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 It has been archived by the British Library, and widely quoted.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.

Equations, and Mary Evelyn Harju


Now that the work of prose fiction entitled Equations is available in its entirety on PennSound, in two parts: The Thesis Episodes and The Jade Episodes: some elucidation might be helpful, if the book is to be widely heard and read. One obvious question worth answering: is the book literal, or meant to be taken literally, i.e. was it written out of genuine, authentic relationship experiences? Yes, most of it was. The dialectic structure of the book, and other things about it, necessitates its designation as prose fiction; yet many of the characters who enliven the book were real people in my life. The most literal character in the book, by a considerable margin, is Trish Webber. Those who know me, know that Trish Webber is closely modeled on painter Mary Evelyn Harju, who could also be called simply Mary Harju or Mary H. in the Aughts. Mary's presence as Trish in the book lays down a gauntlet of how many representational perspectives I can employ to attempt to portray a very complex reality: who we were, together as a couple, and who we were individually as well. If Trish Webber emerges as the star presence in Equations, it is because I really did spend the most time with her, and because she was the occasion of my most profound experience both of falling in love, and of staying in love. I loved her. That having been said, some of the perspectives which develop around Trish are negative ones, too. For a relationship as intense as ours was, and we were very intensely involved indeed, this would seem to be inevitable. It is also worth saying that discerning readers of Equations will notice this; Trish, Mary, winds up looming over the text as something or someone ineluctable at the center. But it may be new data that the standing at the center quality Trish has in Equations was something real, authentic in my life. When I've done Mary in poetry, as in Otoliths 69, the instinct to compress, cut to the core is given more leg room. In both prose fiction and dialectics, the expansiveness of the text creates an effect of circumlocution which is difficult to avoid. Yet fiction, when done with skill, can represent a wider reality than poetry as well. Equations is not meant to be one long paean to Mary, but the composition of the book, as though it were a painting, brings her to life at the center by surrounding her with energy similar to hers, but not the same. She stands with, and against, others in the book. And to be noted that the center placement for her in Equations is deliberate, from my end, and earned as well. 

Ry Mullen: A Collage, and Queerness

To address this particular issue: queerness, in both the broad and the specific sense: nothing less than a card's on the table confession will do. I am a straight man. I am not queer, or bisexual. Yet the issue is relevant, because queerness in the humanities in this day and age is omnipresent. A straight male writer had better articulate just how he feels about gayness or queerness, and what he makes of the sorts of circumstances around individuals which they engender. So: when I write about queerness, it arises from a lifetime of observation, rather than direct participation in the queer world. An observer has the potentiality to be more objective than a participant, even if he cannot be as real, as felt, as someone who lives (and dances) on the razor's edge of the queer world, with its sense of being angled against the normative. All these issues manifest in Ry Mullen: A Collage, which I wrote at the end of 2019. The character Ry is based on two queer men who happened to be prominent in my life in the mid-Aughts: one African-American, one Caucasian. Both had a sense of in-built charisma around the idea of salesmanship, a social gift; yet both were forced to hide behind a salesman-like facade who they really were. The point of the collage is a definite one: the reader is asked to determine whether the game, as Ry chooses to play it, is really worth it, or if Ry is merely rationalizing that his life as a dealer in the world takes on deeper meaning and substance, as indicated in his more authentic writing. The collage form I was playing with in the late Teens has a resonance, of course, with T.S. Eliot and the Waste Land; only Ry is meant to take the harsh asperity of Eliot and warm it up, make it more personal. Also, to point out that the direct path towards human intimacy is one which the Mod crew often miss. These issues are pertinent, also, in Wittgenstein's Song, from the mid-Aughts, which takes the tack of poetic formality also to attempt a manifestation of intimacy, within queer consciousness. Ultimately, an outsider to the queer world is just that, and must remain so. I do not have the experience or the credentials to speak of the queer world with authority. The position of the straight male writer, however, is determined, if he is any good, by a sense that engagement with the queer world, attempting to make a contribution to it, is more or less mandatory in 2023. That's the sensibility behind what you see here.    
 

Creepy, Stately 2: No Man's Land


While various contingents in American poetry might or might not find both the sonnet, and formality itself, interesting, the sonnet remains common ground. Everybody knows sonnets, and no one is surprised to find them cropping up all over the place. In comparison, the unique form John Keats invented for his odes, vaunted though they are, is obscure, tangled, and difficult: the literary equivalent of no man's land. There they are: ten-line stanzas, boasting ABABCDECDE, and no ode less than thirty lines. The problem is, in the early Aughts I fell madly in love with this form, and compelled by the idea that I might employ it with some mastery myself. Even as I got the sense that minor poets might consider it a permanent vacation in no man's land. Early attempts, like On Love, which wound up in Hinge and in this 2003 reading (embedded) on PennSound, got caught on the double snag of Keats imitation and underdeveloped thematics. When I returned to make another attempt in the mid-Teens, I had better luck integrating the form into an impulse to confess which was part and parcel of my life then. The Exile Ode, written in 2015 and published on P.F.S. Post in 2017, achieves for me the goal of revivifying an obscure form with an original set of vignettes, impulses, and images. Keats' odes, especially Melancholy, famously fulfill themselves as odes oddly, and celebrate what usually is not celebrated. Exile takes that particular game one step further. It's a pretty picture that's not pretty. The no man's land form bleeds over into being a no man's land theme. And it is, to my way of thinking, the one time I manifested, in complete fashion, the Keats odal ideal, if there is a central ideal there. In 2021, I wandered over into toying with it again in this piece in Otoliths. It's a textual experiment which doesn't attempt to be representative. In 2022, I found a skeleton key to transmute odal equipment into building blocks for elegies, as well. I thus did the unique textual trick of wandering from a center or centralized sector of no man's land into even murkier wilderness. Yet that movement, from mystery into greater mystery, is supposed to be the heart and soul of Negative Capability, isn't it? One would hope.

