North Philadelphia

Connoisseurs of urban areas and urban life know: dilapidation, in urban contexts, has its own kind of glamour and ambiance. There is a richness and a decadent glamour to dilapidated neighborhoods simply from the sense of solid time, decades and even centuries, passing through them, hollowing things out towards a kind of perfection; especially if the architecture is interesting. North Philadelphia is mostly ghettos, mostly dilapidation: but the nicer bits of North Philly are so potent with ambiance that, for Philly Free School, North Philly would always be interesting. Part of the PFS vibe was a certain kind of laissez faire around where we would go in Philly, which was anywhere, at any time. We were not hemmed in by fear; Aughts Philly was not a fearful epoch. So that, when my friends Radio Eris set up shop at 52nd and Cedar in the mid-Aughts, smack in the middle of a North-West Philly ghetto, and called their shared, co-op abode The Eris Temple, it became natural for my routes to begin to include The Temple and its environs. The Eris Temple is where the two Apparition Poems videos were shot; and the site of endless readings, performances, and adventures. It’s not like the violent undercurrents of that particular ‘hood were invisible to us; but we moved within the charmed circle of a germane time which subsisted for flaneurs, art-heads, and misfits. I also have to say that the glamorous dilapidation of North Philly (and West Philadelphia, too) supersedes the closest NYC analogue, which is Brooklyn, most of which is hideously ugly, sans the elegant architecture which distinguishes almost all of Philly, for all time, from other cities. This poem from The Posit Trilogy, “Tranny Dream,” catches the sense I have that, as the Aughts wore into the Teens, impending doom in the form of a Sword of Damocles hung over all of our heads here, even as I did not manage to write/publish this until 2013:

I find myself in bed with a woman
with a man’s crotch, & find this
unacceptable, & so excuse myself
into an autumn evening in North
Philadelphia, looking for a train
station, finding more nudie bars.
I get trapped in an enclosed space
with a stripper, done with her work
for the night, who counsels me
against taking the train home, that
I can sleep with her backstage at
her bar. I push past, into the night
again, & am assailed on all sides.

The first person orientation of the poem aligns it with, not only the original Posit, but Opera Bufa; what is even more important, on a narrative-thematic level, is the association with autumn, and its harbinger of winter, which amounts to a confrontation with mortality. As in, the way North Philly subsists in 2014, even for all its ambiance (which includes also, a sense of the spectral or apparitional), has become unmanageable for those of us who remember the frisson of being there pre-Great Recession. I wrote the poem from a dream, and from the ‘burbs; pining, as does happen, for a precious era which is now past. I will always be haunted by what Philadelphia was both for me, and for all of my friends and lovers in the Aughts, and by the sense that we managed to capture, from Philly, another, higher world out of the ambiance and architecture here. The second poem I would like to share is more nose on the face about the sort of goings-on which transpired at The Eris Temple in the Aughts, is a sonnet, and bears the simple moniker “Eris Temple”:

That night I got raped by a brunette
chanteuse, I lay on the linoleum floor
of the front room sans blanket, & thought

I could hack it among the raw subalterns
of the Eris Temple, who could never
include me in their ranks, owing to my

posh education; outside, on Cedar Street,
October gave a last breath of heat before
the homeless had to hit rock bottom again, &

as Natalie lay next to me I calculated
my chances of surviving at the dive bar
directly across from the Temple for the

length of a Jack & Coke, North Philly
concrete mixed into it like so many notes—

There was once a raucous charm even to the violent undercurrents which create North Philly’s ambiance, and the “concrete” of man’s desire to kill, maim, and dismember man, was never far from my thoughts while I patronized the Temple. Speaking of Temples, Temple University, where I held the University Fellowship from 2006 to 2011, is a North Philadelphia establishment, and is every bit as garishly lurid as the Temple is. What you can see from Anderson Building, where the English Department is located, is quite frightening in its stark attraction-repulsion circuit. To be on campus all day was to be challenged, by a blasted landscape, to find charm in a fracas, and to embrace a kind of alienation built into what Temple had to offer on ocular levels. Why it should be that this dynamic, attraction-repulsion, is so important to an appreciation of the ambient ghettos of North Philly, is that it takes a certain kind of sensibility to be magnetized by sites that are simultaneously attractive and repulsive; and the Neo-Romantics, especially the painting branch of PFS, were all heads for this kind of contradictory approach to the city we lived in, and loved.

