Christopher Wunderlee

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Christopher Wunderlee is an American avant-garde poet and experimental writer. To date, he has written two novels and a book of poetry.

Wunderlee is considered an 'underground' poet, although with a considerable following. He is most associated with post-Beat, post-modernist writers. His poem "Tomorrow" however garned attention for its word juxtaposition, confessional style and allusions. In recent years, a number of 'prose-poems' published in journals in the UK and U.S. furthered his reputation and brought him critical acclaim and a number of awards.

His prose rose to prominence with the short story "A Chat with Howl" in the literary journal Zyzzyva (magazine), in which he interviewed the "voice" of the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg. The story's originality and experimentation attracted readers and garned Wunderlee an "Emerging Voice" nomination. He followed with a number of critically well-received stories, and travel articles in the magazine Places.

In 2003, Wunderlee published a collection of poems, Kalopsia. The title is indicative of Wunderlee’s poetic theory and means, “a state (or delusion) in which things are more beautiful than they truly are”. The poems in the collection share the theme of juxtaposing graceful lines with an often dubious subject matter, and highlight his talent for new lyricism. “Tomorrow/ I’ll wake/ after some suppressant evening/ with nothing but the tele-waves/ and groans of bored kitty cats/ and shave my head for god/ leave the house with alms hands/ and circumambulation cries/ and live Brahmin-like in alleyway insights” (from “Tomorrow”). It won critical acclaim from a number of critics and publications for its merging of modernistic themes and postmodernistic voice, essentially a collection that seemed to unite T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound and Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Ginsberg.

In 2005, the Loony appeared, the story of an estranged scientist’s supposed role in faking the Project Apollo moon missions in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Again, the title of the book mirrors the subject matter, as the protagonist appears to be either suffering from ‘lunacy’ or he is the victim of an elaborate conspiracy to keep it secret that the Apollo missions were faked. The main characters are Albert Locner, an astrophysicist who becomes embroiled in the plot. An apparitional love interest named Harris who is allegedly a military spy who uses sex to blackmail prominent enemies of the state and/or another victim of the plot. And, “the Colonel”, who is either the military officer in charge of Lochner’s case or a psychiatrist. It has been suggested that they are postmodern counterparts to Dante, Beatrice and the Devil, or Don Quixote, Dulcinea, and the narrator. The story, using experimental narration, follows Albert Lochner’s life from conception to his downfall, when he joins the team to fake the lunar landings. After they accomplish their goal and fool the world, Lochner is blackmailed when Harris is supposedly abducted. In order to save her, he must agree to a number of unspecified demands, one of which is that he spends several years being driven randomly around the U.S. by two agents, why is never explained. He later escapes to find Harris, in attempt to discover whether she was truly a victim or an accomplice in the conspiracy. The plot is infused with unique devices, including the repetitive use of lines from David Bowie’s Space Oddity song, “out-of-room-voices” who chime in to offer commentary or break into song (it has been suggested that these ‘voices’ are actually patients at a psychiatric ward and that the entire or at least some part of the book takes place there) and “file footage”, or scenes from movies, television shows, propaganda films, and other media (again, potentially simply what is playing on the television at the hospital). These plot devices combine with the unique, loquacious prose style to mirror a state of lunacy, whether this is because the protagonist is indeed mentally ill or because of the situation he finds himself in is the big unanswered question of the novella. Because of its symbolic parallels, stylistic innovations, and distinctive narrative style, The Loony is considered a groundbreaking work of fiction. Comparisons of the novella were made to Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, and Vladimir Nabokov.