Books by Portland Authors: Rodney Koeneke

Yesterday Reading Local was honored to have sat down with Portland poet Rodney Koeneke.  Today we take a look at a couple of his poetry collections and what I believe is his doctoral dissertation work.

Musee Mechanique

Product Description:
Poems written while working at the Musee Mechanique, a collection of antique arcade games on San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf. Fashioned in part with those rhythms in mind, and partly with the mechanical aid of Internet search engines. Includes the serial poem “On the Clamways.”

Reviews:
“Rodney Koeneke’s quick-paced, often hilarious, often vulgar juxtapositions are rude to understanding but courteous as a calling card to anyone who cares about the life of language. Assembled with delight, affection, and a connoisseur’s ear for the latent pleasure of babble, MUSEE MECHANIQUE is a joyous record of the words in our head, c. 2006. I love this book.”–Benjamin Friedlander

“The work shows us how it is now, with the nostalgia of the muse oddified by idiosyncratic clutter from Toothy to Tooth to Asteroids. Tell yourself the kaleidoscope is real–we are not being naturalized by pedestrian thoroughfares, rather by the dreamy transmissions of “ecriture for the flaneur/ in search for sexy subforms on the Proust list.”–Cynthia Sailers

Dig into your linty pockets for a quarter and drop it in the slot. The waxy fake gypsy whirrs, moves its eyeballs, drops its jaw, and speaks not some ambiguous truism or routine divination, but autonomous megamodules of bizarre & (bizarrely) joyful social critique! Winsome and piquant, these poems, like improvised apricots, are capacious enough to embrace gaudy regalia, sky hooks, Flip Wilson, Jackson Mac Low, wasabi, pizza, evil dummies, and kitties. Based explicitly on the egg-laying structures of cicadas with grooved ovipositors, the poems lay bare their devices in the special way that only a Wetumpkan high on yumyumcha can pull off. Koeneke, like an oracle asquat his own fissure, has written a book that is unconscionably nifty-gallifty. Put simply, it’s CLAM CHOWDER FOR THE SOUL. — Nada Gordon

Rouge State

Product Description:
Pavement Saw had the taste to publish the first full-length book of Flarf!! Winner of the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award for an outstanding first book-length collection of poetry or prose. It’s the Flarfiest!

The first collection from Koeneke includes poems which first appeared in: Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Combo, Mirage#4/Period(ical), Moria, The Muse Apprentice Guild, The San Francisco Reader, The San Jose Manual of Style, Shampoo, and VeRT

Reviews:
In Rouge State, Rodney Koeneke puts the blush back on the demotic. His idiomatic montage is a careening screed dictated from a state of alert, all puns intended to turn the hose back on a culture run literally amuck, and whose marquee reads: Raw, Red, Rouge, Incarnadine. Welcome to these states! –Michael Gizzi

Mammogram the bildungsroman, induce / dingbat hexameters in the heldentenor’s / yeasty Hornitos.” It’s about time somebody said it. Hornitos was never yeastier, hexameters never dingbattier, the bildungsroman never more mammogrammed than in Rouge State, Rodney Koeneke’s “extensive cruise / across the bruised Sargasso of white male sexuality.” Cannily an(a)esthet(ic)izing the misogynist and orientalist phantasms that are projected on the digital plateaux of its own prosodicbravado, this is how Naked Lunch might have turned out if it had been written by Robert Browning having a sex-change operation. There can be but one sordid bordello of this magnitude, and Koeneke has erected it squarely at the fissure where the simulacral Middle America of Pop Warner and bubble top vans collides with a paracolonial hallucination of Eastern inscrutability inhabited by five-dollar houris and hack oud players. These elegant verses have teeth, and be warned: behind each incisor lurks a Dunciad.–K. Silem Mohammad

A playful amalgam of images is assembled for this cover of Rodney Koeneke’s Rouge State; from the collection’s play-on-words title to the poetry within, the book is steeped in a similar assemblage of animated and spirited wordsmithery. A recumbent woman smokes a cigar as a horse bucks in her background, and a kanji character is poised in the position that the sun might take in a conventional landscape scene. A quasi-humorous fusion of unlikely bedfellows, these cover elements reflect expertly the stylistic musings of Koeneke’s work. For example, the first stanza of #13:

I owed my happiness then to rhinoplasty,
a short run of articles called Sex Secrets of the
Ancient Egyptians and a kind of crafty pimping
of my mom, teaching latch hook and decoupage
to the embassy brats, who in turn lent good ears to
her litany of soft-serve ‘facts,’
like hip-hop came from Romania and AIDS
was a whacked hacker’s plot.

Ignore the cryptic blurbings of Michael Gizzi and K. Silem Mohammed on the book’s back jacket and experience this one for yourself. Melding images of natural timelessness with appearances from contemporary culture, Koeneke’s collection is easily enjoyed by the well-seasoned bard and poetic neophyte alike.–Bookslut.com

Empires of the Mind: I. A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929-1979

Product Description:
Empires of the Mind tells the story of I. A. Richards, Britain’s foremost literary critic in the 1920s, and his effort to promote an 850-word version of “global” English in China. Examining the cultural milieu of Cambridge between the World Wars, where Richards’s internationalist vision first arose, this book traces the heretofore-unexplored connections between Richards’s literary theories and his political ideals. Richards’s time in China covers a volatile period in Chinese history: the Japanese occupation, the Communist revolution, and the beginnings of the Cold War all feature prominently in the history of Basic English over a fifty-year period.

Reviews:
“Koeneke has produced a very detailed and informative account of Basic English in China….the story of Richards and Basic English in China is fascinating and it is worth reading the book just for that.”—Asian Studies Review

“Telling the fascinating and somewhat improbable tale of I. A. Richards’s efforts to persuade the Chinese to adopt Basic English, Rodney Koeneke has given us a magnificent book,written with the insight of a poet and the documentation of a historian. ” —Peter Stansky, Stanford University