Undulant, and further waves 2


Undulant has made its way from Monday Journal and PennSound to P.F.S. Post. It's probably the best sonnet I've ever written. Important to note, for those who may be interested, that when I wrote Undulant in 2017, I already had a published history with the sonnet form. When I started publishing seriously, as of the mid-to-late Aughts, and as part of a cabal of young American avant-gardists, few of the writers around me liked or pursued the idea of form, or formality, in the traditional sense. As an avant-gardist who was nonetheless steeped in Keats, Wordsworth, and the other major Romantics, I found the idea of translating traditional formality into terms the American avant-garde cognoscenti could understand an intriguing one. The solution, where the sonnet was concerned (and it should be noted that Karen Volkman and a few others had done analogous experiments), for me at least, was 2008's When You Bit. This 2007 page from Lars Palm's skicka blog, with poems from When You Bit..., presents some el primo textual specimens attendant on this syndrome: how does the American avant-garde plug into the history of the English language? How do Stein and Pound cohabitate, in a fourteen-line word-machine, with Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder? Can we, at least, move past Millay? Later, more recent experiments with the sonnet form developed, for me, into a sense that a twenty-eight line poem, what I call a double sonnet, might be an interesting way to take conventional sonneteering and up the blazoning ante. Thus Perfect, a double sonnet from the same manuscript as Undulant, appeared in Otoliths in 2022

Apparition Poem #1345


In late November 2009, I had a computer meltdown. The call was made to the Geek Squad, but they couldn't make it to Logan Square for several days. I was able, then, to use the TUCC (Temple University Center City) computer lab more or less whenever I wanted. It was in the TUCC computer lab, at about 6 or 7 pm of November 20-something, that I composed Apparition Poem #1345, which appeared in Jacket 40 and on the Poets on the Great Recession blog. Annoyance at being outed from writing at home was balanced with a sense of triumph; 1345 was a eureka moment for me. I was able to find suitable metaphors to express precisely what I wanted to express; to make a statement about power, politics, and bureaucracies which wasn't merely fist-waving or agit-prop self-aggrandizement. The core idea is simple: among the human race, power is abused because people simply won't listen to each other. Yet the ramifications of deaf-minded humanity, set on singular courses to create living conditions, to their tastes and their specifications, for masses of people, are enormously complex and ornate. And the issue is permanent.

Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1488...


There was one day, in the mid-spring of 2008, which for me has symbolic value, both as a talisman and a pivot-point. I have spoken in-depth, in other places, about the strangeness of 2008 as a year and a gestalt entity for me and my kith and kin; this was perhaps the strangest day of that year. Because the day's shenanigans involve a number of my compatriots at once, in different ways and in bizarre formations, the 2017 sonnet addressing the day's events (to be eventually included in the book Something Solid) is illustrative, and can be illuminating for those with an interest in our affairs and snafus. Yet, the heftiest residue left by the day, which was slightly chilly and overcast, as I recall, is hewn into Apparition Poem #1488, which appeared in Upstairs at Duroc (see attached jpeg) and The Seattle StarJulia has not been formally introduced into our Blogger universe yet, but she will be; and 1488 is both for and about my relationship with Julia. I found Julia haunting instantly, both because her assured sense of literature and books was stunning (she began as my student at Temple, in a Renaissance Lit survey course), and because she herself was a kind of walking Gothic mansion, not to mention fashionista (she worked at the South Moon Under boutique on Chestnut Street). Julia grew up in Cheltenham, as I did, and went to CHS, and graduated ten years after I did. I expected another marriage, and didn't get one. The severance package was nasty, too; yet Julia was deeply human, even when what was deeply human in her was hiding. If I remember correctly, 1488 was written in December '09; and, this time, most assuredly from Logan Square, at Flat #2. Julia did briefly colonize Flat #1. 

Where Feel is calling from...


I'd like to hope that I've established by now that the mid-Aughts in Philly were a wild and crazy time. The proverbial gloves came off, for many of us, and a Pandora's Box opened, letting loose all kinds of crazy energies. Those who watch me more or less know who the individuals were around me in the mid-Aughts. Yet, the decision to write an epic poem like Feel, which finally appeared in X-Peri and on PennSound in 2018, was an oddly practical one. I was working towards an M.F.A.; and for the length of a semester (spring 2005), I worked under Anne Waldman, a large Beat presence on the East Coast and in Colorado. I thought to amuse both myself and Anne by doing an Aughts palimpsest over Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Anne wasn't as amused as I thought she'd be. The central flaw of the poem; that, as those who heard the poem in Philly noted at the time, not all the individuals represented in the poem were artists, let alone "the greatest artists of their generation"; was excused (I hoped) by the notion that they were nonetheless renegades, mavericks, and misfits who bothered to blaze individual trails through the world, against the taint of homogeneity. Poetry buffs know: Ginsberg does even less to prove that his muses are "the greatest minds of their generation." Among other things I had going at the time, Feel more or less asked to be "back-pocketed" for a while. One last fun factoid: the longest, first, anaphoric section of the poem was written at The Bean Cafe on South Street in 2005 and 2006. So, the poem's strongest roots, as a work of art, are in South Philly: who woulda thunk, especially in 2022

