Over the past three decades, the poet, fiction writer, and translator John Keene has gradually and unassumingly established himself as one of the preeminent writers of experimental literature in English. To call his output modest risks overstatement: between 1995 and 2020, he published only three full-length works—one compact novel, one collection of short fiction, and one collaborative book of poetry and drawings. Keene’s most recent book, Punks: New and Selected Poems (The Song Cave, 2021) is, despite its subtitle, his first single-authored, full-length collection of poetry. Yet “new and selected” fits as a descriptor—Punks’s length (over two hundred pages), formal plenitude, and arrangement into thematically discrete sections give it the feeling of an omnibus edition. Celebrations of the social and erotic lives of queer and Black people; elegies for those lost to AIDS and anti-LGBTQ+ violence; splicings of poetics theory; found-text fragments arranged into grids; and persona poems from the perspective of Black historical figures (some famous, some known only to themselves) are all featured in its pages.
Punks’s capaciousness makes it the latest iteration of Keene’s ever-expanding experimental sensibility. To borrow his descriptor, Punks is a “mixtape,” a mélange of disparate lineages, subjectivities, and techniques which Keene arranges but doesn’t synthesize—it’s no mash-up, to keep with the analogy.[1] The book’s seven sections are marked by persistent variation and guided by an innate sensibility; Keene deploys forms, swaps out influences, and traverses space and time with an adroitness not so much improvised as intuitive. This sensibility finds its poem-level analogue in the ease with which Keene jumps between existing aesthetic tendencies: the choice between confessional lyric or Language-style parataxis dictates neither the poem’s subject nor its affective timbre. Taxonomies of verse are not norms to abide by—or, for that matter, rail against—but the endpoints of a process and poetics that rules nothing out in advance. Any given poem is a center from which expansion happens.
Punks achieves its singular style of cohesion not in spite of this variousness but because of it—it insists on life’s particularity with the particularity life demands. What this particularity consists of is a moving target: the use of a given poetic form or found text; the cultivation of a lineage or acknowledgement of an inheritance; the presence of specific people and places, of scenes and conversations and memories; or a simple yet uncommon attunement which, rather than flatten a poem’s emotional texture, would let ambiguity ripple through. On their own, each of these elements would count as no more than one authorial choice among many, or an instance of exemplary craft. But as in any great mixtape, the accumulation of discrete pieces conditions the birth of something new. In Punks’s case, what emerges is an abiding openness, receptivity, and care—a commitment to the value of the lives, in all their fullness, of the eponymous punks.
§
From its speculative origin as the name for cast-off dust from fungus-infected wood, “punk” has come to encompass a wide set of those perceived as worthless or undesirable: a beginner or amateur; a criminal or delinquent; a person used for sex; a gay, effeminate, or weak-seeming man. It’s a fitting sobriquet for the voices and lives the book contains—those who reside on the margins of utility and live for pleasure, joy, autonomy, self-knowledge, and unabridged expression in a world structured to snuff them out. A punk is someone the mainstream saves no place for. They must, in the experience of living, become the architect of their life’s value, their particular way of moving through the world.
Take the opening elegy “Mission and Outpost.” Unspooling in long, roving sentences, the poem follows its speaker’s wanderings through San Francisco in search of traces of the bygone queer arcadia he’s heard, read, and dreamt about. At the outset, the poem’s tone is earnest, spiked with longing, but the inevitable disillusionment comes; the speaker’s “imagination sags beneath the weight / of disappointment on this shadow trail” as the city’s current reality (5), transfigured by the AIDS crisis and the violence of time, robs him of his “western Oz” (3). But this fantasy proves to have been no more valuable than what replaces it: the texture of a shared and real world. The default whiteness of the mythologized city is supplanted by the actual people who live there (“a rangy afro’d brother, a thickset guy, Asian, // in a bomber, a cordillera of chicos, buff and bundled” [4]), and at the poem’s end the speaker, with no more use for “memory’s emulsion” (4), joins “the leathered and rubber-clad legions / prowling, chatting, renewing the Castro’s rites, / …as the hills bloom with stars and headlights” (6).
