Clown Poetics with Henry Goldkamp
Editor Carlie Corson ‘28 corresponded with poet Henry Goldkamp, who has two short poems from the longer piece “Still Life with Hammerspace” in Meetinghouse Volume 6.
Tell me about clowns. They seem to lurk behind many of your works. Two of your recent publications Balloon Animal and Joy Buzzer have circusy themes. So, I ask: What is the fascination with clowns?
One particularly formative moment that sparked my interest in clowning was discovering Natalie Palamides’ background in clown (via Philly’s Pig Iron Theatre) after seeing her Nate: A One-Man Show (2020) several years ago. In that show, Palamides pulls off these moments that trigger an almost impossible response of both laughter (joy) and weeping (grief) simultaneously, just brilliant moments of surprise and silliness. Of tantamount importance to me is also her paradoxical blending of the collective energies of the live audience with discomfort, a kind of “let’s all cringe through this together,” which I think is the subsurface of all this internetty fast-paced fascination with the so-called cringe. However, clowning can achieve cringe in-person well beyond any sort of goof-off influencer on a screen, due to the nature of the theatrical medium. In-person performance beckons attention and allows the mind to dwell—a total must for truly cringing... To cringe is an event that happens slowly, a kind of melting of nerves—in ways that scrolling the fast-form content of a phone cannot.
Researching Palamides led me to other contemporary clowns such as Slava Polunin and Zack Zucker, who, albeit differently, conjure an intense lyricism through a rather madcap, at times grotesque approaches. From there, as I started studying clown more seriously, I was getting a lot more juice out of those theories than I was with anything regarding poetry directly (i.e. those “craft” books which really operate as thinly veiled poetry “self-help” such as Graywolf’s “Art of” series and all the rest ad nauseum), and I couldn’t stop making the connections between the two arts. So the teddy bear’s stuffing had pratfallen from my eyes: the best poets are clowns, and the best clowns are poets. I’ve been super interested in rehearsing this topsy-turvy modality ever since.
I coined the easy label of “clown poetics” on it to give myself an umbrella to take shelter under. Given the paradoxical nature of clowning, you can take this to mean “the poetics of clowning” or “the clowning of poetics.” Both equally valid. To be clear, it’s very wet under this here umbrella! Pouring rats and poodles. It’s the atmosphere outside this umbrella that feels drier and dustier within the traditional manner of a poetry reading. I was starting to get a little cough; I searched for a cure; found clown syrup in the cupboard; I’m lucky enough to teach clown and get consequently pour it into people’s poetry cups if they want a swig.
“Clown poetics” as an artistic mode incorporates both the stage and page. How do you feel that the performance and freedom of this clown poetics influence your written work?
A concrete example of one of my first ‘aha’ moments was reading about a clown exercise where you stand up straight, lean forward a little... then a little more... more... until you begin to topple...—and then catch yourself. That em-dash serves as the brief moment that clown teacher-practitioner Christopher Bayes calls “the tiny moment of abandon,” that split second before you make the physical decision to stop from falling flat on your face. Something clicked, and I saw this as enjambment enacted... letting the line dangle into this non-zone of space on the page, then catching the weight on the front foot (um maybe poetry pun intended?) in the next line (traditionally speaking: if the poem is read left-to-right, top-to-bottom). In this way, the poem is embodied by the performer more than simply telling of their interest in “the body,” which ultimately is a trivialized and static abstraction.
Much has been said on the relationship of stage/page, but for myself I know when a poem is finished if I feel the desire and know-how of performing the poem to a large-ish group of people. The clown does everything in service of the audience, the collective, while also tickling (or pummeling) itself pink or black or blue. It's not about the punch-up or punch-down, but in many ways punching yourself in your own face. By understanding an actualized viscera as the conduit of language, and not just a mental game, a world of possibility opens when it comes to what exact language is selected, how it gets delivered, and what its immediate intentions are based on that actual real moment in the time of performance. A clown poetics poem is a porous one: it’s okay if the language changes based on the space-time the poem is performed in. It’s an organism that lives and dies. Not some immortal script, not some impenetrable rock.
I tried my hand at a top-ten list of the tenets of clown poetics, which I’ll leave here. Please don’t take this as any kind of manifesto. I think it’s just good to know there are other options available. They are there if you want to kick them around!
1) Stupidity and simplicity are valuable forms of meaning-making.
2) Let’s activate the hammerspace of a poem (anything can happen next).
3) Paginated poetry is a pre-thing that wants to wrench its thingy-ness into the physical world through performance.
4) Performance=Contention
5) A lyric poet’s call for violets is lesser than the clown’s call for violence.
6) Props serve physical colloquialisms or visual puns.
7) “Think fast!” makes good practice to stay slow.
8) Revision is a scam. All you have to do is write another good poem instead of the bad one.