Ode On Jazz


The Ode On Jazz was written in the autumn months of 2002, in a spirit of cosmic balance and harmony: things had settled into a comfortable groove with Mary H, and I was splitting my time between Logan Square and West Philadelphia. I was boning up, as I did periodically in those days, on the jazz of John Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the rest; and also in hot pursuit of John Keats and the English Romantics. The idea of an odal poem on this form of music, jazz, necessitated more looseness & a greater sense of improvisational freedom than Keats' wonted odal forms would allow. Once I had more or less finished the Jazz Ode, it began to follow me around, from Bob Perelman's Advanced Workshop at Penn, to another workshop with Joan Larkin in Henniker at NEC. More importantly, I got to perform the Jazz Ode at Live at the Writers House at the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus (4-05-04), and it was broadcast on Drexel's popular WXPN radio station (later to be placed on my PennSound author page). By 2006, it had receded slightly in my oeuvre, but Steve Halle published it, in honor of my first visit to Chicago, on his 7C site. In the Teens, the Ode On Jazz made a lively comeback, on a number of sound/mp3 repository sites; a chart hit on hearthis.at (#7), featured by The Esthetic Apostle on Soundcloud. On Soundclick, the WXPN version was a #5 Podcast; and the This Charming Lab version a #2. French DJ Falki Hoz used the WXPN version inventively on his techno track Hipsters (Scotch EP, 2017), which appeared as Ode On Jazz 3 (with Falki Hoz) on Soundclick again, and elsewhere. 

Posit (Posit, Posit, Posit)


The most direct influence on the composition of the chapbook Posit, released by Dusie Press in June 2007, was a graduate workshop I did at Temple University in the fall of '06. The workshop was nasty: a fracas and a half, in fact. Yet I got something concrete from it; the sense that the first person singular in poetry, the "I," was in perpetual need of interrogation and re-interrogation. The efficacy of language itself also stood in this line of fire. Nothing new, necessarily; Locke to Coleridge repeated these topoi, as did, among others, the Deconstructionists (being the most notable); yet offered to me as a compositional angle, I hadn't used it before. This, rather than placing myself naively into my own poems some of the time, as I was accustomed then to do. The poems in Posit were written towards the end of '06, into '07, just as Mary H. reemerged into my life. I talked to her about them while she painted my Ad-to-Abs portrait. Picked up by the Dusie Kollektiv, I got a useful tip from Sueyeun Juliette Lee about Linke Printing in Kensington, Philadelphia, and: voila! The first copies were mailed on June 9, 2007. As of 2013, I found myself bowed down by the rigors of suburbia and suburban life. Volo Coffeehouse in Manayunk, Philadelphia, was as good an escape route as any. It occurred to me, during one of my Volo sojourns, that the cycle initiated in Posit could be repeated, and fruitfully, the poems enabled to ricochet backwards and forwards. The second two thirds of what then came to be known as The Posit Trilogy were written mostly at Volo in Manayunk in '13. The master draft was completed later, and The Posit Trilogy, which included the second edition of Posit, was released as an Argotist Online e-book on Sepetmber 9, 2017. It was my first official book-length release since Cheltenham from Blazevox in 2012. Back at Volo in 2023, my re-visitation to the original 2007 Posit form was an act of non-vandalism about consolidating all the ways structure (even down to using Mondrian images as covers), however loopy, could be built into poetry, and resulted in Volo: A Chapbook, also from 2023, which doubles as Posit Part 4. 

Creepy, Stately: 2015 and the Ode On Exile


Even in a civilized country, the ten years following a major recession are always difficult. Resources can be scarce, and people can be scarce, too. As of the mid-Teens, I found myself in a version of Conshohocken which could only be described as ghostly. What I was seeing, on a day-to-day level, could be, in a way or manner not appropriate to be expressed here, unspeakably gross and carnal. Yet the architecture in Conshy, the buildings, effortlessly dominate the landscape, like Calvary Episcopal, which appears in the Exile Ode, and is here shown. The cumulative effect of all the recessional horror and desolation, co-mingling with the sublime buildings which dominate Fayette Street, Conshohocken's main thoroughfare, I perceived to be Gothic, and imposing. In the year 2015, I didn't write much new poetry; but to again assay the Keatsian odal form precisely, as I had done with On Love (and not the Ode On Jazz), seemed germane, between absorbing the buildings on one side and a sense of hollowed-out malevolence from other sources on the other. I happened to write the Ode On Exile in one sitting, on the afternoon of June 5; and this one didn't need much revision. If I perceived myself to be an exile in 2015, it was certainly from Logan Square and Philadelphia; as a suburb, Conshohocken is very distinctly itself, and nothing like Philadelphia at all. The mores are very much like a small town or a rural community, however close to Philly Conshy may be; and the community of buildings I could integrate my consciousness into, but not the people. The buildings had much to teach me; and the first lesson I learned is that the enchantment of buildings, and superior architecture, is a lynch-pin holding together all that is solid about human life. Sad that the ricochet to the populace didn't seem to work. And the Exile Ode is meant to swing between these two poles of awareness.

