Musee Mechanique [Paperback]

Rodney Koeneke (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2006

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.”

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Musee Mechanique is a joyous record of the words in our head, c. 2006. I love this book." --Benjamin Friedlander

"Authentic anti-epic switch-hits as comic saga, a new model for hybrid experiment and spiraling craft. Lyrically buoyant." --Jack Kimball

"... autonomous megamodules of bizarre & (bizarrely) joyful social critique ... unconscionably nifty-gallifty. Put simply, it's CLAM CHOWDER FOR THE SOUL." --Nada Gordon

About the Author

Rodney Koeneke is the author of Rouge State (Pavement Saw, 2003) and a work of history on I.A. Richards in China. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and son, where he works in publishing and serves on the board at Small Press Traffic.

Product Details

• Paperback: 92 pages
• Publisher: BlazeVOX Books (May 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0975922807
• ISBN-13: 978-0975922804
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,955,225 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Search for Sexy Subforms on the Proust List, October 11, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Musee Mechanique (Paperback)

Now based in Portland, Oregon, the poet formerly of San Francisco is also a Amazon reviewer of longstanding and has written a worthy followup to a prizewinning first volume, ROUGE STATE (2003). Looks like a typo, doesn't it, and that I should have written ROGUE STATE, but Koeneke's art is partly based on the sort of automatic mistakes Dr. Freud used to write about, and now in MUSEE MECHANIQUE he tries to prove that on the internet, there are no accidents.

He reveals in the afterword here that since writing the poems of ROUGE STATE he enrolled in a poetic movement based in New York called, "Flarf," named by the poet Gary Sullivan, who contributes a pen and ink portrait of Koeneke staring off into space, his lips pursed as though Apollo was prompting him to speak to memory. The idea of Flarf, Koeneke writes, was "to enter the most absurd or inappropriate search terms into Google and sculpt a poem from the results." Koeneke refers to Jack Spicer's concept of the poet as a radio, picking up transmissions from the outer reaches of the broadband, perhaps of the universe, and so the Flarf poet works with difficult, demotic, sometimes obscene materials from whatever shows up on a google search. MUSEE MECHANIQUE itself is the tourist trap at Fisherman's Wharf here in San Francisco, which preserves primitive mechanical toys and coin-operated games from the 19th century onward. Put a penny in the slot, see what happens. Koeneke makes the conceptual jump from the museum of bygone toys (where, as it happens, he used to work in their gift shop) to the curious inner workings of postmodern poetry.

You might say that no "I" operates in this writing, since the poet as author has stepped back and let a host of anonymous, obsteperous voices dot the actual writing for him (or her). Oddly enough, however, no matter how many chance operations the poet applies, something of a core personality still shines through and Koeneke emerges out the other end of the fun machine as pretty much the same curly-haired sprite he went in as. He hears the lamb's innocent call, and he hears the ewe's tender reply.

In four parts, like Eliot's FOUR QUARTETS the book makes a religious pilgrimage out of the current junk culture of American commodity society (the Flarf writers, most often US citizens, cast a caustic eye on nationalism in general), and moves like a line in the sand from the hermetic magic of "Fire Water Burn" towards the musical iteration of "Verse Chorus Verse." One whole section, "On the Clamways," uses the humble bivalve everywhere you used to be able to imagine a noun, or verb. Does "On the Clamways" represent a revisioning of Clark Coolidge's jazz influenced "On the Nameways" (2000)? There are similar salutes to the aleatory procedures of Jackson Mac Low, and to the perceived misantrjopy of Lautreamont. "Clamways"' goofball lyrics include "Houston, We Have a Clam Problem" as well as "That's Just the Clam Talking."

*Is* it just the clam talking? is what everybody always wants to know about Flarf, for how far does that line in the sand move and shift to erase, with the wind of technology, an artist's personal responsibility for what is being said? As the book draws to a close, Koeneke suggests that his poetry, and that of his colleagues, serves to reduce social tensions by miniaturizing and animating them like the coin-operated toys in his museum, thus robbing them of their threat, or perhaps their power to harm. In any case, he has written an engaging book that, for all its apparent insouciance, has a jewel-like filigree of "work," and a sunny radiance that feels warm in your hands as you hold it to the light.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars electric monkey verse sensation, July 27, 2006

By 

Stan - See all my reviews

This review is from: Musee Mechanique (Paperback)

it'll make your brain tingle. in a good way. highly recommended....