1.

Let's face it, most poetry readings are stuffy, self-indulgent, soporific affairs. Maybe that's just what happens when you provide a soapbox to a bunch of introverted neurotics and megalomaniacal buttonholers. Or maybe poets only appear suchwise since their work is not inherently performative: they're wordsmiths who craft their art for the quiet, more sedate platform of the page. Why should we expect them to be merry-andrews or acrobats? When summoned in front of a live audience, it's little surprise that poets lack showmanship. There's nary any horseplay involved. A rare few might have a lone trick up their sleeves, if they want you to pony up some cash for their book. And then there's the slam poets whose acts all seem to mimic the same overwrought, underdeveloped hurly-burly, down to their chippy gestures and choppy intonations.

Or maybe poets these days, when they make public appearances, occupy a new role. As the critic David Orr writes:

Charm and competence matter in life, but they matter even more in poetry. As the art form has dwindled as a cultural force, its institutions have increasingly elevated writers not simply because they're skilled, but also because they're seen as reliable, tactful ambassadors to the broader universe. This obviously beats having the art form represented by misanthropes and crackpots, but it does convey certain advantages upon friendly, solid, media-savvy poets who are always so happy to see you because oh my gosh it's been ages you look amazing and your last book was incredible I'm so excited for our panel.

From Orr's observation we can posit a shift in the way the forum operates: poetry reading as public relations, as marketing for one's personal brand, as smooth-talking corporate shill. Conference panel, academic job talk, board meeting, business mixer, craft workshop, and off-site reading become interchangeable. They're each glib, milquetoast expressions within the same careerist fishbowl, filled with affable in-group banter. They begin to sound alike, chummy egos in an echo chamber. No wonder they're all so dull, dull, dull. Personally, I'd prefer some crackpots and misanthropes. At least that might liven things up.   

2.

Henry Goldkamp's work acts as a riposte to this atmosphere where poets have become relentlessly professionalized. Like the performance artists the Yes Men, who invaded boardrooms and shareholder meetings to punk twofaced CEOs, Goldkamp steps into poetry events to razz and jazz up the languid proceedings. Poets, when facing a crowd, tend to lose their sense of playfulness. And without that, what's the point? Poetry requires an element of things going slightly sideways, of drift and sallies and free association. Poetry has an intrinsic motive to take the detour, the scenic route, the road less traveled. To find meanings by rhyme instead of reason. It's this roundaboutness, this slant, that provides poetry with much of its diverting nature. Since poetry should be diverting. It should be fun.      
 
Henry Goldkamp is a self-professed clown. One might even say he's more performance artist than he is poet. Still, he's just published his first two poetry books this year, Not My Circus and JOY BUZZER: A CLOWN SHOW. I won't differentiate much between the two volumes here. Rather, I'll treat both as instantiations of what Goldkamp refers to as "Clown Poetics," an ongoing, singular, and still-undefined project. Whatever else Clown Poetics may be, though, it's a philosophy to create literature—especially live performances—that are boisterous and waggish. Brimful with nonstop, hopped-up whizbang zingers. Above all, funny. He aims, alternately, to make the audience squirm in their seats or fall out of them with explosive giggles. Goldkamp's take-no-prisoners style is not afraid to go full-blown giddy, goony, gonzo, or gobsmacked. He'd do anything, including sacrifice the self-serious ideals of poetry, for a laugh.     

The scholar Austin Warren noted that the 1930s poet John Brooks "Wheels" Wheelwright—who personified contradictions, at once founding member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and a fur-coat-clad Boston Brahmin—was distinguished by his:

willingness to clown, to shout, to clatter, to repeat, to pun, to alliterate, to jingle—in order that the reader shall stop to listen and, stopping, be forced to remain alert… Critically, there is no harm in calling the consequence intellectual vaudeville, if one stresses the adjective equally with the noun.

Warren might very well be describing Henry, not "Wheels," in this passage. Another precursor to Clown Poetics is the Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky, who once screamed satiric agitprop at his audiences, threw tea in their faces, and caused police raids at the Stray Dog Café. Besides poetry, Mayakovsky worked in theater, film, public art, design, and circus; really, whichever medium best unleashed his riotous exploits. Likewise, Clown Poetics probably owes some debt to the French eccentric Alfred Jarry—poet, playwright, puppeteer—who allegedly once painted his whole body bright green then rode his diminutive bicycle around Paris to celebrate the hallucinatory power of absinthe. Jarry, with his gift for pranks and troublemaking, was the progenitor of absurd literary pandemonium that inspired the Surrealists, Picasso, and Artaud.         