Ode On Jazz Part 2


More about 2002, the Ode On Jazz, Logan Square-West Philly, etc: I've never been that much of a clothes horse. I just wear whatever. At that time and for the entire duration of the early Aughts, Mary wasn't quite so casual about her attire. In fact, Mary often went for the outrageous, where clothes were concerned. She liked to shock, startle, and alarm people with what she wore. She said it made her feel more alive: if others were alarmed by her, she felt more of a sense of social empowerment. Mary's big shock-number in the early Aughts were clothes which were obviously African in origin, including head-wraps often seen on African women. Not uncommon to see African attire, head-wraps and all, in West Philadelphia, but uncommon to see them adorning a white woman. Mary looked as though she were emulating black chanteuse Erykah Badu, in fact. I was often slightly alarmed for her, but her piercing blue eyes and imposing height (slightly less than five eight) seemed to push people back. I never saw her get pestered. Abby was more casual than Mary, and her mind was often preoccupied by whatever she was painting, and whatever her different girl-posses were up to. When I wrote the Ode On Jazz, and later performed it, I had in mind this kind of landscape, an urban one, which could be inhabited by a sense of communing with the earth nonetheless. That's something Logan Square and West Philly have in common; a sense of harmonious balance, at their best, between earthiness and the ethereal, the skyline and the grass, trees, backyards. And the voyage back and forth could be made on foot, or by bus or trolley. None of us had access to cars, and we were all the richer for it. Even as Logan Square brought out something slightly more wild about Mary than West Philly did.

Adventures in Form & the Ode On Love


I learned very quickly, as soon as we started going out in 2001: Mary Harju is a complicated person. Different strains in her personality mix and match, or don't mix and match, with others. As has been said: Mary liked to dress provocatively. What she liked to read was a quirky tangent to that: she doted over Victorian novels, and doted on my attachment to the English Romantic poets as well, especially (and predictably) Lord Byron. Mary tended to think of free-verse poetry as lightweight, not very serious. The entire twentieth century landscape around English language poetry was largely a dead-end street for her, and she often said as much. As was fortuitous, as of '01/'02 I began to experiment with the most serious versions of poetic formality. The form I was most attracted to was that employed by John Keats in his odal cycle. For many months in early '02, six months before the Ode On Jazz, I attempted to employ the Keats odal form successfully. I often read, during those months, at a salon being held by Natalie Felix at the North Cafe on South Street in South Philly. Some of the formal experiments were half-assed, some weren't. The most successful experiment from that period by far was the Ode On Love, which was published by Marilyn Bess's Hinge Online, in 2003. The Ode On Love was written for Mary, because I wanted to write something for her that she could care about, that she would find moving. The crowd at the North Cafe were respectful but also wary; as was a crowd I read to at Borders on Walnut Street to back, for Alexandra Grilikhes, an issue of American Writing which came out in '02. The way the Ode On Love played at readings, the general sense was irresolution: not knowing what to think. I was irresolute, too; one reason that, by mixing in jazz in late '02, I found myself on more comfortable ground. Formal rigor is threatening, because so few people can achieve it the right way. It's extremely, uncompromisingly exclusive. Philly does not find this prohibitive. 

A Note on the Nineties

 


About the Nineties: specifically, about the Nineties section of Something Solid. Important for me to make even more explicit, what the book is attempting to explicate: the Nineties were a time of social revolution and turmoil. Many of the facets of media mythology and narratives often applied to the Sixties apply to the Nineties, too. I can’t fit everything into the book; one of the pieces left missing (implicit in Cheltenham) is that the wall dividing two neighboring, rival communities, Cheltenham and Abington, fell for a number of years, creating a raucous sense of controversy and unease in the two locales. I managed, through social connections, to remain on the crest of this wave for a number of years in the Nineties (esp. semester breaks, first in Gulph Mills, then back in Glenside). The Zeitgeist dictated that what was wrapped tight loosened, and the sense of euphoria and exuberance on Cheltenham-Abington nights, for those of us engaged, was marked. The euphoria of finding alternatives to the mainstream— socially, creatively, sexually, and every other way— was the up side to Nineties Zeitgeist energy.

Outlaw Playwrights, as it operated in State College in the Nineties, was similarly a maverick enterprise. The heat of it— a black box theater filled to capacity every Thursday night at 11:15 pm, for student, graduate student-penned work— was euphoric, for those who wanted to write for the theater, as I did. Outlaw Playwrights did, in fact, continue past the Nineties, but its el primo time to be radical, the right way, revolutionary, was the Nineties, when boundaries loosened and meant that the crest of the Outlaws wave meant real action.

The way Something Solid deals with my relationship to Jennifer Strawser starts from a premise related to these issues. The premise is what I’m explicating here— the revolutionary Nineties created an atmosphere or context in whish unlikely relationships (marriages or not) could be consummated, including ones which bothered to cross class boundaries. Jennifer’s home was a poor suburb of Harrisburg— Liverpool, Pa. Her family was settled in a trailer. I grew up amid comparative affluence (Abington, btw, is slightly less affluent than Cheltenham, but same general range). But we fell in love, and what happened, happened. A couple of Zeitgeist kiddies we were in State College (and Liverpool and Gulph Mills), acting out a scenario which certainly did engender controversy and unease, but which also innovated against the normative for PSU (and CHS) students. Emily, from Perfect, Lisa, Maria, and all the other townie girls were also up for the game of class-confounding.

The problem then arises, in writing Something Solid— how to express specifically these things, without sermonizing or engaging in sentimentality. The Nineties section of the book, like Equations before I imposed a dialectical structure on it overtly, is tricky to navigate, if a general sense of the Nineties Zeitgeist is not imposed on the book, and thus the book’s readers. This, I have no idea yet how to surmount. Letting histories, mythologies, and narratives arrange themselves around the Nineties through media influence, I cannot trust (the same way I tend not to trust accounts of the revolutionary Sixties). If there could be one poem which creates a mise en scene for the rest of the Nineties section, that might work. If not, a preface…again!

 

 

Undulant, and further waves...