There’s a sense of resignation here, but a glimmer of newness, too, and we catch the speaker at the crossroads between the loss of a formative but simplistic fantasy and an unfamiliar but vibrant reality. The tone is not one of despair, nor is it triumph, but what accompanies the act of approaching, via one’s own experience, a truth that is belated, unbidden, and essential. This approach finds its corresponding form in the poem’s baroque sentences, their hypotaxis scaffolded by four-line stanzas:
Instead what I found were tips
on how to dress, pack my cock, achieve the ultimate in clone
perfection; how to cruise and lay and lose the gold-tressed,
virile god of every queer boy’s fantasies—but mine; bemoan
the arrival of one’s sexual autumn, the dying light
in the Pines or dunes of Provincetown; work a bathhouse or four—
and where they hunkered in every civilized metropole; popper,
coke and fist my way to true liberation; keep score
by counting the number of times you’d hit the clinic, beat it, got it
again, forgotten and passed it on again; and more tales
about young, tanned, muscular vapid beauties who’d disappeared
or gone mad or both; and all those grand parades, processions, festivals—
stocked with garish, compelling “types”—all beginning
and ending here.
(4)
This sentence’s dilation opens up space for subtleties of tone to flood in. Awe, desire, alienation, and scorn abut one another and cross-pollinate. Does the surfeit of “tales / about young, tanned, muscular vapid beauties who’d disappeared / or gone mad or both” elicit a rapt stare, eye roll, or some other expression, private and illegible? One can imagine a lesser poet spelling out the answer, or overexplaining the question’s stakes. Throughout Punks, Keene rejects such artificial closure—his poems are playful but not coy; earnest but not maudlin; rigorous but not esoteric; committed but not didactic. “Mission and Outpost” does not collapse affective registers or wash out ambiguities; rather, it musters the precision of tone and equivocality of attitude necessary to depict emotional experience in a manner adequate to experience itself.
§
Keene’s experimental sensibility has been present, in different shapes and iterations, from the early stages of his writing life. His first book, Annotations, while arguably too short to be a novel proper, possesses a formal unity and narrative thrust that make any other label ill-fitting. The term “novel” drapes over the book like a baggy shirt—imperfect, but with a low-key ease.
This is not to say Annotations abides by novelistic conventions. The book’s main stylistic tack is parataxis: discontinuous sentences or fragments woven together to enable unexpected resonances between sounds, images, and ideas. What emerges are memories of childhood and adolescence interwoven with a running commentary on the act of rendering the unlinked acts and events of one’s life into a cohesive narrative—autobiography, in other words. Annotations is full of experiments in cohesion: its chapters, most three or four pages long, are each titled with a variation on a phrase plucked from elsewhere in the book. The form is derived from Lyn Hejinian’s seminal work of Language poetry My Life, and Keene embraces this inheritance, borrowing a line from My Life for one of Annotations’s epigraphs.
Hejinian’s influence is also palpable at a more granular level. The sentences of My Life are defined by a certain keenness—precise yet expansive, analytic yet playful. They do not aspire to beauty, but, via a fidelity to their own expression, arrive at beauty almost incidentally. This is no less true of Keene’s sentences in Annotations. Parataxis can be a tactic for avoidance, a cover for a writer’s disinvestment, trepidation, or confusion about what they’re trying to write; in Annotations, it is a method for integrating the scattershot parts of the self:
Daddy also coached basketball as a means of providing those boys with a viable life-alternative. Later on, he was as prone to drink as he was to cuss, a fact that rapidly trained them to tread as if on crystal. Note that it is easy to underestimate the power of representation, and yet to fixate on this site of contestation to the exclusion of other problematic areas is to consign the nature of the struggle to the scopopsychic realm. Uh-huh.[2]
Matter-of-fact biography punctuated by a vivid simile; a flight into theory countered by the verbal equivalent of a raised eyebrow. By placing such incongruous registers in sequence, Keene enables the disparate facets of the narrator’s self—son, poet, scholar, skeptic—to harmonize and clash. Unlike My Life, Annotations traces a clear narrative arc, the story of a self becoming the self who tells his story. It’s a story that never relinquishes its grounding in the specificity of life as lived, and thoughts as thought. And if what we read gives us only glimpses of that narrative, a montage of events and images that gesture toward their source without revealing it, it is because, as Keene writes in the book’s closing sentence, “these remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations.”[3] The whole story is out there; what we’ve read are scribbles in the margins. This does not make Annotations a lesser book; rather, it introduces a tendency in how Keene, for a good portion of his career, framed his work: as a series of adjuncts to a greater, unwritten or unwritable whole.
