Kamstra's Got Your Tongue

from Broken Pencil Winter 2009

Talking to the poetman about taxes

by Nathaniel G. Moore

I will confess, I like Ryan Kamstra's work a lot. And I like him. I've been familiar with his work for a long time. I published him in my litzine Tupperware Sandpiper at the onset of the 21rst century. We both also like the world “cerebral.” I don't mind putting Kamstra over, because Kamstra is already over. (In wrestling the word “over” means accepted or respected in the hearts of the audience, within the context of the industry).

For years now, poet Ryan Kamstra has been an elusive biohazard poet, interdisciplinary artist, Jack of all tirades. His new book inTO tHE dROwNED wORL_D (Insomniac Press), his first in several years, was released as 2008 came to an indecisive close. At times, in this cruel, cruel post sacred world in which we live, the work seems too smart for it's own good. Kamstra addresses the popular singer Madonna fir approval. A lovely choice considering, when it's all said and done, no one can truly follow Madonna. (Morrissey once quipped in a 1988 interview: “Who can follow Madonna in terms of a female pop icon?”) So Kamstra is letting us read his diaries. But it's the Kamstra filter that excites. Who fucking cares that he's addressing Madonna. Bitch! He's addressing us, the world, the cognitive world in decline with the passion of a young Catholic trembling during confession. The book is exciting and brings to mind one of my favourite quotes ever. Now don't you go using this anywhere:

“The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom.” Isabelle Eberhardt.

In the hyper bare world of minimalist nano-nonsense poetry that continues its unhealthily, low word count as a polarization for saying absolutely nothing, (and living in a world that seemingly has nothing to say) Kamstra is refreshing panacea. (To those who doubt we're living in the post sacred era please note: when I spell check Ryan Kamstra's last name the computer suggests I am attempting to spell Kmart.) The best thing you can do at this point is go and get Ryan's new book. The rest is just talk show levity.

NGM: You write music and poetry. what is the biggest difference between these two mediums?

RK: Broadly, music is very physical for me, writing very cognitive. I also think music is more based in the exact present locale it is being performed whereas poetry is archival (both more concerned with the past and looking towards a, perhaps, more hospitable future). When I'm working with/in music it feels very much like I am slugging it out in the present, and I feel the process bodily. And a live audience who can experience what you are experiencing in more or less exact sync can be both a dangerous and thrilling thing. I'd likely explode if I didn't have the release of the more visceral/legible/public/performance-based medium. I'm a little high-strung. I'm also a little too downscale and northern Ontario frumpy to ape the arch purity of an aloof, totally cerebral avant garde figure.

NGM: What is your opinion on the long poem? what sort of tradition are you emulating/destroying in creating your latest poetry book?

RK: My opinion on the long poem is not much different from my opinion of the short one. The place I see for poetry that other mediums don't do as well (I think) is to confront compositionally the fragment or the quotation as the foci where contemporary meaning gets created (in relation to other fragments). The demanding thing about the long poem is you have much more fragments to work with, rubbing up against one another, much more unexpected chaos. My particular interest in this book with the long poem is finding a sort of middle ground between a very lyrically stringent verse style (which lATE cAPITALIST sUBLIME, for the most part, was) and the more casual, chatty, improvisational tone which one finds in prose or conversation. I also experimented much more with diversion, digression, which is pretty much the main strategy at play in contemporary intrapersonal communication, speech, email, text messages. I am fond of the direct punch of the more satirical short poems. I find the long poem with its meanderings potentially more seductive. But like all things seductive, one should be on guard that the content below the form is not getting lost in the frillery of the delivery.

NGM: The future Ryan? Any Hope?

RK: I also actually see hope on the horizon. I did not in 2001. lATE caPITALIST suBLIME, grandiosely, I imagined being dug up by a future socialist-robot excavation team after our culture doomed itself by means widely publicized to us currently. But with the world actually coming to terms with, shall we say, the downside of absolute unregulated capitalism, it seems change might really have to come. Its destroying bankers now as well as the most vulnerable! It's insane but that's hopeful. iNtO tHE dROWNED wORlD is actually bizarrely hopeful to me. In lATE caPITALISt suBLIME I felt like a solitary observer of an impending disaster in a world of solitary observers unable to communicate with one another. In this book, hell, we are all drowned, so all of us have been impelled to act among the floating wreckage. Both me and the government of France and even the pope in Rome. It's so less lonely!

