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. All this is investigated in the Symbolist-influenced double-sonnet Season in Hell: White Candle, in P.F.S. Post and on PennSound. Emily, from Perfect (for which the chiasmus becomes Otoliths to PennSound), 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!