Apparition Poems: Architecture: Philadelphia

One reason Apparition Poems got its title is that, between the spatial dimensions of different sectors of Philadelphia and its ornate architectural elegance, one gets the sense of ghosts, specters, and apparitions here, hanging in the air in a way that some find intoxicating, some do not. As I said about Temple University and the Eris Temple, those who find an interest in attraction/repulsion circuits (things, ocular vistas or otherwise, which attract and repel at the same time) will have much to ponder as they walk Philadelphia streets. Attraction/repulsion also leads, circuitously, to thoughts of salvation and damnation; and who the saved and who the damned are is another pertinent Neo-Romantic subtext. If Philly has an interesting relationship (also) to philosophy, it is because the relationship of our architectural constructs to the sky, the heavens, and to a widely disparate scene on the ground, lends a sense of transcendentalism to the city, and to attempts to forge higher worlds, aesthetic and otherwise, from it. This is all leading to this Apparition Poem:

There are gusty showers
in Philadelphia, showers
that beat up empty lots,

down in sooty Kensington,
you could almost believe
what the books say about

being-in-the-world, I mean
being in a damned world, it
really does seem that day

on greasy days in Philadelphia.

The circular nature of the poem around Philadelphia-as-topos gives it an air of being self-enclosed, self-completed, a whole, round circuit. The circle involves time, temporality, which has as one of its more graceful manifestations the temporal circle, where (in whatever context) you finish where you started. One of the grand subtexts of Philadelphia— architecture versus time/the temporal and space, is mirrored here, as the scaffolding of the poem creates a square around the circle of the poem’s temporal conceit. The “gusty showers” and “greasy days” of North Philadelphia depend, if we posit some aesthetic satisfaction in them, on a broadening of viewpoints towards a recognition that surfaces belie interiors, and what looks damned might actually be saved, and vice versa. This is Baudelairian territory— salvation and damnation are not up the alley of the English Romantics that much— and the Philadelphian Prowler may well be more, in his/her Noir orientation, simpatico with the Symbolists then with those consonant with the replenishing powers of trees, birds, and flowers. To be forced into a kind of Purgatory, against century XX, by architecture— such is the fate (through Philly Free School and otherwise) of Philadelphia in 2014.

Notes: 261 and Nightingale

I am continuing develop connective tissue, in a critical context/framework, between Keats’ Odes and the Cheltenham Elegies. Taking “Nightingale” and 261 (“Never one to cut corners…”), and a shared visionary sequence between the two poems— Keats in his poem, through the process of composition (Poesy, and its “viewless” wings), is able to extend the reach of his vision into the dark woods to co-mingle/commiserate with his synecdoche; just as the protagonist of 261, on the viewless wings of Poesy again, is able to “pull a rough U-turn” (“Here’s where the fun starts…”) on Old York Road at midnight, and thus join the ambiguous hero/anti-hero of the poem. This, doubled between the two poems, enacts a transmigration process which is an outlet and a subtext of the visionary, and temporally freezes the sense that what the nightingale/ “rogue driver” of 261 signify— night, death, physical mortality, but also an inverse (perverse) owning of dark freedom and power— is matched by a negatively capable textual engagement.

Never one to cut corners about cutting
corners, you spun the Subaru into a rough
U-turn right in the middle of Old York Road
at midnight, scaring the shit out of this self-
declared “artist.” The issue, as ever, was
nothing particular to celebrate. We could
only connect nothing with nothing in our
private suburban waste land. Here’s where
the fun starts— I got out, motherfucker.
I made it. I say “I,” and it works. But Old
York Road at midnight is still what it is.
I still have to live there the same way you do.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Here is an interesting discrepancy: the “I” in 261 (important, also, to note that the rogue driver’s U-turn being made in the poem may be turning back to Cheltenham) manages to turn the proverbial tables on his companion (rhetorically/textually) twice (“But Old York Road at midnight…”), thus re-living the U-turn twice, rather than Keats’ singular journey into the dark woods. Keats does not begin to develop any kind of bravado against his Muse; conversely, the two textual U-turns in 261 demonstrate first, an ostensible escape from Cheltenham (which amounts to an assertion of personal or individual, artistic success), and then a renascence to a position that what Cheltenham and Old York Road signify are omnipresent in the human continuum; and both express bravado in both individualism and intellectual mastery. So does Keats enter the sensuous, shadowy paradise of the woods and then sink downwards, first into being grounded, then (as an extension) into Lethe-consonant (forgetful) despondency; and these are two textual journeys of visionary identification and self-transcendence. The possible inversion, in which Keats’ Ode, through its ultimate sense of lost, demeaned, defeated yet sensually self-aware consciousness, against textual flights or “Fancies,” constitutes a kind of elegy, while the Cheltenham Elegy, through its ultimate air of sangfroid and mastery (empowerment over harsh circumstances) demonstrates, if not exactly odal joy, certainly a sense of a kind of textual tour de force being enacted in a compressed space, an ambiance of the explosive, which is not in Keats. The nightingale and 261’s rogue driver (Chris) are both phantoms, essentially: rhetorically addressed, evanescent. The negatively capable identification process occurs once in the present (Keats, appropriate for an ode) and once in a visioned/visionary past (261, appropriate for an elegy)— and it is merely textual, unperceived, unappreciated by one inhuman Other (the nightingale) and one human Other (Chris). The ultimate destination, why the identification process is enacted, is for the imagined, individual reader-as-third party.