Goldkamp's Clown Poetics also clearly derives from New-York-School antics like Kenneth Koch's micro-scripts for an impossible-to-stage poet's theater and the gleefully hairbrained pop-collage sonnets of Ted Berrigan. In different contexts, Goldkamp himself name-drops Nicanor Parra, Daniil Kharms, and Hart Crane (especially for "Chaplinesque"). Clown Poetics is capacious. It could well subsume such forebears as Ariosto, Byron, Chaucer, Rabelais, Beddoes, Aristophanes, and Delmore Schwartz; the monologues of Browning, the table talk of Dorothy Parker, the novels of Ishmael Reed, the linguistic calisthenics of Guillermo Cabrera Infante, along with Ed Dorn's Gunslinger, the oeuvres of Barthelme and Vonnegut, the anarchic harlequinade of Dario Fo, as well as the droller snippets of Auden. While adjacent to overtly performative contemporaries as Douglas Kearney, Kenneth Goldsmith, Chelsey Minnis, Joyelle McSweeney, Arianna Reines, C. A. Conrad, Tao Lin, and Rodrigo Toscano, Goldkamp takes his cues from none of 'em. Although Clown Poetics burbles up from the estuarial swamplands where all these tributaries mingle in a funky emulsion, it has been assiduously cultivated in a region that has its own distinct terroir of hoo-ha. Indeed, Goldkamp's literary stomping grounds is New Orleans, where he has often performed in booze-sodden venues such as the Splice Poetry Series at the Saturn Bar. The Goldkampian vintage gives overripe notes of shit-eating grins and amazeballs.          

Goldkamp, however, is also genuinely invested in the history and theory of clowning. He's not above using a barrel of prop stunts, pratfalls, and malapropisms. Withal, the combination of his highbrow lowdown and downhome hijinks gives his acts the aura not of poetry nor clowning per se, but rather of some mischievous offshoot of performance art. Or maybe it's that he rejiggers performance art in his own queer pitch. Spalding Gray's madcap monologues, the scatologically punk-rock Kipper Kids, the Situationist body art of Vito Acconci, the many-faced masquerades of Adrian Piper, or the carnivalesque extravaganzas of Matthew Barney, to say nothing of Claes Oldenburg or Robert Whitman—what are all these provocateurs up to if not some version of clowning? Goldkamp brings into focus the ways that avant-garde performance merely updates the clown's age-old caboodle of tricks. Such performance artists, kitted out and slyly kidding, all act the fool with over-the-top, topsy-turvy methods for showcasing human ineptitude in the multitudinous forms it can take. 

Retrospectively, we can read Andy Warhol's mortuary-pale mien and fright wig as a deadpan clown's pancake makeup and peruke. Similarly, George Maciunas's FLUX boxes come off as a farceur's bag of endless gags. And, most decisively, the granddaddy of inscrutable rude mechanicals, Marcel Duchamp, excogitated an entirely new discourse for cerebral clown shows out of whole cloth. His lifework was to devise elaborate leg-pullers that he staged at arm's length, from his mustachioed Mona Lisa to his drag get-up as Rrose Sévaly; from his chess matches against the likes of John Cage or Eve Babitz to his late installation pieces such as His Twine, which included groups of children playing among a cat's cradle tangled throughout a gallery space. Duchamp's bone-dry wit tickles the brainpan's phantom funny bone. Whereas clowns typically engage in physical comedy, Duchamp's clowning ventured into metaphysical comedy. Duchamp laid bare the artworld's pretentions; Goldkamp mines the foibles of today's poetry biz.

Goldkamp's fearless, rapid-fire jestbook lifts the veil on the incipient quacksalver at the heart of Conceptual Writing. Although Conceptualists have long poked at the treacly navel-gazing and lyrical namby-pamby of mainstream poetics, most Conceptual Writing itself is about as fun as eating a plate of chalk dust. The medicine it prescribes is worse than the disease it diagnoses. If mainstream poems come across as too sincere, Conceptual ones can be incurably pedantic. Goldkamp might share the same gripes as Conceptualists, but he eschews their papermill of highfalutin tomes seemingly designed to induce dry-rot on one's cornea. Goldkamp laughs with, not at the reader. He takes the better part of the Conceptualist legacy—their brash stagecraft and bedazzled brass knuckles—and discards the rest. He exchanges the Conceptualists' latent in-jokes for outsized practical ones.

3.

