[WHITE]: Poems

By Trevor Ketner

[WHITE] is a book born from obsession. This debut collection of poetry from Trevor Ketner follows two paths of obsession, laying them over one another to tease out a critique of whiteness in the arts that reflects on how we think of whiteness in America. Throughout, Ketner curates a landscape that is part [auto] biography and part political synthesis.

Ketner’s work takes inspiration from seeing a retrospective of Rauschenberg’s work at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) seven times and from teaching themselves to read tarot in two weeks. [WHITE] is a kind of combine or collage of two projects that speak to and against each other and, in their juxtaposition, become an entirely different third thing. As we follow the life of Rauschenberg, so too do we follow the journey of the fool through the major arcana of the tarot moving forward into understanding. Here is an examination of queer bodies, Rauschenberg traveling toward, through, and away from infamous lovers in pursuit of art and selfhood, eventually finding himself in “the January water / of a lake nearby / called Eden.” Meanwhile, Ketner exposes the insidiousness of whiteness and its inescapable role in American history and art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9780820360409

Trevor Ketner

TREVOR KETNER's chapbooks include Negative of a Photo of Fire, White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg, and Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest. A 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow, they have been a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow for the Poetry Project, and a Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow. They live in Manhattan with their husband.

Book preview

Each time I enter the retrospective:

quickness, sanguine intensity

             and for a moment I have

to stop, everyone milling around

me and the art in the middle. Then I lock

in again, a secret

compartment in the heel of a spy’s shoe

once the smuggled thing

—a square

             of mud or gold or

             toilet paper, white lead

paint (so heavy)—

has been removed.

[

Rauschenberg instructs someone to write

on the back of Erased de Kooning

Drawing, "DO NOT REMOVE

DRAWING FROM FRAME / FRAME

IS

PART

OF

DRAWING,

" which is just that,

a drawing that’s been erased—an undrawing.

[

After he, Rauschenberg,

reclaims paper’s beforeness,

it sits on the wall—

a scrim bustle scrape smudge

of sound applied behind it

as to a stage being set.

[

A letter from Robert Rauschenberg to the cast of Open Score (1966):

This is identification and instructions.

The stage director will direct you to move quietly upstairs

and wait for your entrance. You will enter into the darkness

and wait for cues. This is a continuous piece and your

entrance should be made as quietly and smoothly as possible.

[

Open Score was a large-scale performance piece staged at the Armory as part of a nine-night performance series. The center of the piece was an unchoreographed tennis match between two players. Each tennis racket was wired to sound whenever it made contact with the ball; they sounded like bells in a bell tower—each chime shut off a light until the arena went totally dark. Once darkness was complete, a group of some five hundred people entered, announced their names, and faced the audience. Their ghost images were caught with infrared cameras (cutting edge technology at the time) and projected onto large screens around the arena: miniature/magnified mirror of the crowd/each ghost respectively, a shadow mimicry.

[

LARGE NUMBERS WILL BE YOUR DIRECTOR.

The activities that must be executed are listed

below and should be memorized. These

will

not

necessarily

appear

in

the

order

listed.

0 – The Fool .

Wearing that dress (the floral print)

             with goldenrod tights,

I say of course and mean I’m queer as fuck.

There are no cliffs in Minneapolis

             because there are no mountains.

Sky is not normally yellow—and yet.

Here are my thick boots. I forget

to shave my beard, so it grows wild, thicket-thick.

I say of course and mean 0 is in the middle of the number

             line between every possible positive

and negative. White flower in hand is flat—

             flowers stitched thin into dress are flat.

I grew my hair last winter, bleached it.

             I feel as if I’m supposed to feel

like I want something—I’ve already got

emerald slippers people on the street say they love.

I’ve got a stick I carry with me.

The stars are up there, behind that color.

I look for them, fall down the