Matrix recommends

inTO tHE dROwNED wORL_D (Summer 2009)

by Christian Charette

In his latest book of poetry inTO tHE dROwNED wORL_D (Insomniac Press 2008), Torontonian Ryan Kamstra bursts out the bullhorn and lets loose a string of kitschy histrionics so postmodern as to make post-modernism look positively antediluvian. The voice, at once removed and indelibly enmeshed in the vacuousness of pop culture, harangues an unfeeling public, using Madonna's “Drowned World” tour as a point of reference in a tirade that is at once failed romanticism and shell-shocked post-capitalism in a pro-capitalist world. What seems to have Kamstra whipped up into such a frenzy is the dull fuzziness of a society that has been swallowed and drowned by the vicious, dirty sediments of social erosion. “We know no one, love too late, far too unconditionally,” writes Kamstra in a fitting eulogy for a people caught in the dichotomy of our world, that of Isolationism in a High-Speed, High-Gig Rate culture. With clarity of vision and deftness of tongue, the poet cares a hole the size of his fist in our consciousness and then pushes his way through. Good, heady stuff.

Not waving but Drowning

by Sarah Liss

Eye Magazine, November 2008

In these tumultuous times, it’s nice to know that there are still pop-cult certainties to which we can cling. Namely, that Madonna will forever serve as a muse for queers, freaks and misfits.

That inspiration can play out in weird, wacky and unexpected ways. For a testament to this fact, look no further than local musician, activist, poet and writer Ryan Kamstra’s latest offering, iNTO tHE dROWNED wORL_D (Insomniac). The second book of poetry by the Toronto-based creative force (he also fronts rock band-cum–performance art whirlwind Tomboyfriend) is a surreal bricolage that’s set, Groundhog Day–style, in a perpetual day-before-the-turn-of-the-millennium. Tied together by direct addresses to Madonna (who shifts, chameleonlike, between the entertainer and the virgin Mary of the New Testament), Kamstra’s vivid poetic fragments evoke a turbulent, decaying culture mid-apocalypse. His text is as much of a kaleidoscopic sensory assault as any one of Madonna’s live multimedia stage shows — if not more.

According to Kamstra, selecting Madonna’s 2001 Drowned World tour as a thematic focal point for his collection was, in part, a cheeky joke. The writer/performer says that, in the wake of the “weirdly prescient” nature of his first collection, 2002’s Late Capitalist Sublime (which approached the seemingly “edgy” nature of globalization with critical wariness), he yearned to produce something that would capture the breathless “end times” spirit he was experiencing in the world at large.

“It’s interesting for me to be an observer of the world as well as a poet,” he begins. “I don’t think poetry is timely — really, you’re better off going to the internet more in that regard. And when I reflect on the iconography of everything that’s happened to us in the last eight years — planes going into the towers, harrowing images from American prisons in Iraq, soldiers getting decapitated — somehow, choosing a minor tour of Madonna’s, one that even her fans weren’t all that excited about, as a major symbol struck me as the place to go.

“I really like the idea of this character, who wakes up in a destroyed room, looking at a poster of the Drowned World tour. At that point, he barely remembers Madonna as a character. Rather than [merely recalling] memories of events from the recent past, it’s an excavation process.”

Fans of both Madonna and the dizzying rush of good postmodernist mash-up art will be satisfied by Kamstra’s official book launch, which happens this Tuesday (Nov. 18) at Mitzi’s Sister. In addition to straight… er, bent readings by Kamstra and others, egghead critic Carl Wilson will hold court over a Madonna trivia contest. There will be a prize (!) awarded to the brave soul who shows up sporting the finest Madge-inspired costume. And Kamstra’s band, Tomboyfriend — renowned for their combo of outlandish props (i.e., Jello blood) and arch, socialist critiques — will perform two different sets.

Kamstra’s ideas seem to be founded on a rigorous critical platform, so I’m mildly surprised by the simplicity of his distinction between his poetry and his musical output.

“I don’t know how well it comes across, but I’m vastly studied in all things poetic that happened in the 20th century. And it seems to me that, today, you just don’t get to do a simple rhyme when you make poetry. That’s where music comes in,” he crows. “I love fucking rhyming! There are a couple of sections in the book where I nearly rhyme. Most of that is aping romantic ballads. But all the Tomboyfriend songs are based on A-B-A patterns. There’s a gigantic payoff that comes from simple rhyming.”

Into the Drowned World by Ryan Kamstra

August 2009 Open Book Toronto

by Jacob Mooney

Among the most verbally exciting poets in Toronto, Kamstra's infamous valley girl drawl often masks the eccentric musicality inherent in the poems. My advice is to skip the middle man, and just buy the book to read the poems in whatever voice you'd like.

For more information about Into the Drowned World, please visit the Insomniac Press website.

***** ORDER:

 

Besides your hot as cakey hotcakes local book seller:

in Toronto, copies of INTO THE DROWNED WORLD

can be obtained at the BOARD OF DIRECTORS

GALLERY (1080 Queen West). In Thunder Bay,

The THUNDER BAY ART GALLERY.