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?