Apparition Poem #1180

 

For those who know the Aughts in Philadelphia, it is not difficult to understand why I waited so long to write in-depth about Jenny Kanzler. She was a mysterious person, and a cantankerous one. However, in late 2024 I stumbled across something in my files from ten years before, something I’d evidently forgotten, and it instantly changed my life forever. It was a cache of roughly ten brilliant Kanzler paintings from the Aughts, which redefined for me everything I felt she’d achieved with the handful I’d begun touting in the mid-Teens. All my mid-Teens appraisals had thus to be updated; whatever value I’d placed on Kanzler as a painter had to expand exponentially. I had nowhere to run and nowhere to hide on other levels, too. The also-mysterious Diana from 4325 Baltimore Avenue in West Philadelphia, where Mary Evelyn Harju lived in the early Aughts, who had looked suspiciously like Jenny Kanzler, I concluded was really her. And we were involved, briefly, then. I also understood that all our combative tete-a-tetes at the Last Drop at 13th and Pine in Center City, which had arisen from her approaching me first, had been influential for me on a subconscious level. She is in Apparition Poems precisely twice, both in #1180, just released in Scud, and in #1342. A part of me would always wonder why she chose combativeness, sometimes bordering on sociopathy, as a metier of sorts. Yet, as of late ’24, the ten treasure-trove masterpieces and semi-masterpieces, which take classic Spain and make Americana of them, pull the rug out from under any jejune assumptions I might make about having mastered, bettered, or even fathomed her. Much more than Mary and Abby, Jenny Kanzler will always remain a mystery to me. She left no pictures of herself. It must’ve been a conscious gambit. And what it expresses, it seems to me, is the perversity of a mentality bent to do anything to have viewers put the paintings first, and forget about personality cults, beauty contests, and the rest. That she was a beauty makes the situation even funnier. And more cantankerous.

New Apparition Poems 2013-2014

The initial Apparition Poems series sprung right out of the heart of Center City Philadelphia. Everything about the twists and turns built into the pieces had to do with city life and an urban landscape. This, including what a major city is like in the middle of the night. The thirty-six pieces in New Apparition Poems 2013-2014 are not as necessarily nighttime as what’s etched in the two Blazevox books. They don’t need to be. All that stillness, that sense of slumber, are built into the suburbs, all day, every day. I had relocated from Logan Square to Conshohocken in 2012, and understood that what Conshohocken was, was about an emended sense of the active or activity, tilted towards stasis rather than dynamism. The 2013-2014 Apparition Poems thus have a backdrop about consciousness coming to grips with stasis, and with the sense of stasis doubled, owing to the aftermath of the 2007-2009 recession. As of 2013-2014, and as was later deemphasized, the media were still reporting the said recession as The Great Recession, and helping us to a realization that we were a nation of hamburger flippers. The national scene was not a prosperous one.

The other thing worth knowing about Conshohocken: despite all the somnambulant touches, Conshohocken is famed for its architectural grandiosity. The way Fayette Street works in Conshohocken is that, on an ocular level, it could appear sublime at any time. Thus, it would be fallacious to say that when I stepped into Conshohocken, I entered into any kind of dead zone. The building scene, as is often the case in Philly and the environs, was, and is, a magnificent one. So that, by 2013 I felt ready to do the work of re-imagining what an Apparition Poem could be, even in a context more static than I would’ve preferred. Morris Arboretum, on the cover, is set within the city limits of Philadelphia, but in a part of the city far from Logan Square and Center City, not far from Conshohocken and Plymouth-Whitemarsh. It is a tribute to the endless sense of diversity and graciousness built into Philly that it has within its boundary-lines a real arboretum. It is a photo, also, I snapped myself in 2022. What I meant to convey is that all these suburban, or sub-urban, elements, conspired to place me in a subconscious space in which the series called Apparition Poems could have a legitimate rebirth. That’s what New Apparition Poems 2013-2014 is all about.

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Notable that two of the major New Apparition Poems turned up in UK print journal Tears in the Fence, Issue #60, in 2014.

Rubber Soul: Vino Veritas

 

Vino veritas, translates from the Latin, roughly, as this: truth-in-alcohol. The phenomenon by which we tell more of the truth when drunk. Is vino veritas something real? I wouldn’t venture a definitive guess. Different people react different ways to different stimulants and/or depressants. I would only say that, in my life as a writer, I’ve only dived (delved) into these murky waters once, i.e. written an entire piece (in this case, a chapbook length manuscript) while alcohol shit-faced. Rubber Soul was written and published in 2008. I have made a point of pointing out, in other places, that I was not playing the game straight for much of that particular, recession-trundling year. I wasn’t compulsively shit-faced either; I had (for instance) to function at Temple, both as adjunct prof and graduate student, and I did. But it was a saucy time, of old games turning up loose ends, and, where the recession was concerned, micro and macro levels converging in my life, and the lives of those I cared for. Even as I found, of course, that I couldn’t take care of them anymore. So: I was drunk enough of the time to take my stab, for instance, at the Jack Kerouac of Big Sur. The narrative voice emerges, as in Big Sur, fuzzy, hazy, staggering, stumbling. Drunken. Also channeling my old family relation Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild said of Morrison, When he was being the shit-faced kamikaze drunk, it was odds-on against getting him to do a vocal. You might look into it. Paraphrase for a writer churning out a brief book: I looked into it.