Apparition Poem 1342: Jenny Kanzler

I met the painter Jenny Kanzler in 2008. I was sitting in the Last Drop one weekend afternoon in April or May, and she approached me and introduced herself. She was very pretty in a cherubic way, not unlike Abby Heller-Burnham. Over the course of 2008, we had coffee many times. I wouldn’t call these tete-a-tetes dates— Jenny was otherwise engaged— but we got to know each other with some thoroughness. Jenny, both in her paintings and in her life, had a fascination with “the stunted,” in general terms— stunted people, stunted situations, even stunted animals (she found tarantulas exquisite, for example). She also had a fetish for violence and gore— the films she liked were violent, and the art. Jenny had been at PAFA along with Abby and Mary, but she usually declined to discuss them. I got the distinct impression that they were not among her favorite people there. Mary’s “The Fall” was showing at PAFA precisely when I met Jenny Kanzler, and she gave it a mixed review. There was some sexual tension in the air between myself and Ms. Kanzler, but she made clear that she was mostly a Platonic soul. Abby and Mary were floridly liberated, eroticized, and romantic in comparison, despite Jenny’s attractiveness. Yet, Jenny did have a singular mind and a singular vision, and she made a strong impression on me. It seemed to me that the substitution, in Jenny’s art, of violence for love and sex was a deliberate one, but (this was my own prejudice) not necessarily a healthy one. Jenny’s penchant for violent, rather than sexual, smut, was what inspired Apparition Poem 1342, along with the sense, mistaken or not, that Jenny was sublimating so that the part of her psyche which wanted her to remain a stunted little girl would stay untouched, unchallenged, and inviolable:

What’s in what eyes?
What I see in hers is
mixed greenish silence,
somewhat garish, it’s
past girlish (not much),
but I can’t touch her
flesh (set to self-destruct),
anymore than she can
understand the book
her cunt is, that no one
reads directly, or speaks
of, there’s no love other
than “could be,” but I
think of her throat cut—
that’s her slice of smut.

The phenomenological import of the poem is a torque of Elegy 414— I privilege myself to do a “break-in” into Jenny’s brain, and have a look around. The problem with phenomenological break-ins is that it is difficult to ascertain whether what you are seeing is real, is really someone else’s brain, or if what you find is just a projection of your own fantasies. It could be that Jenny’s “slice of smut” is more involved in real emotion and intellection, not just a product of stunted adolescence, but there was no way for me to tell, as I was writing, whether this was the case or not. In fact, I believe the break-in in 1342 is brash enough, pompous enough, even, as a male narrator violating a woman, that this Apps Protagonist seems like more than half a pig. If he is correct in his assumptions, however, his piggishness has still won him entrance into a woman who has denied him conventional entrance. It is worth noting that I didn’t fight Jenny this way— no passes were made, nor did I have the experience of falling in love with her— but the bullying energy to understand her made for some strange, loopy mind games between us, and our “gaming” against each other on cognitive levels lasted a few years. To broaden the context— by 2008, the Recession era was starting to sink in, and much of the grandeur of Aughts Philly, the romance and the freedom, were beginning to fade. For Jenny Kanzler to enter my life at the time she did, and for us to become sparring partners rather than lovers, was a sign of the times for me. It’s also perfect for me that by 2008, a painter I was conversing with preferred violence, gore, and the stunted to sexualized expressiveness; where all of America was headed was into a meat-grinder of violence, moral/ethical bankruptcy, and generally entropic conditions, and those of us who wanted the Aughts, which facilitated art around sex and romance, to go on forever, were to be bitterly disappointed.