I've already spilled a good amount of ink other places delineating the origins of the sonnet Undulant, from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, which has been a #3 podcast on Soundclick and is on PennSound, with other material from the book. The incidents narrated in the poem concern the first of two nights I spent with Hannah Miller in 2005, which happened to be June 16, 2005: Bloomsday, a big one in Philly. My Logan Square flat is in full view, and Bar Noir, the celebrated walk down on 18th Street in Center City. One thing hasn't been mentioned, but is extremely important in catching the correct note of mid-Aughts mayhem attendant: the second night with Hannah happened a week after, and the next day I left for an MFA residency in Henniker, New Hampshire, eighty miles outside Boston. The summer 2005 residency, wedged in right before Poetry Incarnation '05, was its own spectacularly wild ride. It was at this residency that Mary Walker Graham, who had graduated with her MFA in '04, came to visit, and what happened between us, happened. I was, as they say, a little loose, a little unhinged, and a lot of us were, both in New England and in Philadelphia, that summer. But the consummation of two major affairs, spaced that closely together, was sui generis for me, and my appearance in Jacket Magazine that spring opened doors for me I didn't anticipate. By the time I was back in Philly for Poetry Incarnation '05, I had felt the earth move in several different directions. Even if neither affair led to a solid marriage.  

The Painter


When The Painter, from Something Solid, went up on PennSound this June, it carried an insignia that some might consider curious. My interest in the occult dates back to my adolescence; my interest in Aleister Crowley, and his Book of the Law, began in the early Aughts. In the poem, Book of the Law acts as a totem or talisman, connecting me to my higher Self, and the possible manifestation of my True Will (potentialities the book adumbrates). At the time of the inception of my relationship with Mary H, this was a difficult and messy procedure. Book of the Law, Satanic reputation aside, helped. For a time, my occult preoccupation became formalized in the mid-Aughts: I joined the Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn. I'd already asked for, and received, access to their files earlier. Mary H witnessed me doing Bringing Down the Light, and other Golden Dawn rituals, many times, including blessings and incantations to her. The point of the E Sequence, from Something Solid, which includes The Painter, is that, through a manifestation of collective True Will (doing our Will), many of us in Aughts Philadelphia were able to achieve a sense of oneness with the cosmos, or universe. On a profound level, we were there, in Philly, to manifest divine energies and co-mingle in divine ways. The reward we were giving for following through Higher Law was a shielded, deep-set sense of being at home, both in our own skins and in our own lives.    

Wittgenstein's Song


Heady for me to remember: amidst all the tumult of the mid-Aughts, I had a few moments where everything cohered in my brain, and I could create something intellectually representative, against prevailing winds more about sense and sensuality, rather than sensibility. Like many not trained in the rigors of formal logic, I only half-understood Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Yet, I found the portion I understood not only interesting but moving, on a psycho-affective level; something that integrated itself in my consciousness in a well-rounded way. So, sitting outside at the Last Drop on the corner of 13th and Pine, on a warm April day in 2005, I composed the first draft of Wittgenstein's Song. The juxtaposition of Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism with a lyrical impulse, I knew would be construed as strange. Yet, if I felt drawn towards the idea of doing Wittgenstein persona-style that way, it was because the strangeness of the juxtaposition would (I hoped) jounce people into an awareness that Logical Positivism could be seen to have a psycho-affective element, just as Deconstruction (arguably) does. The first draft I scrawled on that April day at the Last Drop was put into my bag, as I left, strolled down 13th Street, into South Philly, towards Gaetan Spurgin's studio, to take care of some Free School biz. The poem was debuted at an NEC workshop that summer, tumult aside, with Carol Frost; and stands as an ensign, at least for myself, that the conjunction in verse of art and philosophy can be, at its best, a viable and vital reality, as it also demonstrates a version of the mid-Aughts in Philadelphia more serious than just showmanship, visible elsewhere too. It is arguable that the poem could be considered presumptuous, in that I am daring to put words in Wittgenstein's mouth. Yet, without denying this, I would also argue that the poem adds to the repertoire of what has happened or accrued to Wittgenstein as an entity in the world, as well. Those who know the poem can judge these things for themselves. Also worth knowing that Wittgenstein's Song is on PennSound twice, front-loaded here too. 

Apparition Poem #555


I never really got out of Mary Evelyn Harju why it was that, in 2003, she expressed a desire to spend some time in Montreal, Quebec. There were museums she wanted to see— the city was famous for its elegance, like Paris— but I always felt she was pulling punches, and something else surreptitious was going on beneath the surface. We went there and back by train that summer. Our digs, during our stay, were modest— a small room on the top floor of an inconspicuous building on Saint Catharine Street. The way I thought it would go, we'd bum around cafes, meet other artists. Mary didn't see it that way—without me noticing, she'd learned Montreal's transit system thoroughly, and when we got there, showed every intention of taking the city by storm. As was not usually our convention, I let her lead me around.

As Apparition Poem #555 demonstrates, all was not well with Mary H. during our Montreal adventure. The now-famous portrait of Mary on Saint Catharine Street is a ravishing one. Yet, it doesn't allow viewers to see how modest our room was. The night in question, Mary couldn't handle that we'd been on the Plateau, and not found a suitable place, club or bar, for her to dance in. By the time we saw the fight transpire in a pub right across from where we were staying, Mary was overcharged and had a minor fit of catatonia (I shuffled the order of the night's events for the poem's sake). I did a Golden Dawn cleansing ritual and it seemed to work, but being alone with her in a foreign country scared the Be-Jesus out of me. She remained intermittently on edge for the rest of the time we spent in Montreal.

