, Koestenbaum defies categorization

There are at least two things that don’t scare Wayne Koestenbaum: snow and innovative literary structure.

The author braved yesterday’s relentless precipitation to deliver the February installment of the School of the Arts’s Creative Writing Lecture Series to a packed audience at Dodge Hall.

Koestenbaum and his body of work defy classification. A CUNY professor, critic, and amateur pianist, he has written five volumes of poetry, one fiction novel, five books of nonfiction, and a book—”Hotel Theory”—that is a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction. In the fiction section of the book, he omits the articles “a,” “an,” and “the,” a type of wordplay that is a hallmark of Koestenbaum’s work.

His prose reads like poetry, his fiction incorporates art and music criticism, and his critical essays are shot through with autobiographical interjections. “I utilize various kinds of devices and sentences that aren’t traditionally found in straight-laced critical prose,” Koestenbaum remarked. At the event, he defined the major techniques that he has admired in other writers’ texts, which he synthesizes to tie together his own diverse resume.

Koestenbaum’s lecture, titled “Bulge, Glaze, Pause, Shock,” presented the audience with his personal four “aesthetic virtues.” He explained to the writers in attendance—both professional and aspiring—that these four principles should be incorporated when writing, and engaged with when reading. “I like to think of myself as a flâneur, someone who wanders the corridors of culture in my life,” Koestenbaum said. “I am particularly in pursuit of experiences of bulge, glaze, pause, shock.”

To illustrate his point, Koestenbaum discussed a handout of 19 quotations that he had assembled for the audience members. The excerpts represented the work of such diverse authors as Sigmund Freud, Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and Roland Barthes. Koestenbaum discussed how each work’s effectiveness could be attributed to one or more of the four aesthetic virtues. One of these selections was an Emily Dickinson poem—Koestenbaum explained that because it is “glutted with em dashes,” the poem embodies the “pause” principle, forcing the reader to digest each phrase and contributing to an overall “shock” effect.

Koestenbaum moved fluidly between his own theories and the quotations, uninhibited and engaging. He spoke in a manner one might expect from a poet who is also an academic, with well-constructed, artistic sentences flowing effortlessly from his mouth. At the end of the lecture, he offered additional advice to fellow writers, based on his own experience. “It’s always been a policy of mine to make writing interesting by changing gears as frequently as possible,” he said.