Tellingly, the most common targets of Goldkamp's raillery are, by turns, poetry and capitalism. These two systems of meaning-making abound with evident failures, to say the least. Both are nevertheless unavoidable for his project, entangled as he is in their devices. Poetry and capitalism are like two ends of a Chinese finger-trap that snag him deeper in the harder he tries to extricate himself.

On the one hand, poetry is often mawkish, obscure, tedious, boring, fatuous, pretentious, precious, and arcane (not infrequently all at the same time). Or, as Goldkamp declares, "Poetry is so cringe," a statement we glean as multicolored magnetic letters for kids careen down the page in a jumbled heap. Furthermore, much contemporary poetry extols the author's plight by oversharing personal details. It turns into a pity-party, at once empty and self-important. Goldkamp's interlocutor asks a poet what their job is, dismissively, by quipping, "Why what do you do? Make people feel sorry for you?" The butt of the joke here is the myopic trauma-mongering so pervasive among confessional, slam, and autobiographical poets. In a section entitled "HELLO MY NAME IS THE NO-ESCAPE ROOM" he turns the tables by likening the standard poetry reading to a "hostage situation." Listeners become the real victims of a poet's diatribes. If Goldkamp cheers on poetry, it's with a Bronx cheer. He parodically punctures the officious poet who takes up all the air in the room, deflating their self-aggrandizement.

On the other hand, capitalism. Its incessant monetization of every desire and sentiment has become the most palpable grounds of social meaning (bling-bling) while monotonously grinding down to pulp any solid values which desires or sentiments may aspire to (blah-blah). In "1 FOR THE MONEY," for example, the speaker contemplates "an applebee's gift card," which—so far as I can discern from this skylarking drunk-text of a poem—prompts him to reconsider the existence of god as well as the need for sharing his experiences. Immortal longings tend to dissipate in the context of all-you-can-stomach jalapeño poppers and half-off blue margaritas, after all. Like everything else around him, the azure-tinctured margaritas are artificial, seeped in an innervating sheen that makes them appear attractive. By the end of the night, however, the speaker comes to regard the empty calories of these (un)well drinks as a "miracle," much like the one Elizabeth Bishop said she had for breakfast. It's a travesty of Bishop and chain restaurants both.   

In picking fights with mainstream poetry and too-late capitalism, Goldkamp aligns with the bulk of experimental poetry of the last, say, twenty-five years: LANGUAGE Poets, Flarf, Conceptual Writing, et al. Yet, he recognizes that these poetry movements, too, come off as flat, trite, banal. They're unreadable and problematic (sometimes willfully so). They are too often humorless, cliquish, academic, or self-involved. Lots of posturing and baggage there, as well. Not enough fun. Not enough whoop-ass or pizzazz. Goldkamp, by contrast, wants to slide down "a stripper pole on a party bus outside the poetry reading." The eponymous joy-buzzer epitomizes his method: he aims to send an electric shockwave to wake up the sleepy-headed hoi polloi with his zippy, zappy, slaphappy lines. His goofball games—and crowd-work gamesmanship—enact a low-key theater of cruelty wherein a spellbinding life-current galvanizes performer and audience alike.

4.

On my first reading, the repeated use of the setup "HELLO MY NAME IS…" throughout every page of JOY BUZZER struck me as a schtick that quickly wore itself thin. Why not mix it up a little more? Why insist on a one-note rimshot of a clown show? I know the manically inventive Goldkamp has more kitties in his bag. At times it felt like death by a thousand knock-knock jokes. The routine works differently among a live crowd, where each audience member gets a prefilled nametag to wear and Henry interacts one-on-one, occasionally with some ad lib. Converted to the page, however, the offhand vim and face-to-face risk evaporate. If clowning requires physical comedy, what happens when it's disembodied? When it becomes as one-dimensional as the page itself?  

Presented in book format, the routine emblematized some overdone tropes of contemporary poetry, too: the project book, the selfsame titles that recur in a collection, and the redundant theme-and-variation that makes a book more marketable since it's "about" a singular topic. All these may lend a manuscript more unity, underscoring its message for mass appeal, sure-sure, but they frequently come at the expense of a work's fecundity, heterogeneity, and moxie.
             