Keene’s second book, 2006’s Seismosis, is a collaboration with the artist and writer Christopher Stackhouse, a collection of poems and drawings (primarily pen and ink abstractions) composed in response to each other. As far as experimentalisms go, Seismosis makes Annotations seem prim: Keene’s penchant for technical vocabulary and neologisms, in concert with his deployment of Language aesthetics—fragmentation, procedure, the eschewal of “aboutness”—results in a poetics chiefly concerned with depicting “the juncture of numerous conceptual planes.”[4]
It would be easy to label Seismosis an outlier in Keene’s oeuvre. Race, queerness, and the actual physical world appear only obliquely, if at all. But other commonalities track: the precision of language, the mingling of description and self-interrogation. Present, too, is a frame that would classify Keene’s own work as marginal. His poems, ekphrastic responses to Stackhouse’s drawings, are in a literal sense derivative, contingent on the hand of another. Like notes in a margin, they are incomplete on their own, amounting to parts that don’t compose a whole. Where Seismosis differs most notably from Annotations, however, is in its relentless formal inventiveness. Just as each of Stackhouse’s drawings trace their own intuitive path, Keene’s poems are constantly seeking out new forms. Arrayed lines, prose blocks, shifts in kerning, and lexica arranged in grids all inhabit adjoining pages. Here Keene’s method—persistent variation as a style of attunement—takes clearer shape.
To call Keene’s 2015 book Counternarratives a collection of short fiction would be akin to calling The Brothers Karamazov a murder mystery—technically accurate but comically misleading. A more apt description: Counternarratives is a brazenly experimental revisionist history of five centuries of Black life in the Americas. What these episodes have in common is their drive to represent what has been lost not just to history but to literature: the moments of resistance, pleasure, agency, and self-actualization that white supremacy, to sustain itself, strains to erase from collective memory. Many episodes extrapolate from the historical record, filling in the gaps between known fragments—or, as in “Blues,” which narrates a romantic encounter between Langston Hughes and the Mexican poet Xavier Villaurrutia, leave behind those gaps as a reminder of the loss literature tries in vain to fill. “Blues,” like the poems of Seismosis, is a unique deployment of form, but differs in its deliberate calibration to the story being told. The same is true of “Acrobatique,” a monologue by the circus aerialist Miss La La written as a single page-spanning sentence, the final letters of which fall vertically down the page like a dangling rope.
Keene doesn’t hesitate to stray from the historical record when it fails to provide a satisfactory resolution. The superlative “Gloss on a History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic, 1790–1825; Or the Strange History of Our Lady of the Sorrows” follows the orphaned Carmel from revolutionary Haiti to a Catholic convent school in Louisiana. After teaching herself to read and write, and mastering the divinatory arts of her late mother, Carmel opens a rift to the spirit realm, sets fire to the convent, and, at last reuniting with her mother, appears to transit to this new world. Carmel’s coming into herself is mirrored by the story’s own shifts in form: third-person omniscient narration gives way to Carmel’s error-filled diary entries, culminating in a first-person voice brimming with certainty. As readers, we perceive Carmel’s stages of self-actualization via corresponding shifts in narrative technique. Such a device could seem gimmicky or overdetermined, but Keene’s handling is so intuitive as to feel inevitable. The same holds true for the story’s leap into the speculative. What risks being a narrative card trick or twee sprinkling of magical realism amounts to a rupture that broaches ontology, a break from strict realism which enacts via form a freedom that exceeds the physical world. It literalizes Carmel’s flight. In the context of Keene’s oeuvre as a whole, “Gloss” merges Seismosis’s form-driven experimentation and Annotations’s depiction of Black self-fashioning, establishing a unified aesthetic mission.
