Henry Goldkamp’s Joy Buzzer is a clown performance turned poetry collection. The clown (“Henry”) passes around nametags for the audience to wear. One-by-one, “Henry” introduces themselves to the audience, the audience responds, and the performance repeats over and over. Joy Buzzer asks the question: what is special in the act of introduction?
David Haydon, Associate Editor at Air/Light, spoke with Henry over Zoom about clown poetics, showing your work, and hammerspace.
David Haydon: Joy Buzzer has a distinct form that is repeated throughout the collection. Could you talk about how you devised or decided on that form?
Henry Goldkamp: It started with this prompt from Laura Mullen: “What if you said the same line, but you were addressing it to different audience members?” That got me thinking about how things might shift with a one-on-one audience interaction.
This really came together during COVID, when no one was able to see anyone, so it came out of craving human interaction. I was in my garage and talking to myself and performing for an imaginary audience. That shifted my practice in not writing towards the page but doing it through voice memos, so I would know how I wanted to say things in terms of tonality and attitude.
Then Berryman’s persona of Henry came into play. The joke is, “Well, I’m the real Henry,” and sort of going towards, “I am a persona of myself,” which then blended into the clown concept of how we don’t really know who Bozo is. No one knows that person’s real name. I was interested in conflating these two identities. It just so happens that, you know, I was doing it through clown theory. I was studying Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards Poor Theatre, which helped me start bringing in things that I had lying around. The idea being that I rarely spend money on a prop. And this helped me start focusing on attaching the verbal with the physical.
It was really a craving of a cure for loneliness; I wanted to introduce myself to the world again. So that handshake is the joy buzzer, that gag that shocks. I think that speaks to what a traditional poetry audience because it’s disruptive. They’re like, “I just wanted to sit back and relax and watch some words go out of someone’s mouth.” But Joy Buzzer sort of challenges that format.
DH: Clown poetics has a strong communal element. How did your interactions with audiences and with other writers shape the ultimate form?
HG: Putting the book together was tough, because I knew how I wanted to act it out. I knew how I wanted to perform it, but I didn’t know how to portray it as a book.
I’m not much for a revision. I’d rather have the poem live in the moment. That goes back to Grotowski. The core of that theory is for theater to exist, you don’t need a script or language. You need a spectator and the spectacle, actor and audience member. I remember the gist of what I want to say, and I’ll improv it based on the space, the comfort level of the audience.
When I handed out the name tags, I never knew who picked what and in what order it was gonna go. Ideally, Joy Buzzer could have been published in every single order of the [performance]. It can really backfire. There’s a Shark Tank [moment] where it’s like, “Sharks, how about a company that turns your dead friend into sweatpants?” The reaction of the person who got that one was, “Okay…” but I sequenced it in the book itself as sort of an elegiac section. The book now, as a book form, is a codex.
DH: In the addendum, you provide a link to videos that “track the development of clown poetics in its prototype stages.”
HG: Just for the record, I don’t know if it’ll ever get out of the prototype stages. I think it’s designed to always be a prototype.
DH: What motivated you to show your drafts, so to speak, in this way?
HG: I embrace the mess of it all. A big shift happened for me when I saw Natalie Palamides, Nate — A One-Man Show. I was just like, “Holy shit, I wanna do that.” Suddenly I’m feeling a bigger range of emotions than I’ve ever felt from something. I’m feeling the tragedy of it. I’m also laughing hysterically, but I’m also kind of wanting to suck back in the laughter. These emotions are felt at the same time, and that’s something I strive for.
The [poem from Joy Buzzer] that comes to mind is “Stand-up Elegies.” My friend John, who did die, and his mother, who’s crying hysterically and saying words can’t express her grief, then thinking the smart-ass remark of “Well, I’m a poet, I can write elegies, what are you talking about?” The way in which I deliver that, people will often laugh, and then be like, “Oh, that’s really fucked up.”
The clown knows better than anyone that tragedy and comedy aren’t two sides of the same coin. The clown can melt that down, make a ball out of it, and then juggle that.
DH: It reminds of “Hello, my name is End Times, or Fun Times,” where you respond, “from the right distance, you can’t tell the difference between an oil refinery and an amusement park.” And that kind of balance of joyfulness and doom.
