Crystal Set #14: Circus Nerves by Kenward Elmslie

“I bought this copy of Circus Nerves last summer at The Captain’s Bookshelf in Asheville, North Carolina–one of my favorite bookstores–along with the 1968 Something Else Press edition of Geography and Plays by Gertrude Stein and the 1948 first American edition of The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf. I’ve always loved this Brainard cover image–the subtle sexiness of the offset torso, the primary color bonanza of tattoo parlor staple images arranged into an almost occult figuration. The exaggerated, cartoonish curves of the female nude contrast with the realistic but anonymous nude (we assume) male body it’s printed onto. These nonverbal symbols of mid-century Americana and heterosexual masculinity are tweaked into a celebratory, queer portrait of the male body as canvas and subject, as art itself. I think my grandfather, a World War II veteran, might have actually had the exact same bald eagle tattoo on his arm. Brainard made a series of works featuring tattoos throughout the early 1970s–one was featured on the cover of Artforum in 2001–and tattoos of anchors and butterflies would appear throughout his work. Tattoos make sense as Pop art images–endlessly repeated and recycled bodily ads of the cultural imagination–and Brainard handles them with his quintessential humor and vulnerability. Even the gorgeously typeset title page anticipates Elmslie’s cross-genre American imagination. It’s all energy, performance, and attraction–a good visual primer for Elmslie’s buoyant, charming, and powerfully weird lyrical gymnastics in Circus Nerves. … Whether or not you remember when the monstrous ‘[a]nts chomped at / the jigsaw puzzles, ground with their hideous mandibles // treey landscapes and Venices at sunset,’ a mishmashed environment of American surrealism cum sci-fi European classicism, there’s something to enjoy and wistfully read through at every turn. The poems’ scenes and sources, like the work of Elmslie’s close New York School friends, are constantly shifting and unexpectedly inclusive. …”
Nick Sturm (Video)
Jeff Jackson presents … Please welcome back to the world … Kenward Elmslie The Orchid Stories
from a secret location: Z Press – Calais, Vermont
amazon: Kenward Elmslie