Ekphrasis: Portrait: Mary Harju/Adam Fieled
Dear M, I know many
yeses.
Yes, I’ve had pants-ants,
I’ve
sewed my oats, not
Quaker,
but remember: oats are
small.
Yes, I wrote our
happenings,
made them public. OK, you
can say I suck. Sucking
hasn’t
made me sour, however.
I’m
as sweet as a Gobstopper.
I’m
colorful, too. You should
suck
c. Mary Harju/Adam Fieled 2006
Ekphrasis: The Fall: Mary Harju/Adam Fieled
I look at a bridge
through the window.
I am standing, naked,
while you paint.
I feel that every moment
is new, nude.
I am in my body as it
actually is, I am
in time as it moves
forward, from in
side my body, responsive
to drafts
coming through the window,
mirrors
that show me what I know
too well
to know, what I have
lived through
and with, what I have
seen but not
been Other to. Sunlight
glistens—
we fall upwards, without
question.
c. Mary Harju/Adam Fieled 2008
Argotist Online Apps Page
The Argotist Online Apparition Poems page has a nice story behind it. The Apps on the page were all written very early one December morning in '09 (12-05-09), about 4 am. I sent a query to Jeff Side at about 9 am (2 pm UK time) and by noon US time the poems were up. Could be the single most exciting day I had while writing the book. More was added to the page in '17.
Apparition Poems in Jacket 31 (10-17-06)
I have some new Apparition Poems up in Jacket #31.
Also in Dusie and Otoliths. Many thanks to the editors.
Apparition Poem #1613
The complex relationship
between Inter-Dialogism and philosophy cannot be simply or succinctly
enumerated. When consciousness leaps into other consciousness, the basic
questions of phenomenology remain the same— what is inside our consciousness,
what is outside, what is held or bounded in or by consciousness, and what is
not— only issues of individuation, difference, and distinction manifest to lead
any inquiry into any number of both theoretical and semantic quagmires. When
philosophical issues are addressed in serious poetry, the potential and actual
arabesques out into cognitive space become innumerable, especially when
Inter-Dialogism is used in a new capacity. What happens when, as often happens
in philosophy, allegorical figures are employed? From Socrates to Zarathustra
to Abraham, philosophical texts must lean on symbolic representations of
individuals, to delineate the essences of philosophical dilemmas and interests.
Abraham, we know, was Kierkegaard’s major choice is his most pivotal text— Fear
and Trembling— and he, as an author, asks us, as an implicit “you” in an I-thou
relationship, to attempt to leap into Abraham’s consciousness when the Lord
asks him to climb the mountain and sacrifice his son, seemingly for no reason,
and testing Abraham’s faith, sharpening his faculties of perception. Apparition
Poem 1613 subsists as both an interpretive vista onto Kierkegaard and a
tangential representation of an implicit “I” who has been able, it would seem,
to achieve the requisite Inter-Dialogic leap into Abraham’s consciousness,
though we know Abraham to only be a figure in an allegory, rather than a
partner in any intimacy:
Follow Abraham up the
hill:
to the extent that the
hill is
constituted already by
kinds
of knives, to what extent
can
a man go up a hill,
shepherd
a son to be sacrificed,
to be
worthy before an almighty
power that may or may not
have had conscious
intentions
where hills, knives, sons
were
concerned, but how, as I
watch
this, can I not feel that
Abraham,
by braving knives, does
not need
the one he holds in his
rapt hands?
What the implicit I sees
in 1613 is a kind of loop around unconscious processes of governance— that God
himself may rule the Universe from a center of consciousness or not, and that
the subtle mental strength Abraham gains from contact with this Universe Force
unconsciously begins to direct his thoughts and actions, which take on
consonance with being sharp, incisive, knife-like. The final loop, we see, is
that, in a binding chain, the “I” in the poem becomes sharp, incisive, and
knife-like from Inter-Dialogic interaction with Abraham (and it is implicit by
this time that Inter-Dialogic interactions may happen with characters in
allegories as well as flesh and blood people), who has inherited his
incisiveness from the Universe Force whose consciousness or unconsciousness
cannot be gauged or mastered. If the dry ice rule applies here, as it does for
most of Apparition Poems, it is because all philosophy, as heavy as it is on
intellect and allegory, is touched by dry ice, and I-you queries ride shot-gun
to the objectivism which must drive the thing forward and turn the proverbial
steering wheel. Is some real I-thou intimacy mixed in? To answer this brings us
to a philosophical critical crux which is very strange— strange, in 1613,
because the protagonist seems to be (mystically, uncannily) attempting an
Inter-Dialogic leap into our brain, as he (unconsciously) sees what he sees,
and steps back out again, leaving a sense behind that philosophical awareness
can be governed by unconscious processes and impersonal forces all the way
through, just as many of the most salient Big Questions, both for science and
philosophy, are impersonal ones, and can only be conjectured at in an
impersonal, if not unconscious, manner. The implied “you” in 1613 is rather
rare, and demanded by a literary context; a merely philosophical context would
stay in the third person; but, in attempting a bridge and a chiasmus between
philosophy and literature, aids the reader in feeling a sense of humanity amidst
all the objectivism and dry ice. Yet, the contradiction inheres that in
addressing the Big Questions on any profound level, it is almost always
individual consciousness which is able to produce breakthroughs in science and
philosophy, cloaked in the impersonality and objectivity (governed, also, often
unconscious processes) of the third person. If poetry is able to enter this
game seriously, the first person singular must re-make itself as explicit, and
personal, to give whatever construct is at hand the insignia of the aesthetic,
and allow the reader graceful entrance.
A Dream (1996, Gulph Mills, Pa)
was moonless. An
ambiance of demonic
enchantment hung
heavy over grey
concrete parking lot.
It was a carnival of
dead souls, ghost-wedding,
vampire funeral. No
rides, cotton candy,
starlit skies, carousels,
only shades of sniffing
bloodhounds, consumptive
spaces, conglomerations;
strange animal glamour
of spilled blood. Deep
implications of hell, chills.
I awoke: thunder crackled
over the trunks of trees.