On further readings, I reevaluated. Maybe Goldkamp was up to something. I developed three hypotheses, none of which are mutually exclusive:

Perhaps the recital of the catchphrase is self-parodic. It's the clown Henry's way of aggressively running his comic bit into the ground. Henry derives from the Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, and Andy Kaufman school of stand-up: that's to say, his comedy frequently arises from an obtuse belligerence against his audience. This shitbird's not here to merely entertain or make us chuckle. Rather, he seeks to lull us into a state of dubiety, ennui, and disquieting bafflement. We begin to second-guess our second-guessing. The witless yokels who came for the yucks might start to boo. The true hecklers, though, are a bit taken aback, realizing they're giving him exactly what he wants. Most of the crowd gets on edge and itchy with the restive fidgets. Though a few nervous titters may erupt, the audience eventually abandons their irritable searchings-after, their need for the bullying cue for when to guffaw. Only once this awkward, agonistic interim gets unbearably prolonged can one make the breakthrough into a recognition of unbound cosmic absurdity. Henry's opening setup repeats ad nauseum because this Beckettesque clown asks us to approach the nauseous void from which the existential tragicomedy of his Vantablack humor emanates. In this way, the performer delivers not so much fleeting punchlines as a feeling gut-punch.
      
Or perhaps the repetition of stock language from a corporate sticker—broken up occasionally by the syrupy, chirrupy "Hi, I'm Henry"—lends the text an impulsive rhythm. The touchstone riff I have in mind is Joe Brainard's I Remember, a poetic memoir where every paragraph begins with the title's watchwords. Similarly, Goldkamp's inveterate tagline prompts a larruping time signature he can counterpoint and syncopate against. It's simultaneously a gullible ditty and a galloping litany. It's the patter he putters in the chain of firecracker wisecracks he pops off. A few of them blooey-kapow! A few of them fizzle, dead duds. But the groans, too, form part of the grain: you need a handful of trifling piffles to narcotize the reader before tossing the big windup, walloping potshots that land. It's even harder to perfect such a rollicking cadence on the page than in performance; yet Goldkamp deftly paces his beats with an array of recurrent figures. Every odd bushel of jokes in standardized font is interrupted by color photos of scribbled-on nametags and bubbly magnetic letters jitterbugging down the page. Another figure who keeps making a cameo is "HELLO MY NAME IS THE MOON" who moons around like some high-flown hanger-on from Romanticism and goes through more phases than an adolescent's musical fads: the kind of pockmarked schmo a more sophisticated, soigné poem might banish as too green, too cheesy. There's also a Tristram-Shandy-like blackout page that stands in for the intermission. These intervals provide the structural tempo that allows for the punctum of comedic timing.   
                    
Then again, perhaps the "HELLO MY NAME IS…" routine is a comment about the commodification of identity. JOY BUZZER's quick-change nonsensical sobriquets (e.g., "HELLO MY NAME IS THE MIDDLE PART OF THE BELIEVER/BELIEBER VENN DIAGRAM") play against the earnestness of declaring one's demographic markers. Look at the back covers of most poetry books nowadays, and you'll find third-person bios populated with statements like "Henry (sir/zir) is a neurodivergent-allying, cis-genderfluid, redocumented, third-and-a-half-generation South Macedonian lip-synch poet from the Upper Lower Midwest who lives with zir domestic partners, the Sphynx cat Fluffy and the Persian Schopenwhore." Such a line in a bio is no trivial throwaway, either, but the most carefully crafted cipher that unlocks the import of the entire text. Poets corner the market on their intersectional niche. For some that niche is the fount from which all the didactic truth they hope to speak to power has been deduced. Goldkamp's farcical badges of identity act, instead, to position him as a prelapsarian Adam lap dancing while daftly naming his fellow party animals. He's more mutant than militant, less woke than wacked-out.

Goldkamp's own third-person bio for JOY BUZZER is treated as one more occasion for a put-on. In fact, it's incorporated into his running gag:

HELLO MY NAME IS A THIRD-PERSON BIO

Fuckin dyin over here

In this respect, the clown Henry both is and is not the authorial Henry in the name Henry Goldkamp. An epigraph in JOY BUZZER sneaks in a reference to Berryman's alter ego, alerting us to the gleeful slippages between mask and man. This clown doesn't just sport greasepaint and a red nose, no, this clown has an infinite hammerspace of vizards, get-ups, and hair pieces. And yet, a performer always exceeds the sum of their personas. Identity is less about the iteration of habitual roles, whosit Henry hints the deal, and more about the improvisational verve to keep reinventing the self. Some big ol' Nobody sits up in the control booth anyway. And meanwhile the outward hotchpotch cosplay of identity gets stuck together with one's "own personal brand of doofus glue."

 
5 .

