As in his other essay collections, Koestenbaum’s topics in Figure It Out are wide-ranging but often innocuous – a punctuation mark, a stranger’s bracelet, his new glasses, the drawn and written line, individual words. These focal points allow him to ambulate and sweep across things disparate while never losing the specificity of the object under investigation. In the spirit of Renaissance essayists, Koestenbaum finds macrocosms everywhere, and considers it is his obligation to ‘analyse them to death’. More than earlier collections, however, Figure It Out is attendant to the act of writing and to his own literary flirtations with dissipation and ephemerality. It comprises twenty-six essays written over the past twenty years, a period of remarkable activity for Koestenbaum, seeing not only the publication of various works of poetry, fiction, and criticism, but also exhibitions of paintings and recordings and performances of music. The book is his most sustained engagement yet with his own creative ventures: we see him writing, doodling on canvases, noodling at the piano. And it is with typical foxiness and verve that this seemingly tireless artist writes himself as evanescent and on the brink of inanition.

Wayne Koestenbaum (photograph by Ebru Yildiz)

Koestenbaum has spent much of his writerly energy speaking a good word for the forgotten and the retired, so self-diminishment may be one of his more titanic literary ambitions. All the same, he likes to write small, short, and fast. He has a penchant and wonderful talent for quick sentences – the aphorism, the fragment, and the ‘crot’ (a term he picked up from his one-time tutor John Barth, which describes a kind of textual cordon sanitaire – a ‘separable unit, like a paragraph, without connection to the units before or after it’). If, like Oppen, he recognises his output as a foredoomed failure to be silent, he has learned from O’Hara that ‘the only way to be quiet is to be quick’. In Figure It Out, he dramatises his attempts to end sentences, to escape the strictures of language (with only more language) and so move away from versions of himself that have barely been arrived at or consummated. Koestenbaum often draws us in only to throw us off his scent, coveting the shimmer of ‘identitylessness’. Written in parcelled fragments, his is a writing that is coolly sedate but alive with the exhilarations of reading and writing as forms of potential self-dissolution. The essays occasionally portray his more heated efforts at the writing desk as he pursues freedom by way of rule-bound sentences, silence by way of expression, and ways of being simultaneously sentenced and unbound.

Like his hero Susan Sontag (whom he apostrophises in his 2013 essay collection, My 1980s), Koestenbaum is ‘cosmophagic’ – culturally rapacious, he ‘eats the world’. He is a consumer, and, equally importantly, an excreter of art and language; a producer of the ‘compactly extracted’ forms of ‘turd’ and ‘text’. And so again is Koestenbaum ‘pooped’. ‘To implement anal innuendo’ is, by his own admission, his ‘calling card’, and Figure It Out shows that he has an excremental imagination to rival that of Rabelais or Thoreau. He is a writer of what he calls (after Gertrude Stein) ‘bottom nature’; of ‘thinking through the bottom’. In his bowel-friendly and seductively smutty writing, he engages in ‘Play-Doh Poetics’, a slippery, greasy interaction with things that informs his dual roles as poet and critic. Ingesting, digesting, and egesting, he lubricates his movement through the world, including the written world of his own making – the slime of his own excreting. (He proudly advocates playing with one’s own waste.) From his critical perspective, we may eat or grease the world, but we are already eaten and en-greased by it – we are enmired in culture and language, and our way out is to slime things further.

There is, meanwhile, a concern throughout these essays with cleaning up the muck he has made by writing. There is a desire to turn his pen (or his typewriter or word processor) into a mop, or to write ‘in invisible ink’ – a phrase he takes from gay French diarist Hervé Guibert. But, as Koestenbaum’s excellent essay on Guibert’s wounded and soiled poetics shows, that invisibility is still inky. The ephemeral suppurates and spills out. His pen-mop can clean up only by marking and mucking the world further. Like the painter Robert Rauschenberg’s squeegee, another of Koestenbaum’s essay-subjects, it washes only by painting. ‘Speech,’ says Wallace Stevens, ‘is not dirty silence / Clarified. It is silence made still dirtier.’ Figure It Out is a book thrillingly alert to its literary markings and excretions – the dirtiness of both its speech and its silences.