Despite its scope, Counternarratives does not abandon Keene’s tendency to present his work as marginal. As with Annotations, he frames certain stories as extant fragments of an absent whole. “Gloss” is a premier example: Carmel’s story springs from an asterisk notched in a page-long excerpt from the fictitious A History of Roman Catholics in the Early American Republic: 1790–1825. A black line, as would separate a footnote from the main text, hovers atop the ensuing seventy-one pages, ostensibly consigning the story to the margins of a more important history. But there is one crucial difference from Annotations: in “Gloss” the marginalia utterly overwhelm the main text in force, scope, and specificity, becoming a part which exceeds the whole. The inability of an “official” historical frame to explain the destruction of the convent is consonant with the need for a supernatural narrative turn to effect Carmel’s escape. The asterisk that marks the footnote is a portal to another realm, a place where capital-H History can’t go. Such categories of experience call for alternative means of representation; the fashioning of such means is, for Keene, the essence of experimental literature.
§
The poems in Punks were written over the span of three decades, concurrently with Keene’s previous books. It’s fitting, then, that Punks is an amalgamation of their distinct experimentalisms, slicing and weaving them together. In Punks’s third section, “Ten Things I Do Every Day” (a nod to Ted Berrigan), Keene riffs on the Language-influenced aesthetics of Annotations and Seismosis, deploying techniques—fragmentation, free association, the jettisoning of narrative logic—historically used by many white avant-garde writers to scramble the sense of a coherent speaking subject. Although Keene makes use of these techniques, he harbors a warring purpose: he seeks to mine veins of personal and historical experience that such writing has sought to keep buried, and to create—or reveal the presence of—a margin’s bleeding edge. In “A Report on the ‘What’s American About American Poetry?’ Conference at the New School,” Keene uses his recording of the 2001 conference to assemble a fractured manifesto about what might be called “American poetry” and the discursive crosswinds that buffet it. There’s a cheekiness here (“I am not suffering / the language of power / behind the poems / only ghosts / of Charles Bernstein” [80]), but the poem concludes with an unambiguous declaration of principles:
we keep coming back
to Eliot and Pound
to rebel against
the street and jazz
Africans in bondage
I think I break
behind the poems
an East Coast thing
only minstrels
and whores
are our precursors
of cynicism
don’t read
Generation X
but look for me
ghosts
translate my absence
into language
speak
to power
behind
the words
rebel against
the silence
(83)
The American experimental tradition—and American poetry writ large—has been justifiably critiqued for its whiteness, its maleness, and its alignment with state and institutional power. Repurposing language from the conference, Keene wields it against itself, characterizing—with caustic irony—the poetry establishment’s tendency to “keep coming back / to Eliot and Pound” as a “[rebellion] against” the influence of Black culture (“the street and jazz”) and Black history (“Africans in bondage”).[5] But the poem’s tone resolves into an earnest declaration of principles. Its language—plain, direct, approaching activist clichés—risks patness deliberately, without apology, its attitude resonant with the sense of conviction that unites Punks’s discrepant parts. That these final lines are themselves composed of text harvested from an academic conference, arguably an organ of power and silence itself, encapsulates Keene’s method of wedding specific form to function, of identifying an interior margin and exposing it to light.