The original draft of #555 I called Dancing in Montreal. I debuted it at NEC in the mid-Aughts, in a workshop with Paula McLain. The last line, as I had it, ran "dozed & woke ready for more dancing—" Paula suggested that I drop "dancing" and conclude the poem "dozed & woke ready for more—" I took her suggestion. #555 is front-loaded the right way on PennSound, and is included in the original 2010 edition of Apparition Poems. In the end, I take as a cathartic attempt to deal with the unstable side of Mary H. That instability was where and how she got her art— no doubt— but those who lived with and loved her had crosses to bear. The Montreal portrait is chiaroscuro; so was she. 

Something Solid: Apologia: 2022-2023

Something Solid, unlike Apparition Poems, is a book which knows its place. The God-forsaken quality of the poems strung in numbers is replaced by a sense of consolidation with the core values which render poetry useful for most literary landscapes— incidents and situations chosen for interrogation, involving the poet in memory, sensuality, and the formality of the traditional sonnet (and newfangled double sonnet, twenty-eight lines); a downward curve, as it were, into these topos, rather than an upward curve into serious philosophical discourse. What would make the book more than a curiosity (or, perhaps, anti-curiosity) to such discourse, is a Barthes-ian acknowledgement of a basic literary principle which philosophy finds distasteful, but which nonetheless has and will always dictate individual literary economies— we tend to read and re-read what we find pleasurable to read and re-read. The pleasure principle inhering in texts and textuality may dictate that Something Solid, despite its not being angled in a strictly original way, will be read and re-read with more pleasure and avidity than Apparition Poems, which most, including discursive types, may choose to respect from a distance. The version of poetic memory explored here has as its ensign an engagement with two periods in time, one place specific— the Nineties, and Aughts Philadelphia. Built into the book’s willfully conventional dynamic, is the imposition, on these periods, of an aura of romantic chaos, of the possibility of the poet’s consciousness, in medias res in the appointed zeitgeists, conflating internal with external vicissitudes, so that the book resonates as both completely personal and ripe for universalization. The poet stands within the text and its dramas, a self-conscious synecdoche.

Where sensuality is taken in the text is to a locale configured to purify and transcendentalize its manifestation into an emergence of imaginative, dramatic reality. Bodies are not seen as real but hyperreal; the carnal acts as a portal into its own effacement, into the larger existence of Eros as an idea and ideal to mystify the objective, express the effacement also of objectivity into immediacy, drama, and the aesthetic establishing its own, rightful claim on aestheticized language, in as ideal form as the text will allow. Imagination in the text establishes its own body— possibilities glimpsed, starting from sense. Undulant, an early standout from the text, performs this task— layering sensual and imaginative data, the tactile over and under the imaginative, so as to solidify, both pleasure in the text for capable readers, immersion in time-zone or zeitgeist awareness, and formal innovation for what peregrinations can be compressed into fourteen lines. This ambitious task subsists past the manner of Keats and Wordsworth, in their respective sonnets, into a Neo-Romanticism of all these conflated elements, coalescing in simultaneity. Not philosophy, but not simple either. The grounded quality of the text, against Apparition Poems, answers perversion with exuberance, a haunted house with an eternal salon.

The sonnet, as a poetic form, is traditionally an enemy of philosophy. Brevity and compression of data are both adversarial to the development of discourse and discursive contexts. Why the sonnet here was chosen and set into dynamic motion was to undo preconceptions regarding what the sonnet’s possibilities are, in practice, if hinged to an imaginative premise. For the book, the poet invented a form— what he calls a double sonnet— one sonnet atop another, as a twenty-eight line poem, rather than a fourteen line poem. Almost half the poems in Something Solid are double sonnets. The expectation horizon of twenty-eight lines is, or can be construed to be, radically dissimilar to the original mere fourteen. In twenty-eight lines, the little song, angled against intellectual expansiveness, takes on a new stripe as a vessel or vehicle more pliant, more nimble, more about widening parameters so that memory, sensuality, and drama, have a stage to perform, do their tricks on, both adequately lit and adequately built to support their weight. Yet, the precision of the form— twenty-eight lines— renders some compression necessary, so that the traditional sonnet geist of willing confinement, enforced brevity, and the phenomenological tension which ensues, for both poet and reader, still stakes a claim and imposes that poetry remains poetry.

For Something Solid to transcend the merely tautological— poetry being poetry, long-established tropes within poetry digging in their respective heels to reestablish their subsistence— the combination of elements which inhere in the text must gather themselves together and travel, as if thrown with substantial velocity, to a unique gestalt locale. The locale, as a congeries of all its component parts, is crystallized, in miniaturized form, in Undulant— the charm, sense of transgression or danger thwarted or neutralized, and frisson built into a life, unconventional amidst all the conventionality, consecrated against bourgeois pursuits. The poet is not domesticated. Rather, in his travels, the pursuit is for the richness of flight, and the phenomenology of flight, travel, as an end in itself. The poet, as an arrow flying through spaces at any moment enchanted or damned, is in love with the very principle of dynamism perpetuating itself. What gravitas is expressed, what objectivity is reached for, has to do with an understanding reached, through the composition of the book, what human life can offer to this form of consciousness, which craves a mien of the unsettled. Here’s how motion or dynamism is achieved, here’s how pieces may fall around it. The rogue poet is no one new, to be sure. This rogue poet is not attempting to be new. What he wants is a new kind of textual voyage, for himself, to mirror and ricochet against his fleshly voyages.