John Keats: Ode On Melancholy: 1820

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
   Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
    By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
   Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
     Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
   For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
     And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
   Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
    And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
   Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,
      Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
    Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
      And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

She dwells with Beauty- Beauty that must die;
   And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
   Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of delight
    Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
     Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
   Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
   And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Intimations of Immortality: Odes, Elegies, and Politics

The critical fallacy inheres in discussions of English Romanticism that Keats is the least political of the major Romantic poets. Ostensibly, Keats’ subject matter is not directly political: the odal cycle or vision addresses subjectivity, temporality and spatiality, history (classical antiquity), epistemology, and the poet’s relationship to tactility, especially in the form of natural objects/vistas and expressed hetero sexuality. Yet, specifically in Ode to a Nightingale, a reckoning is enacted which takes Keats straight to the heart of a political dilemma which has plagued mankind since classical antiquity and before: what is the place of extremely developed and expressed individuality, visionary individuality, as it were, in an individual, against the conformist masses, held under the protective aegis of conformist societal contexts? Adorno’s “Lyric Poetry and Society” initiates many pertinent inquiries on this level; how I would like to elevate the discourse to the next level is to up a certain kind of discursive ante by tackling a trope which has lost some status over the last few hundred years: immortality. Specifically, as a topos to investigate in poetic texts and other literary contexts, who is more immortal, the visionary, with his or her extremely developed interiority, set in place against societal norms, or any generalized normative, and the ethos and praxis of the conformist masses themselves, with their standards of regulated behavior and (more importantly) regulated cognition. These issues present themselves nose on the face in the penultimate stanza of Nightingale:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charmed magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

Nightingale puts Keats’ entire visionary odal system on a tightrope, as he boldly confronts this system’s potential obsolescence. What makes the nightingale immortal, here, is its sense of being indistinguishable from all other nightingales, whether singing for Ruth or not. Those not touched by the stigma of extreme individuality (here of a visionary nature) have their safety and immortality in numbers; while an “I” developed to an absolute peak of sharp cognitive-affective incisiveness is so vulnerable, through its singularity into isolation, that it can only feel the pangs of mortality and impending death beating behind and in front of it at all times. The politics of this dilemma is simple: any given society must decide for itself to what extent individuals may develop themselves as distinct, autonomous entities, against the normative, or to what extent this process must be nipped in the bud. The critical commonplace of the isolated Romantic genius does apply here, as does Adorno; but what is added is the sense of potential longevity in configuring things from one end of this to the other: who gets to be immortal, Keats or his replicant, replaceable Nightingale? This fits snugly into (also) an exploration of the Cheltenham Elegies. The analogue to Nightingale, 261, manifests in no uncertain terms the same syndromes and dichotomies:

Never one to cut corners about cutting
corners, you spun the Subaru into a rough
U-turn right in the middle of Old York Road
at midnight, scaring the shit out of this self-
declared “artist.” The issue, as ever, was
nothing particular to celebrate. We could
only connect nothing with nothing in our
private suburban waste land. Here’s where
the fun starts— I got out, motherfucker.
I made it. I say “I,” and it works. But Old
York Road at midnight is still what it is.
I still have to live there the same way you do.

The protagonist of the poem has the same sense of systematic, incisive insight as Keats does in the Odes. Here, the antagonist, who represents (among other things) the typical and the normative individual trapped in a society which values destructiveness and the continued predominance of short, stunted lives, is not a Nightingale but the driver of the Subaru in question. For discursive sake, let’s call him “Chris.” Who Chris is, as an American archetype; the suburban daredevil or show-off, with the same blarneying sense of indestructibility, backed by the despair of immobile, low-minded interests; is meant to appear as immortal as the visionary poet, who laments in an elegiac way the pointlessness of the world as it exists for both characters. The problem here (or tightrope, over which the elegiac system must walk) is that, for those for whom major high art consonance is anathema, Chris will always remain a more eternal character than the autonomous, visionary artist.

