I didn’t pour thoughts freely onto the page. WK I had a journal, but it was a guilt-space. ZP What was your notebook-keeping like as an adolescent? Or maybe Camp Marmalade is the place in adolescence where your libidinal energies grow unhoused and randy, where you can exercise the jammier frequencies. Maybe you go to Camp Marmalade to be punished out of earlier, more playful drives. Camp Marmalade is a carceral, instructional space: it’s both an endurance test and a joyride. Wayne Koestenbaum Thank you for that arresting interpretation. Zachary Pace Camp Marmalade feels like the adolescent in the Trance trilogy, the second, central phase of the three books. Erudite while iconoclastic, impious and so utopian, Marmalade’s a dreamy sleepaway camp where amorous outsiders can find camaraderie in their mutual alienation. With The Pink Trance Notebooks (the trilogy’s first volume published in 2015), Koestenbaum introduced a new form and process to his work: after transcribing his train of thought through trancelike states of mind, he extracts the juiciest phrases, enjambs them in clipped lines and labels the passages in numbered sections with bracketed, italicized lines like ‘’ and ‘’ serving as titles. ‘’ – the title of the first sequence of poem-fragments in Wayne Koestenbaum’s new collection of poems, Camp Marmalade (Nightboat Books, 2018) – tellingly opens this second volume of a trilogy of ‘trance notebooks’ by a poet whose numerous works of poetry and prose overflow with heartfelt intellect that’s as rigorous as it is deceptively effortless.
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