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Something Solid, contrairement à Apparition Poems, est un livre qui connaît sa place. La qualité abandonnée de Dieu des poèmes enchaînés en nombres est remplacée par un sentiment de consolidation avec les valeurs fondamentales qui rendent la poésie utile pour la plupart des paysages littéraires - incidents et situations choisis pour l'interrogation, impliquant le poète dans la mémoire, la sensualité et la formalité de le sonnet traditionnel (et sonnet double dernier cri, vingt-huit vers) ; une courbe descendante, pour ainsi dire, dans ces topos , plutôt qu'une courbe ascendante dans un discours philosophique sérieux. Ce qui ferait du livre plus qu'une curiosité (ou, peut-être, une anti-curiosité) pour un tel discours, c'est une reconnaissance Barthésienne d' un principe littéraire de base que la philosophie trouve déplaisant, mais qui a néanmoins dicté et dictera toujours les économies littéraires individuelles - nous avons tendance à lire et relire ce que nous trouvons agréable à lire et à relire. Le principe de plaisir inhérent aux textes et à la textualité peut dicter que Something Solid, bien qu'il ne soit pas orienté de manière strictement originale, sera lu et relu avec plus de plaisir et d'avidité que Apparition Poems, que la plupart, y compris les types discursifs, peuvent choisir. à respecter de loin. La version de la mémoire poétique explorée ici a pour enseigne un engagement avec deux périodes dans le temps, un lieu spécifique - les années 90 et Aughts Philadelphia. L'imposition, à ces périodes, d'une aura de chaos romantique, de la possibilité de la conscience du poète, in medias res dans les zeitgeists désignés, confondant les vicissitudes internes avec les vicissitudes externes, est intégrée à la dynamique volontairement conventionnelle du livre, de sorte que le livre résonne à la fois tout à fait personnel et mûr pour l'universalisation. Le poète se tient dans le texte et ses drames, une synecdoque consciente.

Là où la sensualité est prise dans le texte, c'est vers un lieu configuré pour purifier et transcendantaliser sa manifestation en une émergence de réalité imaginative et dramatique. Les corps ne sont pas perçus comme réels mais hyperréels ; le charnel agit comme un portail vers son propre effacement, vers l'existence plus large d'Eros en tant qu'idée et idéal pour mystifier l'objectif, exprimer également l'effacement de l'objectivité dans l'immédiateté, le drame et l'esthétique établissant sa propre revendication légitime sur le langage esthétisé , sous une forme aussi idéale que le texte le permet. L'imagination dans le texte établit son propre corps - possibilités entrevus, à partir du sens. Ondulant, une des premières vedettes du texte, accomplit cette tâche - superposer des données sensuelles et imaginatives, le tactile sur et sous l'imaginatif, de manière à solidifier, à la fois le plaisir du texte pour les lecteurs capables, l'immersion dans le fuseau horaire ou la conscience de l'air du temps, et l'innovation formelle pour quelles pérégrinations peuvent être compressées en quatorze lignes. Cette tâche ambitieuse subsiste au-delà de la manière de Keats et Wordsworth, dans leurs sonnets respectifs, dans un néo-romantisme de tous ces éléments confondus, fusionnés dans la simultanéité. Pas de philosophie, mais pas simple non plus. La qualité terre-à-terre du texte, contre Apparition Poems, répond à la perversion par l'exubérance, une maison hantée au salon éternel.

Le sonnet, en tant que forme poétique, est traditionnellement un ennemi de la philosophie. La brièveté et la compression des données sont toutes deux contraires au développement du discours et des contextes discursifs. La raison pour laquelle le sonnet ici a été choisi et mis en mouvement dynamique était de défaire les idées préconçues concernant les possibilités du sonnet, dans la pratique, s'il dépendait d'une prémisse imaginative. Pour le livre, le poète a inventé une forme - ce qu'il appelle un double sonnet - un sonnet au-dessus de l'autre, comme un poème de vingt-huit vers , plutôt qu'un poème de quatorze vers. Près de la moitié des poèmes de Something Solid sont des sonnets doubles. L'horizon d'attente de vingt-huit lignes est, ou peut être interprété comme étant, radicalement différent des simples quatorze d'origine. En vingt-huit vers, la petite chanson , tournée vers l'expansivité intellectuelle, prend une nouvelle allure de vaisseau ou de véhicule plus souple, plus agile , davantage sur des paramètres élargis pour que la mémoire, la sensualité et le drame, aient une scène à jouer, faire leurs tours, à la fois suffisamment éclairés et suffisamment construits pour supporter leur poids. Pourtant, la précision de la forme— vingt-huit lignes - rend nécessaire une certaine compression, de sorte que le geist sonnet traditionnel de l'enfermement volontaire, de la brièveté forcée et de la tension phénoménologique qui s'ensuit, à la fois pour le poète et le lecteur, revendique toujours et impose que la poésie reste poésie.

Pour que Quelque Chose de Solide transcende la simple tautologie - la poésie étant la poésie, les tropes établis de longue date dans la poésie creusant leurs talons respectifs pour rétablir leur subsistance - la combinaison d'éléments qui sont inhérents au texte doit se rassembler et voyager, comme jetée avec une force substantielle. vélocité, à une gestalt locale unique. Le lieu, en tant que congries de toutes ses composantes, est cristallisé, sous une forme miniaturisée, dans Ondulant - le charme, le sens de la transgression ou du danger contrecarré ou neutralisé, et le frisson construit dans une vie, non conventionnelle au milieu de toutes les conventions, consacrée contre les bourgeois. poursuites. Le poète n'est pas domestiqué. Au contraire, dans ses voyages, la poursuite est pour la richesse du vol, et la phénoménologie du vol, le voyage, comme une fin en soi . Le poète, comme une flèche volant à travers des espaces à tout moment enchantés ou damnés , est amoureux du principe même du dynamisme qui se perpétue. Quelle gravitas est exprimée, quelle objectivité est atteinte, a à voir avec une compréhension atteinte, à travers la composition du livre, ce que la vie humaine peut offrir à cette forme de conscience, qui aspire à un mien de l'instable. Voici comment le mouvement ou le dynamisme est obtenu, voici comment les pièces peuvent tomber autour. Le poète voyou n'est pas nouveau, bien sûr. Ce poète voyou n'essaie pas d'être nouveau. Ce qu'il veut, c'est un nouveau type de voyage textuel, pour lui-même, en miroir et en ricochet contre ses voyages charnels.