9) Poetry is not difficult to do when in touch with clown, as the only prompt needed is “What would I like to write next?”
10) A high-speed chase of dummy desires, and suffering haply for it.
Meetinghouse published two mini poems/movements from your longer poem Spill Life with Hammerspace. Other movements from this longer poem have been published in other reviews. What are your thoughts on the poem being fragmented in this way? When you wrote the longer poem did you imagine that pieces of it would appear in different places?
Hammerspace, as linked above, is the extradimensional area that cartoons have access to, in which any variety of objects can be pulled from. Think: Bugs Bunny pulling out a piano, a carrot, a block of TNT. There’s an automatic explosiveness to this concept, and so I think there is a mimetic value in this long sequence of poems being “spilled” into various outlets as it leads up to the larger book form. What has also been rewarding about this submission process is the approach an editorial staff takes when publishing pieces from it. When I submit, given that the individualized portions can be quite short, I send dozens at once. Some journals have published these swaths in their entirety, others take a clip or two. Both are great, of course. What I enjoy about this latter approach is that it tells me these lil’ fragments can withstand the pressure of being scrutinized on a more barren level of page—just a few lines and their papery limelight. It’s very cool, and I thank you all for that, for embracing the shrapnel and smithereens.
You are an instructor at Louisiana State University and a contributing editor for Tilted House, a small press based in New Orleans. How do you bring your experience as a writer and performance artist into these spaces? In what ways do the various roles that you have influence each other (what skills do you choose to teach in your classroom, what works are you drawn to when selecting for the magazine, etc.)?
It boils down to pushing the limits of what’s there, what’s been established. The clown course I teach for LSU is a complete boon to my self-reward of pedagogy, a scheduled moment in time I can test my working theories alongside willing and able students who are 100% down to clown. So much magic has happened in the space-time of the classroom, and I am consistently dumbfounded at what an accessible artform like clown can do for someone who perhaps before did not consider themselves an artist. I teach that clown, and by proxy writing, is something anyone at all can do well. An egalitarian statement, to be sure, but we do all have a clown (poet, writer, whatever) inside of us waiting to be activated. It’s a privilege for me to shepherd students into accessing that side of themselves more readily.
My work with Tilted House is similar in the sense that I’m trying to access an often-overlooked space of intermedia. My niche project within Tilted House is an irregularly published journal called TILT, which ushers in work that rejects the technological monopoly of the page. Poems that are served up any other way, such as video, spreadsheets, menu items... the possibilities are endless. So it is with poetry.
Your art extends beyond the written work into both performance-based art and visual art through your involvement in Collective Task and the olfactory poem “Summertimer” that you composed in 2023. How do you know when a concept is meant to be written or take on another form? Do words or images tend to come to you first, and how do you reconcile these various structures of art?
That first question haunted me for a long time when it came to my first two full-length books you name earlier, which are essentially performative poetry-text-scripts. Getting them to work “on the page” and as a jumping point for more improvised, in-person performance was extremely difficult to process, and I found the (looking back, very “duh”) solution of implementing poetic stage directions. But what those began as were almost notes to myself before I would perform the pieces, and it wasn’t until later that I realized these in and of themselves are doing a ton of work in service of the overall takeaways and reading experience. If my person is not there to facilitate... the stage-directions can color my style in for me.
I’m a relatively new member to Collective Task, which is an international artist collective in which one member gives a prompt (“task”) for everyone each month. For example, this month’s was simply “outsourcing”; the month prior was simply “Impress me.” The thirty or so people there are about as wonderful a group as they come. These artists and poets and writers have likewise, I would say, unlocked the enmeshed inter-genre’d nature of the world. We live together mainly in monthly email threads, and it’s such a lifeforce to tap into with whatever task has been created by a member on hand. I love it.
I’m so happy you stumbled across my olfactory poem SUMMERTIMER, which for me was a high-point executing terms of pushing boundaries of what poetry might consist of, how one might “read” a poem with the eye of the nose. I am of course always sniffing out in the new forms a poem might take, and it occurred to me the most underutilized sense when it comes to poetry was maybe scent. We talk all the time about sound and vision, but there are many other senses that can be toyed with. Perhaps a poem based on nothing but texture, or taste, is next... I’ll keep scheming and see what kind of conjuring offers itself. But to answer your important question of whether a word or an image comes first, I’ll keep dodgy on it: poetry is an action, and so we must act.
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Henry Goldkamp teaches clown performance and animation studies at Louisiana State University, serves as associate editor of Tilted House, and acts as communications director for the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Recent books include Not My Circus (Ursus Americanus, 2025), JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show (Ricochet Editions, 2025), and Balloon Animal (Cloak, 2026). More at henrygoldkamp.com
Featured image in the public domain. Souce: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/823865