What Occurs Outside the Proscenium: On Henry Goldkamp’s Joybuzzer

Henry Goldkamp, JOY BUZZER: A Clown Show, Ricochet Editions, September 2025, 76 Pages

“Hi, I’m Henry!”

I don’t remember how Henry and I met—only that it wasn’t via his performance. I did not meet Henry this way, no. This is not how Henry Goldkamp introduced himself to me. We met in New Orleans while he was a part of the audience; he was tempered, almost shy, a quiet presence taking photographs. Not the clown-ish demeanor he usually displays in the world, the clown poetics showcase that is his work. Henry was not performing that day, he was there to watch me read, he was there to watch Olivia Muenz read. This work was not about him.

Later, I watched Henry perform Joy Buzzer in a Kansas City brewery while a basketball game flashed on the multiple TVs. Later, Henry read in Philadelphia inside a smashed basement of a bookstore wearing a suit; he brought his clown antics, his name tags, his energy. 

Imagine a troupe of clowns. Imagine many Henrys: “Hi, I’m Henry.” By engaging the audience in dialogue, a performance of everyday life, Henry is duplicating himself through time, twisting the spectators’ minds into thinking through how they show up every day. I was given a nametag. Everyone was given a name tag—we are now in the performance whether we like it or not. He is engaging the body, duplicating what occurs outside the proscenium. 

Joy Buzzer, Henry Goldkamp’s debut full-length collection of poetry, published by Ricochet Editions, cannot exist without the body, without the physical performative act. Henry Goldkamp cannot exist without the input of those surrounding him. The poetics we see on the page are only possible through the daily interactions the poet participates in with his friends, family, and larger poetic community. The book is a collection of friendship. Just see the  “acknowledgements” page. It is an ode to being a part of something, a testimony constructing disparate nodes into a freakish, exciting entirety. 

“BUZZ,” there’s my phone. We are both in our offices, mine is at Temple University, Henry’s is at LSU in Baton Rouge. I am an adjunct, Henry has more of a permanent position. We make some jokes about having windows. Har har. I look out onto the academic horizon, windows encased in, made of Brutalism. We talk about the Russian Constructivists. We are both indebted to the Soviet Modernists. Henry’s office does not have a window. 

Joy Buzzer is also the phone call. 

I’m on the train back to Philly from a reading I traveled to Pittsburgh for—“BUZZ,” there’s my phone, the connection again. Only if I’m willing to pick up. “Hahhh,” I am in Harrisburgh, Henry is in Old City. A disjunction until that evening. Henry is on a book tour. Philadelphia is his last stop. We smoke cigarettes. I apologize for a life lived well and stupidly. I do not need to apologize. Yet. A necessity of friendship—discord in language, our previous choices. Clown poetics, clowning around, cloning. Our contact zone: the parking lot before Dahlak. 

Henry, Juliet, and I are around a pool. We are at a pool party in New Orleans—a backyard. Henry wears a robe, some Playboy Mansion slippies. I have to say goodbye: it’s 1 am. I must fly back to Philadelphia the next day. I circumambulate the pool hugging my farewells with everyone who’s left: the poets from Cleveland, the poets from New Orleans, the poets from Massachusetts, the poets from Denver. This is taking me a long time. I do not leave for another half hour. There’s always a delay with care, a change in logical attitude and plans. Our contact zone: the heated pool. 

We drove to the backyard from the Poetry Festival—Juliet, Mike, Henry, myself. We are us. We are who we say we are. Yet—we were performing as readers, academics, experts, audience members, contributors to the haptics of meeting for the duration of the day. Earlier in the festival, Henry and I were sitting on the sidewalk smoking cigs—two of his former students walked by. Who’s Henry? Who am I? Who’s Juliet? 

The performance continues. 

By giving a nametag to the audience member, Henry allows for the individual to briefly break their own identity by assuming a new fixture, an outlandish impossibility to be the moon. But are we not the moon? The body’s watery crescendos. The phases of the moon in the daily tussle. 

Henry walks around the room, shakes your hand, looks you in the eyes, introduces himself. Responds, moves on. The joy buzzer is the handshake, the buzz, electrifieeddddd. The contact. 

The moon is repeated throughout the book and the performance—the nametag, the moon, the choice to be the moon. Where is the moon? The moon comes in many phases—no wonder it continues to appear. 

“Hi I’m Henry.”

“Hello my name is the Moon,”

“Night doesn’t need your stupid beauty mark, you shit-bum balloon. Fuck your little boots – and fuck your walk, too.”

The performance and the name tags, anew throughout his work and clown exterior, ulterior, motives, alterior, motives, movies…

“Hello my name is the Moon.”

“You strike me as the type of person to put a twenty in the laundromat changer machine just to hear the sound of a jackpot.”

This book cannot exist without the embodiment of Henry’s performance. It is a script. It is also a score—how to break up the 2D existences of what poetry is and can do. How to follow the thread or the lead. I tell my students that poetry is physical. I introduce the line, “To piss is to make poetry.” I do not know nor remember who wrote it. Poetry lives in the physical world. To piss is to make poetry. To piss. The quotidian action. The seemingly base act of pissing or introducing oneself turns into the performativity that affects the audience. I think of the encounter with a server behind the scenes, in the kitchen, or back, and then how they behave in the dining room. Does Henry Goldkamp wear a suit at home? 

The business and the clown. 

The business of being a clown. Is what we do not a business tactic? Our jobs and dreams: academia and poetry, the success and the accolades we seek. Henry teaches poetry and clowning at LSU. Henry teaches composition and first year writing. The joy of interaction. The joy of naming one’s kids Hart and Crane. The joy of communing—“buzzzzz” there goes my phone. “Buzzzz” there go the: 

“Hello my name is getting old.”

“I never anymore say no to children asking me for cigarettes, even if it’s my last.”

Henry’s responses do not make logical sense. That’s the beauty, or the catch. Recently many people around me, myself included, have been impulsively making relational decisions, as though a virulence. This does not make practical sense. Getting old does not prevent anyone from giving children cigarettes—in fact, according to Henry, it is encouraged. We are constantly introduced to the backwards nature of logic, the backwards nature of the contact zone unrelated to narrative.

Yet. 

This is living in the world, being of the world and a community intact with other humans. We make choices. The response to the introduction can go in any direction; that’s the mobility of communication. Henry asks the reader-audience to consider how we are within ourselves. Our spectrum. What does the surrounding space tell us? How are we in space? What is being produced? The feeling—where does it lead us? Reminding me of Eve Kosofky Sedwig’s comment in Touching Feelings on the affect of a-hard-to-articulate book: “it conveys an affective and aesthetic fullness that can attach even to the experiences of cognitive frustration.” Henry produces a cognitive frustration laying the groundwork for asideness, besideness, touching, in connection with what’s beyond. Joy Buzzer doesn’t look to continue nor progress, but touch, connect, find the contact zone, the contact point—what can happen with a bunch of strangers in a room who expect a traditional poetry reading? 

What happens when a book is scripted for your interpretation? 

“Hello my name is the moon.”

“Oh fuck you. You couldn’t write a poem out of a wet paper bag. You don’t even have hands.”

My hands are writing this review. Hello, my name is Olga. Hello, I’m looking out on the moon. Hello, the moon is gone, it’s new. Hello, today is the eclipse. Hi, I’m Henry. The connection is in the handshake. The demand. The other. The world.

∩

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. She has multiple publications out with Tilted House and a forthcoming chapbook, “our monuments to California,” she calls them, with Ursus Americanus. Her translation of Stanislav Belsky’s first full length collection in English will be out with Dialogos / Lavender Ink. She lives in Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.