One of the most revealing lines in JOY BUZZER, where the mask finally appears to be lowered as the performer takes a bow, comes in the addendum:

While its aperture can exist narrowly in scope (i.e. it can live on the page alone, quietly in the mind via the reading experience), undoubtedly Clown Poetics is most agog moving outward toward a live Audience.

For Goldkamp performance is primary, the page a pale residuum. This bias toward the raucous in-the-action give-and-take of the stage is reinforced in the main body of the text, as well, in a stray crack:

HELLO MY NAME IS A POET WHO WRITES FOR THE PAGE AND THE PAGE ALONE

You wanna be on the team, but you don't want any game time?

For-the-page-alone poets are—in this formulation—clearly scrubs, benchwarmers, team managers. The "game," the real-real, is theatrics, spectacle. A performance artist, a stand-up, a clown might see things this way: the page either exists for a script that's only used in rehearsals or exists after-the-fact for purposes of documentation. Such an attitude prizes orality and extempore bravura. It reduces writing to a helpful prompt book or an archival memorandum. Both are a little dusty and devoid of soul.

Writing, of course, can be more than this. Writing can be the thing-itself, the end, the aim, the aught, the art. A sculpture doesn't move, unlike the actors in a play, and yet it may be no less moving because of that fact. Likewise, writing on the page can be as moving as speech and gesture. Still, in this eternal debate, we might think Plato is on Team Page, Socrates Team Stage. In another reprise of this argument, T. S. Eliot once declaimed, "the spirit killeth but the letter giveth life," inverting Second Corinthians 3:6. Well, it's clear which side Goldkamp lines up on.

It's a false dichotomy, page vs. stage. Letter vs. spirit. But it's one that has had enduring appeal. In a sense, the better part of Goldkamp's work can be considered public art, his performances included. His motivations align with activating a communal response, with direct engagement, with dialogical immediacy. He yearns for the unfolding back-and-forth in front of an audience, that buzzy jouissance only possible with some form of collectivity.
The question then is why remediate his in-person performance as poetry-in-book-format? In the addendum to JOY BUZZER, a QR code links to videos of performances on Goldkamp's personal website. The videos feel like an intermediary, halfway between live show and dead letter. Videos recoup Goldkamp's smashmouth, arse-over-teakettle antics better than the thin medium of paper, at least.

The answer to why he needs a book or two, I'm guessing, is that Clown Poetics is still, at the end of the night, a poetics. Goldkamp's audience isn't the deadbeats, lowlifes, and randos who frequent the local stand-up club. His ideal audience is other poets. Um, actually. Scratch that. His ideal audience is other rando lowlife deadbeat poets who wobble into their local stand-up club and double-fist the two-drink minimum before the opener's mic check. Still, his material is pretty specialized. He's teasing Bishop, lampooning Berryman, burlesquing Emily Motherfuckin Dickinson. Goldkamp requires a well-versed audience to catch what he's throwing. His usual stomping grounds are literary events, where he enlivens the staid evenings of mincing poetry-voice maudlin and mumbly nose-to-the-page bardage with his junkyard-dawg-in-a-china-shop escapades.

Nonetheless, game recognizes game. And the game at literary events is having a book or two published. It's the calling cardby which poets accord other poets their grudging respect. Goldkamp is thus no longer the Rodney Dangerfield of poetryland. The print version of his oft-unprintable ballyhoo gives him an all-access annual pass to his coterie audience, which, unlike him, accords pride of place to the credentialized page. Thus, books allow him to gain a wider audience by disseminating his work through print and to capture more live audience members when he performs. To be fair, Goldkamp may have other motivations for a book. For all his apparent contempt for "page" poets, Goldkamp is a sensitive reader, even if his own poems aren't sensitively written. They're chockablock with jackassery, which I say as a compliment. Goldkamp knows wandering troubadours and vaudeville are things of the past. In remediating his performance work, he may be trying to find the correlatives to express his rambunctiousness in the dominant medium that poetry takes today, packing it down between two covers like a spring-coiled snake in a can of nuts.       

Goldkamp, for what it's worth, is better when he's observed in his natural habitat: rostrum, dais, lectern, proscenium, public lavatory, dive bar, black box, backyard. The artifactual poems themselves are still catching up to the high polish of his puckish monkeyshine. In person, this clown's at the head of his class; he's easily a top banana. The written texts, though, occasionally benefit from the reader's imaginative imposition of his live-show pluckiness to pull-string their voice. In his promotional email, Goldkamp even quips:

If it's not funny when you're reading it alone then you can give me a ring and I'll read the poems out loud to you. Well, if I'm not busy, sure why not.