The narrative Rubber Soul voice is, in fact, too fuzzy, too hazy, to attempt anything classic. Keats keeps getting leaned on, Manhattan juts in absurdly, as does a bizarre overlay of occult/New Age/Golden Dawn baggage. Amidst all the glass shards, who I am as a long-suffering male protagonist in Girl is clearly, and precociously, taking on the task of relating/mythologizing the years on the front-lines with Mary Evelyn. Eight years, to be precise. The Word finds me sounding not like Kerouac or Morrison but like Charles Bukowski. He becomes another absurd overlay, amidst the fuzziness and the Crowley bric-a-brac. The overall tone of Rubber Soul, I would say, is not morose like Big Sur but frenzied, chaotic, hysterical. Much of it’s supposed to be funny, too, the kind of funniness The White Album sacrifices at the altar of still-cherished classicism. Rubber Soul can be taken as a romp all the way through. Ungovernable Press, btw, which published The White Album (1st ed.) and Rubber Soul in ’09 and ’08, respectively, is based in Sweden, and emanates from editor Lars Palm at the center. Part of the ’08 fracas was about weird worlds colliding online. Philadelphia to Malmo? Why not. And me and many others did have a sense of largesse, then, about how many books and chapbooks we could publish. A nifty compensation, as it were, for all the drunken nights. And a clue as to why some of us have been able to survive all the melees.

Trish: A Romance

 

Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. As I said, I was never to interact with her in a prolonged way again.

Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.

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For those of us born in the 70s and 80s, who lived through the Aughts in Center City and West Philadelphia, our perception of Philadelphia will always be colored by the sexualized over and undercurrents which animated, charged, and lit the Philly arts scene on fire with sexual energy during that time. Many of us were annoyed by the misconception the media created of a not-fully-sexed Philadelphia; but we were disarmed on that level. I have said elsewhere, and it bears repeating, that if the city of Philadelphia has a sun sign it is Gemini. It is another way of saying this: Philadelphia from within looks and feels vastly different than Philadelphia seen in a cursory way or from a distance. The sultriness around our scene was warmer and more human than the scenes we had all read about in New York and L.A.: we weren’t motivated by money or fame as such, or the desire to create and maintain images of/for ourselves. The hot blood that ran through McGlinchey’s, Dirty Frank’s, the Good Dog, and all our other hang out venues, had some actual romance in it; we all went so far as to care about other people. We were a get-close crew. The Gemini twist, as ever for Philadelphia, is that if the seeds we plant ripen correctly, Philadelphia may go on record as one of the hottest scenes in the history of the arts, thus overturning a century of bad press, neglect, abuse, and widely spread misinformation, and a corrupt arts-dissemination system with it.

Art and life have a way of co-mingling which can be difficult to finesse for an author. Because I dared to place her image on the cover of this book/pdf, I might as well announce what will be obvious to those who knew me and the Philly scene during the Aughts: the female protagonist of Trish is modeled on Philadelphia painter Mary Harju. The life I built with Mary (and with the Philly Free School) was highly unusual; we were artists without being rich kid dilettantes; lovers without being mutually exclusive; Penn students and graduates who went out of our way not to be academic; and human beings who tossed and turned on our own emotional waves without trying to fake balance or calm. It was a scattered life we had, and a haphazard one; but the love and affection we shared was genuine. In fact, if I have ever had a Laura or a Beatrice, it is Mary. The difference, of course, between myself and Plutarch and Dante, is that Mary and I consummated our relationship very fast. The heat we had for each other never quite let up, either. As per Mary’s house (4325 Baltimore Avenue), as is seen here, in the early Aughts— it was an experience in itself, filled as it was, always, with artists, musicians, and other bohemians. On certain nights, everyone in the house would be intoxicated on something or other. Many nights I spent there, I felt as if the entire house had ascended into deep space, into some other, enchanted, sensuous realm. I have memories of floating down hallways and stairs. Mary was a wonderful playmate and an excellent mate in general. She was never boring. And, to the extent that I hope this piece conveys the intense electric excitement I felt in her presence, it is a reminder that these elevated feelings are always possible, even during a Great Recession. It is the Gemini stare of Philadelphia down the barrel of a shotgun.