What, or who, is immortal here is a political issue; not just because the masses tend to propel the masses forward, and Chris is resolutely one of the masses, but because even the notion of immortality-in-art (a fixation for both these Odes and Elegies) is a vulnerable one, before the mind-numbing force and obduracy of mass indifference and resentment. The Odes have been given a high place, over two hundred years, in the canon of English literature. The Cheltenham Elegies have only begun to have the life they are destined to have. Yet neither the Odes nor the Elegies are for the obdurate masses, who are (very much) eternally and immortally impervious to the siren call of advanced textuality. That high art is nonetheless a political force on high levels and for all time is also manifestly and demonstrably the case, no matter how eternally impervious the masses are. The artist must stand alone, with his or her visions, against the imperviousness of the masses; perhaps with a Romantic sense of sublimity, perhaps not; but the politics of Keats dictates that the politics of what endures, of what is meant to be immortal and what is not, of how far an individual may go to extend his or her individuality against the masses, is one which will remain a tightrope to be walked for as long as anyone wishes to create major high art consonant work.

Notes on Keats: 2014 (2nd Draft)

Keats, and what the phantasmagoric has to offer in coherence/complexity- the phantasmagoric being a mode of the visionary- Keats' phantasmagoric approach in "Nightingale" argues for the manifest complexity/density of mere subjectivity, and this argument is a critical commonplace in relation to Romanticism, but lifted into a kind of textual ether by a dazzling array of polarities, swimming in and out of textual focus. They all vie for predominance, generating friction which gives off an intense visceral heat, heightened by melopoeiac/prosodic mastery, into a sense of the text as a juggernaut or conflagration, an intense, sustained, and burning moment. This is the unique province of major high art consonant poetry over prose. The momentary nature of the lyric poem- maximum coherence/maximum complexity as an inspiration, in and out, and over- has, as its principle, and as Keats noticed himself, intensity as its signature virtue against prose and other forms of literature. Why the Odes establish Keats as an almost peerless lyric poet is that when a phantasmagoric edge is added to cognitive-affective intensity, the lyric poem creates a map of creative cognitive consciousness which prose, for all its expansive objectivity and perspective adumbration, cannot.

Phantasmagoric vistas, the romanticism of extreme momentary intensity- in short, genuine poetry- the principle to achieve these effects is inclusion, movements towards things (material and cognitive) and embraces of them. Wordsworth enacts the same textual process, even in his semi-objective Prelude. Prose writers are compelled by other imperatives- yet, genuine cognitive ascension towards profound understanding and solid principles is more fulfilled by the objectivity of the non-romantic plain glance. Ultimately, the two approaches don't need to negate each other- the 60-40 advantage I give to objectivity and prose (especially in relation to philosophy and science) owes to the inaccessible nature of real intensity in the human world, and the Odes especially are such rare birds that they cannot age completely gracefully over the larger, more imposing realities of human life as they manifest, and permanently so, and as consciousness ages towards understanding of sense past sensibility and the allure of the momentary and its phantasmagoria.

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 The ultimate edge Keats holds over Wordsworth- of strangeness, odd proportions, the uncanny, intriguing semantic juxtapositions, "heavenly prosody"- is especially apparent once the limitations of Wordsworth's system have defined themselves against textual systems which exceed it. The chiasmus of nature (natural forces) and the mind of man- how nature, once perceived in the most purified light (as, perhaps, a set of principles), imposes heightened cognition, understanding into distilled reason- must fall, once the acknowledgment is made that Wordsworth's system is just another mode of Romantic (at least semi-adolescent, in its projected narcissism) escapism. The escapist valve is towards a subjectively held and maintained psycho-affective transcendence, which the rigorous demands of human society, its labyrinthine, ineluctable complexities could easily disperse into the nothingness of raw sensibility again. The antithesis: an impulse towards understanding and distilled reason not merely as an escape, but as transcendence-via-direct engagement, not seeking understanding in the otherness of natural forces, or pronouncing facile, half-understood blessings on a human continuum falsely linked to natural forms employed as intoxicants. These forms subsist at a distance from human systematic reasoning, or attempts at such.