HG: I deal with ecological concerns on the day-to-day. I commute from New Orleans to Baton Rouge for work, and that strip of highway is known as Cancer Alley. There’s paper refineries, oil refineries, runoff. The cancer rates along that stretch are through the roof. I think about Nietzsche: you stare into the void long enough and the abyss will start staring back. If you hold that stare long enough, the one thing that we might have on mortality is being able to laugh at it.
Laughter isn’t subpar to seriousness. I’m really kind of grabbing from Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure. We all fail consistently in our lives, and that’s something that everyone, no matter who you are, can understand. Laughing in the end times is a powerful, transgressive act.
DH: In terms of the writing process, what was that kind of affective state? Because the book is so joyful and absurd, but often those projects can be incredibly difficult to write.
HG: I try and energize every single line in a poem, whether it’s more of a traditional poem or the Joy Buzzer form. I think of that in terms of clown teaching: the hardest thing to get students to do is to shake loose their very socialized bodies and be able to do whatever they want with their bodies. The Russian clown Slava Polunin talks about how his clown commune would study Tom and Jerry cartoons to figure out their sequences of movement. This comes up really briefly in Joy Buzzer in one of the visual poems, but this concept of hammerspace, which is the extra-dimensional space that’s behind a cartoon character’s back, where Bugs Bunny can pull out a piano.
I think that American poetry as a commodity culture forgot that hammerspace exists on the page. You can do whatever you want in the next line. And I don’t necessarily mean that in the sense of non-sequiturs. I don’t think that’s what I do. I think of it more as creating one’s own logic. It’s not just some random chaos. I mean, chaos is good, but it’s sort of controlled chaos.
DH: I’m glad you brought up the images in the book because you’ve taken two ready-made forms—the “Hello My Name Is” sticker and foam letters—and pushed them to that fine line between meaning and chaos. When in the process did those come in?
HG: I had been doing those when I wanted something smaller to work on. Those are all one-goes. If the sticker stuck, then there’s where the sticker went. I’ve accidentally scanned in some dog hairs because they got stuck. There’s an honesty about that.
I do that a lot in other practices. A couple years ago, I did a “smell poem.” I built these boxes made with very smelly things. You’d smell the letters S-U-M-M-E-R-T-I-M-E-R in order, and it became an olfactory poem. I’m interested in pushing that boundary. Poetry can do so much more than mess around on a page. I respect and enjoy that, but I enjoy myself more when I have an audience in front of me, and we mess around together as a collective.
DH: One of the poems, “Hello, My Name is Gag Order,” addresses this, when you’re accused of performing gags instead of poems. It brings up this experience of being told “that’s not a poem.” Were there ever moments when you were having to fight that voice?
HG: Well, the voice was never coming from within me. When I think about poetry, language is maybe number four on the list of priorities. I think of some intangible feeling, the way that people used to colloquially say, “Oh yeah, that’s poetry.”
I’m more interested in poetry as art, rather than poetry as literature. I’m a big student of Brecht, of how can we package this in a way that makes people uncomfortable but also maybe makes them act differently after the show. With cartoons and clowning, I think about violence a lot, especially now. Paraphrasing Arthur Leslie, cartoons show that what we call civilization is actually barbarism. There’s truth in cartoons, even though most people’s instinct would be, “This is a non-reality.” In fact, it’s very true to how we are in real life. Comedy is all about metaphorical violence. Hammerspace already has a sort of inherent violence to it. This is my day one lecture in clown classes, talking about the relationship between laughter and violence and tragedy.
I stumbled across this Lucy Parsons article from 1884, “A Word to Tramps,” and the last directive is, “learn the use of explosives.” This is not talking to tramp clowns; this is talking to actual people that are down and out of work. If you really want to make a difference, learn the use of explosives. The clown to me is a political agent. Very subversive. So I’m trying to learn the use of explosives in a cartoonish, poetic way.
Henry Goldkamp lives in New Orleans, where he teaches poetry and performance studies at Louisiana State University, hosts the reading series Splice, and serves as communications director of the New Orleans Poetry Festival. He is the author of Not My Circus (Ursus Americanus, 2025) and JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show (Ricochet Editions, 2025). Recent creative work, performance, and criticism appears in Annulet, Chicago Review, Poetry Northwest, Grotto, Triquarterly, DIAGRAM, and Denver Quarterly, among others. He wishes dunce caps would make a comeback, stat.