Goldkamp's facetious promise rings close to Frank O'Hara's claim in his tongue-in-cheek "Personism: A Manifesto":

While I was writing [a poem to a lover] I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born.

Yet, while Goldkamp admits that his delivery might enhance his text, O'Hara's manifesto begins by declaring, "Everything is in the poems." 

That's not to say that Goldkamp's work doesn't function as genuine for-the-page poems. While their vitality (if not virality) may originate in and for a performative setting, the poems as written capture, from time to time, the mosh-pit of this zany's faceplants. They runneth over with run-amok puns. They take the fork in the road at every spoonerism. They bull's wool aphoristic one-liners, spoofy brainfarts, goofy double dutch, and all-purpose doofusy foofaraw and boffala. Goldkamp is a meshuga sugar-high, a hot mess eager to zugzwang when others zen. He brings a hairdryer to a flea circus. And "he likes to stroke [his] mustache like a pet" while doing so. As he readily admits, "folks either love it or hate it."

6.

In "BARBARIC AWP," a poem that trades in Whitman's rough-hewn caterwaul for the confines of a writers' conference, Goldkamp begins with the line, "the managing editor asked my body count." While Goldkamp explicitly plays with the term's ambiguity between murder and intercourse, what goes unsaid (in my interpretation) is the allusion to the VIDA count, which tracks the gender, race, sexuality, and other categories of representation among literary publications. The speaker in the poem appears to be acting out—with increasingly bizarro shenanigans—against the zombified poetasters, paid-by-the-word prosers, and washed-out copies of copyeditors who mill about the convention hall's book fair. He can't stand their uptight pleasantries or pissant tut-tutting. He pleads, "can the morality police." Finally, the speaker erupts: 

so about all my squeakiness do please accept
my dearest apologies this is a receipt
for sludging up the untenable page
i'm drenched in primordial poetics

He envisions a primordial ooze (perhaps some Santorum-like mixture of sweat, barf, ink toner, cum, fruit-rollups, and smegma?) that results on the conference's last day when he's left saddled with tote-bagsful of swag and free back issues of third-rate journals. The poem evokes a latter-day Dunciad replete with literary in-fighting, bad behavior, pissing contests, and a deluge of insufferable print. Henry dons the headdress of a barbarian invading the gatekeepers, only to find himself drowned in institutional verbiage. Doubtless, the poetry police dredge the river for his body as the weekend concludes.    

Yet, for all Goldkamp's mockery directed at the insular poetry world, he appears to find a place in it—even reading with perfect contempt—for something that's genuine. There are many times when his contempt becomes self-directed, and he wonders whether his own work achieves anything genuine. Perhaps he's too hammy; perhaps he's too ham-fisted? Take this one from JOY BUZZER, for instance:

HELLO MY NAME IS GAG ORDER

So this guy at last night's show tells me these aren't poems, they're gags. As if I'm some sort of poetry interloper. And I was like (gags... gags... throws up on floor)

The query—whether something is a genuine poem—is one that most poets must confront, if they're being honest with themselves; in Goldkamp's case, though, the issue feels more pertinent. Where do his theatrical gags and gimmicks end, and where does the true poem emerge? This framing of the issue, however, situates gags and gimmicks at one end of a spectrum that's opposed to some fanciful "true" poem at the other. It's this framework, I suspect, that Goldkamp would object to.

A gag causes the audience to open their mugs for a laugh in the way a mechanical stopper might be inserted to choke their pieholes: to call something a gag is to recognize it operates by a cheap (gag) reflex. It renders aesthetic reception into a visceral gut-reaction instead of a contemplative judgment. Gags also perform a type of violence against the audience: gagging them, killing them, leaving them in stitches. But if the outcome of prolonged gags is tossing one's cookies, as Goldkamp suggests, this ironically returns us to Aristotle's Poetics, where the objective of a performance was to generate social catharsis—etymologically a purgation. That is, Aristotle's key metaphor is about puking out the poisonous stuff trapped inside you. What, in this sense, could be more poetic than Goldkamp's gaggle of dumb jokes which aim for us to upchuck the rotten affect of bathetic poetry and toxic consumerist yearning?

Similarly, Sianne Ngai writes in Theory of the Gimmick that the gimmick is "simultaneously overperforming and underperforming…. in a well-nigh blasphemous way that conflates aesthetic value with economic value." A gimmick, for Ngai, lies in the same ambivalent affective territory as a "hack." Whereas a lifehack can be a helpful time-saving device, a hack writer may be a grub-street scrivener whose very overproduction leads to wastefulness. The lifehack might feel unearned; a grub-street hack feel like he's not earning enough. Yet to survive in the urban jungle, you want to make sure you can hack it. Is Goldkamp a hack? Are his poems merely gimmicks that both under- and overperform?