The White Album

 

Memories of the summer of 2008, when I wrote The White Album: lots of them, all about chaos, disorder, built-up scum. The move I made that July was within Logan Square, from 21st and Race to 23rd and Arch. The old flat had been a horny revelation: endless fun, endless soporific reverie. The new flat was comparatively pedestrian: low ceilings, not much direct sunlight, let alone bay windows, or a loft-like sense of space. All this, because rents in Center City Philly were going sky-high. The visit to Chicago in June had been interesting, borderline brilliant: but I was running out of the money needed to do such things. Was, in fact, accruing a significant amount of debt. Temple was a source of continual frustration. There were the Comp Exams to worry about, and trying to teach and do everything else I was doing at once. I had started an affair in May, and it had ended in May. I numbed myself out to deal with the disappointment I hadn’t expected. The new Mary H failed to arrive. I was alone. The temptation to wander over to between 20th and 19th and Chestnut and procure another bottle of whiskey was always there. And often indulged. Mary herself had become obdurate, unreachable. There was no going back. Jenny Kanzler arrived with a vision of reality straight out of the late Roman Empire, or the Rocky Horror mansion. A good painter, but a spook. Nothing soporific there. And Abby was wandering at large somewhere out there, shooting up God knows what by that time. Entropy: that’s what all this was about. When, a year later, and still scum-ified in another scummy summer, I affixed the Robert Ryman to the first edition of TWA, it was to express the sense that the magic of several years back had inverted, for all of us, into something primitive, faltering, sloppy. Ryman takes Abby, Mary, and Jenny, and turns them on their heads. That’s what The White Album is supposed to be; the Aughts Philadelphia dream of the early Aughts turned on its head. But sleaze and grease can be glamorous too. Right?

Feast or Famine

In 2024, I made, what was for PFS, a crucial decision. Something Solid to me seemed incomplete without at least a few pieces dedicated squarely to Abby Heller-Burnham. What was built into the manuscript, on that front, as of the beginning of the year, was weak and inadequate. So, in the spring of '24 I buckled down and produced two pieces, the double-sonnet Feast or Famine and the sonnet Portal-ways, which focused as intensely and intently on Ms. Heller-Burnham as they possibly could. As spring turned into summer, Feast or Famine appeared in The Seattle Star and on PennSound. Now, it could begin to be discussed that Abby, who is a reduced presence in Equations next to Mary Evelyn Harju, had begun to blossom in the world the same way Mary had. Even as the dynamic tension she creates, about Philadelphia, New York, and the East Coast in general, must remain controversial. The most controversial lines in Feast or Famine, which suggest that Abby, upon leaving Manhattan for Philadelphia, "was ready" for Philly, inverts a well-worn cultural cliche, and turns the cultural relief map of the East Coast on it head. This, I am proud to have done, as a long-overdue addition to the East Coast cultural economy. The sense is, I mean, that for anyone who wants to write or paint seriously, you may, indeed, find Philadelphia more germane than Manhattan, which is a cultural mecca, it might be argued, mostly for kids and dilettantes. Abby Heller-Burnham is a genius-level painter who deserved better than that; Philadelphia was happy to give it to her. 

Initial Receptions: P.F.S. Post, Waxing Hot

As of now, I'd like to think that P.F.S. Post has settled in as a stalwart presence in both American and continental experimental poetics. It has been archived by the British Library, and widely quoted. Strange, and cautionary, to remember that when P.F.S. Post appeared in 2005, it was greeted with enormous hostility. It may seem senseless now, but Philadelphia, as a hotbed of experimental work being done, took the measure of P.F.S. Post as too classicist and elitist (or "frozen") to be taken seriously; and a laser-sharp focus on London was OK for John Tranter and Jacket, but not for me. The APR/Poetry crowd took umbrage for much the same reasons. A case in point is this early Waxing Hot dialogue with Steve Halle from spring 2006. The English Romantics are not only taken seriously as active, dynamic reference points, they are placed at the head of the class, over the High Mods and those who followed them. That all the hostility seems senseless now points out and adumbrates something else even more important: the evolution of the United States from a Barnum & Bailey, circus-level cultural cul de sac into a mature nation. It is obvious, in 2023 in America, that celebrity culture (mentioned in Waxing Hot as fodder for post-modernism) doesn't sell that much anymore; nor does a centralized, uber-warping press corps. A more advanced United States means that more people keep their own consul and go their own way, express whatever divergent interests they have, against having their cultural economies dictated to them by destructive cultural juggernauts. But in the mid-Aughts, media interests, circus interests, still held sway, and that P.F.S. Post lionized Keats in a serious minded way, next to more usual Amer-Po fodder,  was anathematized. A taste of things to come: this Waxing Hot was re-published in UK print journal Tears in the Fence (#47) in 2008. As per our treatment of Keats: also, knowing it's not really fair to do this if Steve doesn't get to chime in again: twenty years on, indeterminacy/closure doesn't seem as important to me about Keats and as Keats-narrative, as form and formality. The big thing with Keats for me turned out to be the music. Melopoeia. Negative capability can't matter that much if the mysteries being unfolded/embodied have no philosophical heft. Peace.