The manner in which Keats intoxicates himself (and the extent to which his intoxication is a simultaneous movement towards ecstasy and agony, fulfillment and denial, consummation and abandonment) is more grounded in human reality- especially, the confrontation between the human mind and physical mortality. The nature-cocaine Wordsworth imbibes is too much about living forever/eternal life- despite evident technical mastery and a prosaic style fluid, limpid, and complex enough to place the Prelude in proximity to Keats' Odes, Wordsworth's simplified thematic dynamics, and what about human reality is forced by his own systematic fronts to escape notice, relegates him to a position beneath Keats, whose textual bravery and boldness exceed his. Moreover, there are few angles from which the Odes do not appear strange- their formal-thematic angularity and balance of finely crafted and misshapen textual elements render them interesting for reasons past their vaunted Romantic passion, sincerity, and object-animating prosody. In other words, to understand Keats' Odes by the Kantian cognitive model (sensibility-understanding-reason) is to get caught on each level by a kind of camouflage which hides how the circuitry is connected, how it coheres to impose an impression of depth, solidity, inevitability, and formal gorgeousness.

Thus, the Odes for me are strangely fascinating and enduring- no less systematic than the Prelude, but the inscrutability of whose system makes the Odes seem to torque or twist each time they are encountered. That sense- that the Odes themselves have a manner of being sentient, evincing sentience- is unique in the canon of English-language poetry. It also has a way of making the Odes a kind of last word in poetic avant-gardism- because the Odes have inhering in them this strange, vibrant, oscillating light of change/dynamism, they cannot leave the cutting edge, no matter who then or later was or is cast up as standing in an aesthetic position of extremity and innovation. The contradiction- the Odes are largely about disappearances (on physical and metaphysical levels), yet they refuse to disappear- is their principle, and then the compelling power of strangeness, the glory/gorgeousness of the misshapen.

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 Keats' "Negative Capability" has become a lit-crit commonplace, so that scholars and readers forget the richness of its significations. To balance psycho-affective polarities without "irritably grasping after reason" (or principles, in the Kantian sense, which specifically suggests deductive reasoning and its sobriety, against the aesthetic) is one cognitive level Negative Capability accounts for; but the other question (which the Odes answer) is how polarities might be expressed in text in a negatively capable fashion. To achieve this end in the most spectacular possible fashion, Keats has recourse to dialects of sense/sensibility, initiated from a subjective stance of acknowledgement of the darkness of physical extinction, while maintaining affective vivacity in relation to his own psycho-affective processes- all the data being processed finds worthwhile and illustrative objective correlatives in what Keats opens textually. Keats' objective correlatives in the Odes- his nightingale, Grecian Urn, autumn, melancholy, and the rest- have a way of jolting his textual gambits up from sensibility to understanding and then (importantly, by induction rather than deduction) distilled/principled reason, not initially grasped for but floated up to gracefully and artfully.

The time/space coordinates projected by Keats onto his Odal objects create dynamic tensions which torque and transform depending on any given reader's subjectivity- the succession of vignettes in "Nightingale," in particular, create a warped sense of temporal textual succession, in which a succession of disappearances is enacted (the poet, the nightingale, the song, the state of consciousness and entire sensibility which illuminated the succession as a landscape, a forest scene), so that conventional space/time coordinates are replaced as the eruption of time zones is followed by dissolution of the same; and the conceptions which arise from this enactment, animated by the Odal objective correlatives, have to do with an essential mutability inhering in the congealed formal matter of Keats' subjectivity, which it is the unique province of major high art consonant poetry to reveal. This breach in time/space coordinates is explosive, spectacular, compulsively demonstrative; in short, Romantic; and that, the demonstration of psycho-affective mutability potentialities, is what Romanticism at its best brings to the philosophical table, against the conceptually grounded stability of the higher echelons of (philosophic/scientific) prose, their vistas onto human collectives.

The lyric poet, Adorno writes, is self-posited against society; and defines himself in relation to the entire human continuum of types which he is not; isolated by his (or her) capacity for mutability (on psycho-affective levels) and cognitive boundary-dissolution (into, presumably, transcendental realms once conventional frameworks are eliminated), but also ossified into a kind of stunted adolescence by his (or her) inability to view things plainly, and discern profound truth from illusion. That's why, though Keats' textual bravery exceeds Wordsworth's, and his confrontations with mortality are affecting, his appeal still lies in this inducement, often via prosody, of states of intoxication. If textual truth accords with textual beauty (to follow Grecian Urn through), Keats must fare relatively poorly next to philosophic prose, whose concerns and efforts wear more comfortably over long periods of time. Through this textual strainer, Keats' apogee of intoxication is assimilated and the central Romantic fallacy pierced through- that the dissolution of boundaries, psychic and otherwise, is commensurate with a kind of enlightenment, aesthetic or otherwise.