To answer such questions, it may be helpful to make a distinction between Henry the clown and Goldkamp the author, though these figures can pull apart and glom together like salt-water taffy. Still, Henry is wacky stupid to the inverse degree that Goldkamp is wicked smart. "Because you cannot be a smart clown," Slava Polunin says, a quote which Goldkamp uses in one of his essays on Clown Poetics. I'd propose that Goldkamp uses Henry the clown to enact a "stupid" poetry of gimmicks to send up the gimcrackery that's rife in contemporary American culture, and in contemporary American poetry more specifically.

Ngai's insight about the gimmick's sacrilegious equivalences between aesthetic and economic value, short-changing the former to gain shortcuts to the latter, helps lay the foundation for understanding Goldkamp's parody. While Goldkamp is jonesing to josh on almost any subject, his parodic targets are most consistently art and capitalism—and the ways these two forces make such easy yet incestuous bedfellows. Exactly the terrain on which the gimmick thrives. By using little gimmicks throughout his work, he both knowingly implicates himself in and ironically distances himself from the "stupid" processes that institutionalize any art into a type of commercial transaction. His expropriation of gimmicks can be read as apotropaic; but it implies a path forward to revalue and rethink the gimmick, as well. What is it that we want from a performance, and how can we tell if a show or a clown, say, is over- or underperforming without resorting to tired aesthetic norms or tyrannical capitalist metrics?

In clowning it's the wowie-zowie bits or the underwhelming, repeated minimalist gestures that often strike home. The very act of willfully being under or over the mark, too much or insufficient, comprises the better part of the clown's métier. This is one reason that most clowns come across as kooky, klutzy, slop-ditch, slapdash clodhoppers. But within this jester's guise, they can challenge the governing standards that weigh us down. Ridiculous, off-kilter, and uninhibited, a clown doesn't so much declare the emperor's nakedness as he wears a mock-crown and loses his britches to the tune of a slide whistle. Goldkamp zeros in, for example, on the gimmicky nametags used for team-building retreats or networking sessions. These badges of dishonor by which the overlords wish us to be known reduce our wilder, unwieldier humanity to personal brands or some predefined locus on an org chart. Goldkamp loops screwball responses to these nametags with increasingly katzenjammer distortion effects: his scribble-coloring outside the box and dodo-headed self-labelling breaks open the confines of the stifling gimmicks that pen us inside the lines. It's this same hope chest of gimmicks on which are penned the stuffy lines of conventional poetry.

Gimmicks are pervasive: to take but one omnipresent example, AI is the capitalist gimmick par excellence. What is the commonplace usage of AI—with its advanced neural-network computing, army of Mechanical Turk workers, cloud systems that span across the globe, satellites orbiting in outer space, and vast data centers sucking up electricity and water—if not a type of Rube Goldberg device to perform tasks that most of us could do much more simply by exerting a tiny modicum of brain power? To diagram the whole route from input to output through each point in the cause-and-effect chain would reveal its inanity, were it even possible. It would put the convolutions of the game Mousetrap to shame.

The philosopher Henri Bergson believed comedy typically occurs when human characters assume rote, robotic gestures that conform to preset roles and reflexes instead of acting upon any more richly nuanced thought process. Think Chaplin in Modern Times. Perhaps tragedy will occur, conversely, when robots and rote systems perform the whole nuanced toil of human mentation. Think Fritz Lang's Metropolis. AI embodies the gimmick's false promise to save labor while, in fact, making us slaves to its mechanizations. On the contrary, Rube Goldberg machines are funny the more elaborate and tenuous they appear—they are not so much gimmicks as cartoons that expose the gimmickry we face in everyday life. Goldkamp, like Goldberg, holds the mirror up to the loony-tune animations we've become, exposing the gimmicks that have made doddering wind-up toys of us all in the profit-driven crank that wheels us around its conveyor belt in ever faster, faster permutations that slowly kill.

7.

I keep thinking of the video art of Warhol eating a hamburger. He opens the wrapper, splats some Heinz ketchup from the bottle, and chows down on a Whopper. Afterward, he dabs his lips with a napkin, places his garbage in the paper bag, and crumples it up. About half a minute of dead air goes by with Warhol, whose fingers interlock, adjusting his arms and rolling his eyeballs in a gawky attempt to do anything but look square at the camera. Finally, he says, "I'm Andy Warhol, and I just ate a hamburger." The sequence takes a little over four minutes. While originally filmed for Jørgen Leth's 1982 documentary 66 Scenes from America, part of the clip became repurposed as a Burger King commercial in 2019.     