Adam Fieled 2022-2023

 

 

Introduction: Quiddités

 

Ezra Pound a fait remarquer que lorsque la poésie s'éloigne trop de la musique, elle cesse d'être de la poésie. Je voudrais affirmer, comme une pensée tangente à la sienne, que lorsque les arts supérieurs s'éloignent trop de la philosophie, ils cessent d'être les arts supérieurs. La philosophie, non moins que la littérature, est une suite de récits ; et que la littérature haut de gamme et intellectuellement ambitieuse devrait virevolter et se tordre de manière significative autour des dilemmes et des discours philosophiques est quelque chose que la poésie de langue anglaise a oublié au cours du dernier demi-siècle (et je veux dire la philosophie "pure", telle qu'elle se différencie de la théorie littéraire ou de l'esthétique ). Le processus de nivellement par lequel aucune distinction entre le haut et le bas art n'est faite, comme condition préalable à la prépondérance de la post-modernité, a effacé l'intérêt pour les «questions fondamentales» au profit d'ironies étroites et nihilistes et de critiques culturelles corrosives mais intellectuellement superficielles. Mais que, sans reprendre le romantisme, la poésie de langue anglaise puisse retrouver l'intérêt pour la philosophie pure et les questions cruciales de l'existence humaine, c'est l'hypothèse que font ces poèmes. En tant que tels, ils sont orientés contre tout dans l'œuvre de langue anglaise après les Quatre Quatuors de TS Eliot, y compris l'éventail de poétiques déconstructives et non narratives, qui confondent les fonctions respectives (bien que pas complètement antithétiques) de la philosophie et de la poésie d'une manière excessive et dégradante. aliénation de l'esthétique.

 

En quoi mon approche diffère de celle d'Eliot : plutôt que de comprimer les données sensorielles pertinentes à son enquête dans des formes succinctes, il préfère peindre sur une toile large. Les pointes aiguës de sa pièce, souvent exprimées en axiomes et aphorismes, souffrent d'un sentiment dissipé d'être trop généralisé; un chiasme intermittent avec le tactile est représenté, mais l'accent est trop souvent perdu dans des digressions et des méandres imprécisément motivés. Beaucoup d'axiomes d'Eliot sont, en fait, des citations (de, entre autres, Héraclite et St. Johnde la Croix) ; et son allusivité moderniste réduit à néant la pierre philosophale potentielle de la cognition originale pour lui. Les poèmes de Quiddities sont compressés et formés à la manière des Odes de John Keats ; non pas, bien sûr, que les poèmes soient des odes, juste qu'ils soient destinés à transmettre le mystère dans la brièveté; et un sentiment, même imprégné de désillusion et de désespoir, d'enchantement. Pour l'enchantement dans le mystère intellectuel, en ce qui concerne les vers de langue anglaise, peu de poèmes mais ces poèmes d'apparition après les romantiques anglais suffiront. Le modernisme et le post-modernisme ont présenté de nombreux raccourcis vers un sens de la cognition engagée ; mais le plein enchantement des profondeurs et des mystères de l'esprit humain et de ses pouvoirs de perception et de discernement n'était ni perçu ni représenté. Les pulsions qui auraient pu conduire à ces représentations étaient jugées trop sérieuses, dans un milieu et un contexte qui valorisaient l'ironie, et la méfiance à l'égard de toute forme de profondeur, surtout de profondeur cognitivo-affective entretenue subjectivement, avec ou contre des pulsions pouvant être qualifiées de romantiques.

 

Si Quiddites n'est pas simplement une reprise d'impulsions romantiques, c'est parce que les mystères que les poèmes entourent et referment ne sont pas réconfortants. La conception de Wordsworth de l'enchantement intellectuel est positiviste ; il suit un parcours pédagogique pour nous apprendre, avec un système discret, didactique et circonscrit, à penser. C'est la colonne vertébrale thématique du Prélude, son chef-d'œuvre. L'homme intellectuel, nous dit-il, peut toujours se rabattre sur la nature ; et la nature a la capacité de reconstituer sans cesse l'homme intellectuel. Les autres grands romantiques proposent des versions plus naïves de la même prémisse réconfortante par intermittence ; même si Byron et Keats ont également des moyens de créer des niveaux d'obscurité envahissante permanente dans leurs visions. L'enchantement intellectuel dans Quiddities se termine en lui-même ; les poèmes n'offrent aucun système comme antidote transcendantal, et rien ne se reconstitue sans fin dans les poèmes, sauf le montage sans fin de la pensée (pensées sur plus de pensées). L'enchantement offert par Quiddities est étrange et (de manière contradictoire) amer ; la cognition n'a d'autre recours que de se reproduire à l'infini, dans un paysage sensoriel aussi maudit et dystopique que les poèmes eux-mêmes. Pour revenir à Eliot à nouveau, en ce qui concerne Quiddities; c'est la cognition sur le (ou un) terrain vague. Mais que l'intellect humain puisse et doive développer son propre type de narcissisme, au-dessus du narcissisme dictatorial des sens, en particulier chez America, est présupposé. L'esprit humain est le seul endroit enchanté avec une véritable permanence pour l'humanité ; c'est là la supposition clé et primordiale.