Adam Fieled       6-24-16

John Keats: Ode To Psyche: 1820

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung
   By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,
And pardon that thy secrets should be sung
   Even into thine own soft-conched ear:
Surely I dreamt today, or did I see
   The winged Psyche with awakened eyes?
I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,
   And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,
Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side
   In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof
   Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran
         A brooklet, scarce espied:

'Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
    Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass;
    Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;
    Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,
As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,
And ready still past kisses to outnumber
    At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:
        The winged boy I knew;
But who was thou, O happy, happy dove?
         His Psyche true!

O latest born and loveliest vision far
    Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!
Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,
    Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;
Fairer than these, thou temple thou hast none,
    Nor altar heap'd with flowers;
Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan
    Upon the midnight hours;
No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet
   From chain-swung censer teeming;
No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat
   Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,
   Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,
When holy were the haunted forest boughs,
   Holy the air, the water, and the fire;
Yet even in these days so far retir'd
    From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,
    Fluttering among the faint Olympians,
I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
           Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
    From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
    Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
   In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
   Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:
Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees
   Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;
And there, by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,
    The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;
And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,
   With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,
    Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:
And there shall be for thee all soft delight
    That shadowy thought can win,
A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,
     To let the warm Love in!

Percy Bysshe Shelley: Mont Blanc

The everlasting universe of things

Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,

Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

Now lending splendor, where from secret springs

The source of human thought its tribute brings

Of waters—with a sound but half its own,

Such as a feeble brook will oft assume,

In the wild woods, among the mountains lone,

Where waterfalls around it leap for ever,

Where woods and winds contend, and a vast river

Over its rocks ceaselessly bursts and raves.

Thus thou, Ravine of Arve—dark, deep Ravine—

Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale,

Over whose pines, and crags, and caverns sail

Fast cloud-shadows and sunbeams: awful scene,

Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down

From the ice-gulfs that gird his secret throne,

Bursting through these dark mountains like the flame

Of lightning through the tempest;—thou dost lie,

Thy giant brood of pines around thee clinging,

Children of elder time, in whose devotion

The chainless winds still come and ever came

To drink their odours, and their mighty swinging

To hear—an old and solemn harmony;

Thine earthly rainbows stretch'd across the sweep

Of the aethereal waterfall, whose veil

Robes some unsculptur'd image; the strange sleep

Which when the voices of the desert fail

Wraps all in its own deep eternity;

Thy caverns echoing to the Arve's commotion,

A loud, lone sound no other sound can tame;

Thou art pervaded with that ceaseless motion,

Thou art the path of that unresting sound—

Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee

I seem as in a trance sublime and strange

To muse on my own separate fantasy,

My own, my human mind, which passively

Now renders and receives fast influencings,

Holding an unremitting interchange

With the clear universe of things around;

One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings

Now float above thy darkness, and now rest

Where that or thou art no unbidden guest,

In the still cave of the witch Poesy,

Seeking among the shadows that pass by

Ghosts of all things that are, some shade of thee,

Some phantom, some faint image; till the breast

From which they fled recalls them, thou art there!

Some say that gleams of a remoter world

Visit the soul in sleep, that death is slumber,

And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber

Of those who wake and live.—I look on high;

Has some unknown omnipotence unfurl'd

The veil of life and death? or do I lie

In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep

Spread far around and inaccessibly

Its circles? For the very spirit fails,

Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep

That vanishes among the viewless gales!

Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene;

Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

And wind among the accumulated steeps;

A desert peopled by the storms alone,

Save when the eagle brings some hunter's bone,

And the wolf tracks her there—how hideously

Its shapes are heap'd around! rude, bare, and high,

Ghastly, and scarr'd, and riven.—Is this the scene

Where the old Earthquake-daemon taught her young

Ruin? Were these their toys? or did a sea

Of fire envelop once this silent snow?

None can reply—all seems eternal now.

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue

Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,

So solemn, so serene, that man may be,

But for such faith, with Nature reconcil'd;

Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal

Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood

By all, but which the wise, and great, and good

Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.

The fields, the lakes, the forests, and the streams,

Ocean, and all the living things that dwell

Within the daedal earth; lightning, and rain,

Earthquake, and fiery flood, and hurricane,

The torpor of the year when feeble dreams

Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep

Holds every future leaf and flower; the bound

With which from that detested trance they leap;

The works and ways of man, their death and birth,

And that of him and all that his may be;

All things that move and breathe with toil and sound

Are born and die; revolve, subside, and swell.

