9/26/2023 0 Comments Trance writingNarrative for me always starts to happen within the free flow of transcribing. Always, for me, the process of trance writing involves a certain amount of skittering and sliding, but then a sudden arrival at narrative. And there are moments when I choose a moment. In all three volumes, but particularly Ultramarine, I’m dancing on the lily pads of the nuances rather than explaining or delving. I was aware that within a seemingly random or chance-driven flow there are moments of narrative traction and obsessive return that I always attempted to flesh out and make more accessible, or to make more conventionally intense. And I sought in revision to extend those narratives and to give them more heft and particularity. I was happy to find in all three of the books that there were certain mini-narratives, like short stories or fables, buried within the flow. WK: Not when I started, but in the revision process. Did you have a sense early on that there would be this arc across the trilogy? PD: You said earlier that there is a more somber tone to Ultramarine, and that certainly comes from these externalities-political upheaval, deaths. That is, through a trance poetics, the closer I came to language unmediated by sense the closer I felt I was coming to reality. But I would say that the aim of a trance poetics is certainly not solipsism or escape from the material but a re-embrace of the material through a more tactile and sonically driven relation to the corpuscles of language. That’s perhaps granting poetry power to make things happen, which is not poetry’s true provenance. WK: I like to think that my interior is populated by the exterior and that even the characters in my dreams come from the outside world-that my dream life reflects an attempt to rearrange the external world. Where was the line in your trance writing between interior and exterior? And that’s an interesting frame to put around this. And, is it fair to say, Patrick, that the world has grown darker and more dismal in these past four years or so? So, there’s a larger historical terrain, much more material to condense, and therefore more of the elliptical or the elusive. Ultramarine is culled from four years of diaries, whereas Camp Marmalade and The Pink Trance Notebooks are one year apiece. So, I’d say that Ultramarine is more somber than The Pink Trance Notebooks and Camp Marmalade, partly because the composition of Ultramarine took much, much longer. That’s a writing rhythm I noticed in my book The Anatomy of Harpo Marx-how giddy the first four chapters are and how somber and death-driven the later ones are. Wayne Koestenbaum: In all of my long projects, there’s a movement from optimism and exaltation to a certain bittersweet sobriety by the end. Is there really a conclusion to a trilogy based in trance? I’m particularly interested in how you see Ultramarine fitting into the arc of the trilogy. Patrick Davis: You’ve just published the third of your trance notebooks, Ultramarine, with Nightboat Books. Here Koestenbaum reflects on his various obsessions-color, kink, the Northeast corridor, Gertrude Stein-and his signature “trance poetics.” (His poem, “,” was just featured in Harvard Review 59.) In an interview with Patrick Davis, he discusses his recently completed trilogy of “trance notebooks”: The Pink Trance Notebooks, Camp Marmalade, and, this February, Ultramarine. Wayne Koestenbaum is an essayist, professor, public intellectual, and poet. “I have a crush on the world to some extent”: An Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum
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