The Kafka Sutra

Abstract

Robert Archambeau, The Kafka Sutra. Asheville: MadHat Press, 2015. 108 pp. $18.95Robert Archambeau's new book of poems The Kafka Sutra differs from his previous book Home and Variations (2004) in the degree to which it explores the possibilities of appropriation as a literary device. Appropriation, moreover, becomes a hermeneutic tool in Archambeau's hands. A poet and a critic-the author of Laureates and Heretics (2010), The Poet Resigns (2013), and the forthcoming Making Nothing Happen-he employs it to compose his poems and to perform criticism on his textual sources. Entertaining and intelligent, The Kafka Sutra shows Archambeau's in-depth engagement with this widespread, increasingly dominant poetic practice.The title sequence at first quite implausibly grafts several of Kafka's enigmatic parables onto the subject matter of the Hindu classic Kama Sutra. Describing it elsewhere as "one of the odder things [he's] done," Archambeau promises, at least in theory, a merging of existential anxiety, sensual fulfillment, and didactic intent. The result is indeed odd, but not entirely foreign to anyone who has ever had the experience of reading creatively more than one book at a time. The sequence is also disarmingly playful and funny, as are the accompanying illustrations by Sarah Conner. Here is "Couriers," quoted in its entirety:He is offered the choice of becoming a husband or the lover of another man's wife. Men being as they are, he wants to be a lover, as do all the others. Therefore there are only lovers hurrying around the world, near rabid with ardor and bearing their secret letters of desire. There being no husbands, though, there are no wives, so there is no one to receive their amorous messages. Secretly they would all like to put an end to this miserable way of life, but fear commitment.As he exploits the comedic potential of the double parody, Archambeau makes a not-so-outlandish critical point: he reminds us that Kafka's writings are pervaded by frustrated sexuality, while Vatsyayana's text, primarily known as a manual on the art and techniques of lovemaking, is also one of the world's most comprehensive guides to a happy life.The section that follows, "Responses," contains sixteen poems inspired or otherwise instigated by other sources, not always literary or written: the comic book character Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (later reinvented as a "punk rocker" by Joey Ramone); a photograph of David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and Tony Defries; the design of US and Mexican flags; a typo in his friend's email message (contextualized through a misprint in a poem by Thomas Nashe); the life and work of Archambeau's teacher and mentor John Matthias; John Berryman's poetry (who "taught / [his] teacher"); Milton's neologisms; Albert Goldbarth's Budget Travel through Space and Time; and the ancient Gnostic texts discovered in Egypt in 1945. These poems can be most readily called Archambeau's own. Though prompted by other texts, they are linked to his personal experiences and relationships; in one instance, he quotes and ruminates on some words spoken by his five-year-old daughter. Formally elaborate, they project several authorial stances-anecdotal, excursive, dramatic, meditative. My favorites in this group are "Brightness Falls" and "Nag Hammadi: A Parable," poems that speak at once casually and profoundly about global politics.The next two sections, "Two Procedures" and "Versions," offer compositions made up completely of borrowed material. "Manifest Destinies, Black Rains" splices two prose passages, one from Anne C. Lynch's nineteenth-century essay on Washington, DC, emphasizing US exceptionalism, the other from Masuji Ibuse's 1965 novel about the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima. As in most instances of documentary poetry, the choice of textual sources invites readers to draw their own conclusions. In a rhetorically significant maneuver, Archambeau shapes them into nine four-line stanzas, one per page, to make them resonate together with the white space around them:A magnificent country's principles of freedom,completely razed to the ground. …