Against the background of Warhol's celebrity, even the mundane action of eating a burger becomes a series of carriwitchets and allusive cutups. His squirrely poker-face plays off his own photogenetic qualities and the controlled, almost airbrushed, construction of his suit, wig, and maquillage; rather than simper and preen for celluloid, though, he consumes the ground chuck like an ordinary joe. Indeed, the act of consumption is writ large and literalized, revealed for the sludgy, perfunctory digestive process it really is. The Heinz bottle references his Pittsburgh childhood while the Burger King logo becomes a stand-in for the many logos and icons he portrayed as he became king of the 80s downtown art scene. The awkward pause is a reprise of his own slowed-down, static, one-take films such as Blow Job (1964) where any meat-eating is decidedly off-camera. Even the idea of a "Whopper" seems to allude to the cloud of gossip that surrounded Andy by this point in his career. The ending's banal announcement—adding no information we don't already know—acts like the work's signature, transforming this prosaic readymade incident into an impish if uncomfortable aesthetic experience.    

Contrast Warhol with Paul McCarthy's video Bossy Burger (1991), for example. Whereas the relationship between performance art and clowning may seem suggestive or analogical in most cases, in McCarthy's work they often appear smack-dab equivalent. In several videos and performances from the 90s, he plays a variety of clowns. Where Warhol can be cool and understated, McCarthy delights in ooze and excess. In the hour-long Bossy Burger, McCarthy wears an Alfred E. Neuman mask and sports a chef hat and apron. A parody of a cooking show, McCarthy splatters ketchup and other condiments around the kitchen and on his person until the cozy domestic space resembles a gruesome crime scene or a lavatory spoliated by a bad case of the runs. McCarthy pushes the boundary where gross-out humor begins to bleed into body horror. Clowns, conventionally portrayed as sozzled, thickskulled, or nutso, often practice symbolic violence and undergo asocial mishaps even in their friendlier manifestations. It's not surprising, then, that clowns can quickly turn creepy, in the vein of Pennywise or The Joker. McCarthy's dark take on clown imagery is part of his larger project to disenchant the normative innocence of such figures, under which guise cultural toxicity is easily swallowed. He delights in making a hash of the pablum society rehashes.   

McCarthy appropriates the rustic, doltish clown for disturbing and critical purposes. One might claim he is less interested in being a clown than he is in problematizing them, as he does with other figures such as Disney dwarfs. Warhol, on the flip side, with his modish jacket and tie, impersonates the Fifth Avenue advertising jobber he once was: this drag allows him the straight-man look which makes his graceless shuffling and shambling gusto feel like an amusing camp. His fiddly, lummoxy routine emerges as funnier and more clownish precisely because he doesn't adopt a threadbare costume or typecasted mannerisms. Correspondingly, I wonder how much Goldkamp uses his clown schtick as cover or misdirection for his poeting. I can imagine few figures whom the general populace looks down their nose at more than some hapless versifier hawking his blather. Even the red-schonzered, hobo-like pantaloon occupies a more secure position on the social ladder, banana peels be damned. Poets are nothingburgers. Leastways clowns occupy helpful roles; witness hospital clowns that visit children's cancer wards or satirical impressionists on late-night sketch shows that send up crummy politicians. Yet, what the frig does a poet do, doo-doo, about which anyone would give a fig?              
 
Such uncertainty animates—and is the animus for—much of Goldkamp's humor. Adrift in a cutthroat, transactional universe that values the quickest means to the richest ends, poets put up stumbling blocks of words that trip up their own communication. Poets' linguistic loop-de-loops of footwork are akin to the loopy slip-slide-flip-and-crash of a clown's flumping caper. Both depend on a dash of roguery and caprice. With his scatterbrained scat and id-on-overdrive fiddlesticks, Goldkamp bodies forth a poetry that cavorts much like a bumbling, light-footed Punchinello. Ultimately, his wigwaggery riddles us this:

…i've shot my mouth clean off i've shot
myself in the foot soon the head how red like
the rose how dead like the sun on the other side
of the world that it throws its light upon inscape
scapegoat bloody puddle of clams what cold
glam so what do you call two clowns w/ nothing
better to do than sit and stare it's poetry plot...