Power dwells apart in its tranquility,

Remote, serene, and inaccessible:

And this, the naked countenance of earth,

On which I gaze, even these primeval mountains

Teach the adverting mind. The glaciers creep

Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains,

Slow rolling on; there, many a precipice

Frost and the Sun in scorn of mortal power

Have pil'd: dome, pyramid, and pinnacle,

A city of death, distinct with many a tower

And wall impregnable of beaming ice.

Yet not a city, but a flood of ruin

Is there, that from the boundaries of the sky

Rolls its perpetual stream; vast pines are strewing

Its destin'd path, or in the mangled soil

Branchless and shatter'd stand; the rocks, drawn down

From yon remotest waste, have overthrown

The limits of the dead and living world,

Never to be reclaim'd. The dwelling-place

Of insects, beasts, and birds, becomes its spoil;

Their food and their retreat for ever gone,

So much of life and joy is lost. The race

Of man flies far in dread; his work and dwelling

Vanish, like smoke before the tempest's stream,

And their place is not known. Below, vast caves

Shine in the rushing torrents' restless gleam,

Which from those secret chasms in tumult welling

Meet in the vale, and one majestic River,

The breath and blood of distant lands, for ever

Rolls its loud waters to the ocean-waves,

Breathes its swift vapours to the circling air.

Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there,

The still and solemn power of many sights,

And many sounds, and much of life and death.

In the calm darkness of the moonless nights,

In the lone glare of day, the snows descend

Upon that Mountain; none beholds them there,

Nor when the flakes burn in the sinking sun,

Or the star-beams dart through them. Winds contend

Silently there, and heap the snow with breath

Rapid and strong, but silently! Its home

The voiceless lightning in these solitudes

Keeps innocently, and like vapour broods

Over the snow. The secret Strength of things

Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome

Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!

And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,

If to the human mind's imaginings

Silence and solitude were vacancy?

John Keats: Ode On A Grecian Urn: 1820

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
   Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
   Of deities or mortals, or of both,
      In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
   What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
    What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
   Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
   Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
   Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
     Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal— yet, do not grieve;
   She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
     For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm, and still to be enjoy'd,
      For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
      A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
   To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
   Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
     Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
   Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
   When old age shall this generation waste,
      Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
   'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'— that is all
     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats: Ode To A Nightingale: 1820

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
   My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
    One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
   But being too happy in thine happiness,—
     That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
         In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
   Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
   Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
    Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
   Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
     With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
          And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
    And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
   What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
    Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
   Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
     Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
        And leaden-eyed despairs,
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
    Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
   Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
   Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
Already with thee! tender is the night,
   And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
     Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
        But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
    Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
   Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
   Wherewith the seasonable month endows
The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
   White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
      Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
         And mid-May's eldest child,
The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
   The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
   I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
   To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
  To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
    While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
         In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
   To thy high requiem become a sod.

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
   No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
    In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
   Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
     She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
        The same that oft-times hath
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
    Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
   To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
    As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
   Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
     Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
        In the next valley-glades:
Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
    Fled is that music:— Do I wake or sleep?

Ode On Exile: 2015

No bells strike at Saint Matthew’s; midnight

   means lights out; across Fayette Street, windows

send slow signals; but for hope of daylight,

    no means of evoking, painted or not, halos.

Occasional cars; the 7-11 parking lot empties

   not completely, the night crew forced to spill

      laced coffee, pills, down throats, past painted

faces reflecting gloom, as they plan candies

      passed around to kill behind, enemies

         locked in basements, unwilling dross killed.

Dull, dense, reptile-laden world— nature’s phantom

    side, scarred with imperatives to destroy— I

stride past Calvary Episcopal, its handsome,

  enchanted spires, trying to forge a “who” and “why.”

Caravaggio’s John the Baptist, crouched darkly

     in murk, I superimpose on Conshohocken at

      night, including the succession into severed head—

knowing that in there (7-11), warnings sharply

    uttered mean nothing, less than nothing at that,

       humanity is lost, then its corpse is bled.

This is not the world I was born for— Butler

    Pike, a Honda pulls into the abandoned

Dairy Queen lot, the young male driver scuttles

    out into the apartment complex, fear-flattened—

as to what John Milton would say about these

    suburban straits, everyone changing form

       like Satan, a poet singed by lost innocence

up all night on his own pills, thoughts, caffeine—

     I divine he knew all this, putrid fires warmed

         to kill brains, rigid rules passed on, idiot to idiot.

Adam Fieled, 2015