This method finds its fullest expression in “Dark to Themselves,” Punks’s penultimate section, a series of character sketches examining the outer and inner lives of Black people across historical eras. Writing primarily but not exclusively in the first person, Keene shifts between icons like George Washington Carver and less canonical figures, including Martín de Porres, a mixed-race Peruvian monk, and Denmark Vesey, a free Black pastor who plotted a major uprising of the enslaved. The poems about Vesey and Carver dig into the conflicts and unknowns of their psychic lives, the places in which both men, dark to the dominant culture, held areas of darkness in themselves. These poems pick up the thread of the revisionist ethos where Counternarratives let it lie, blasting holes in the monolith of history to let what’s “behind / the words” flow through. The apostrophic “Apostate” mines Miles Davis’s life and speech—referencing his brief stint at Juilliard and his time spent detoxing on his father’s farm in Alton, Illinois—but broadcasts through a certain haze, like a radio station with a fading signal. Music may promise to deliver what’s lost in language’s static, and yet:
when you prepared to state
with your horn what your lips
refuse to bear away,
how it’s not about being a genius
or merely surviving, how nobody ever
sees what goes down in the head
of a brother striving so hard
to make something beautiful
and impregnable and lasting
out of the margins of this blue life,
how the dues you pay never suffice,
and you play and play and play
thinking that moment will come
but it never does, or it came so often
you realized it only too late
(164–65)
Here, Keene calls our attention to a foundational discrepancy between the facts a poem contains and the fact of the gaps that remain, between the margins our gaze is directed toward and those for which the surest shape is silence—a shape that music carries but “lips / refuse to bear away.” We can gather information about the lives of Davis, Carver, and Vesey, but we cannot know “what goes down in the head / of a brother striving so hard / to make something beautiful / and impregnable and lasting / out of the margins of this blue life.” We can hear the sounds the horn makes, but we cannot read the music—after all, it was never written down.
Keene’s method carves out space for silence, a silence that is not the lack of speech but speech as its own withholding. In “Dear Trane (Lecture on Something),” Keene samples from John Cage’s “Lecture on Something” and “Lecture on Nothing,” adopting their form of fractured grids but retooling their concerns. “So play it,” Keene writes, “this impossible, / can you / play it, / this abyss / got to / play, this / silence in this / abyss” (174). These lines echo Keene’s earlier exhortation to “rebel against / the silence,” but the imperative “play” torques the meaning. The task of the musician—or the poet, for that matter—has shifted: no longer resisting an imposed silence, they are charged with articulating a nascent one, an articulation which, for Keene, amounts to the exaltation of a particular and indelible human privacy. Silence is not an absence or a void so much as, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, that which cannot be spoken of but nonetheless lives on. Keene’s work is marked by an insistence that there is much we do not and cannot know about his characters, speakers, and narrators; maybe their words were lost to history, or maybe just left unsaid. We can ask what really happens to Carmel at the end of “Gloss,” or wonder about the greater text that Keene’s “series of mere life-notes” annotates, but our questions will necessarily be met with silence. The answers, if they exist, can be rendered only in interiority’s private language.
To be able to retain for oneself such a kernel of silence—to be the margin curled around something great and depthless—is, I think, a fundamental aspect of being human. To seek to strip people of this aspect, or to deny it from them in the first place, is among the most pervasive and sinister means of dehumanization. Punks is devoted to staging this kernel’s reclamation in the wake of such dehumanization, which for centuries or longer has been aimed squarely at Black people, queer people, and all those deemed sufficiently worthless to be shoved to the social margins. Those written out of history textbooks and the literary canon; barred from cultural representation that aspired to anything more than caricature; turned out of train cars, restaurants, their own towns and homes; murdered for the simple audacity of living on their own terms: these are the punks the book is named for, the ones whose silence Keene plays with such particular conviction.
Notes:
[1] John Keene, “All Together Now,” Bookforum, January 25, 2022, https://www.bookforum.com/interviews/bookforum-talks-with-john-keene-about-punks-an-assemblage-of-poems-three-decades-in-the-making-24790.
[2] John Keene, Annotations (New York: New Directions, 1995), 43.
[3] Keene, Annotations, 78.
[4] John Keene, Seismosis (1913 Press, 2006), 13.
[5] Compounding this irony is the fact that both Eliot and Pound mocked and appropriated Black vernacular speech in their private correspondence and published work—a gesture which the form of “A Report” subverts.