Trish: A Romance

 

Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. As I said, I was never to interact with her in a prolonged way again.

Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.

The White Album

 

Memories of the summer of 2008, when I wrote The White Album: lots of them, all about chaos, disorder, built-up scum. The move I made that July was within Logan Square, from 21st and Race to 23rd and Arch. The old flat had been a horny revelation: endless fun, endless soporific reverie. The new flat was comparatively pedestrian: low ceilings, not much direct sunlight, let alone bay windows, or a loft-like sense of space. All this, because rents in Center City Philly were going sky-high. The visit to Chicago in June had been interesting, borderline brilliant: but I was running out of the money needed to do such things. Was, in fact, accruing a significant amount of debt. Temple was a source of continual frustration. There were the Comp Exams to worry about, and trying to teach and do everything else I was doing at once. I had started an affair in May, and it had ended in May. I numbed myself out to deal with the disappointment I hadn’t expected. The new Mary H failed to arrive. I was alone. The temptation to wander over to between 20th and 19th and Chestnut and procure another bottle of whiskey was always there. And often indulged. Mary herself had become obdurate, unreachable. There was no going back. Jenny Kanzler arrived with a vision of reality straight out of the late Roman Empire, or the Rocky Horror mansion. A good painter, but a spook. Nothing soporific there. And Abby was wandering at large somewhere out there, shooting up God knows what by that time. Entropy: that’s what all this was about. When, a year later, and still scum-ified in another scummy summer, I affixed the Robert Ryman to the first edition of TWA, it was to express the sense that the magic of several years back had inverted, for all of us, into something primitive, faltering, sloppy. Ryman takes Abby, Mary, and Jenny, and turns them on their heads. That’s what The White Album is supposed to be; the Aughts Philadelphia dream of the early Aughts turned on its head. But sleaze and grease can be glamorous too. Right?

Feast or Famine

In 2024, I made, what was for PFS, a crucial decision. Something Solid to me seemed incomplete without at least a few pieces dedicated squarely to Abby Heller-Burnham. What was built into the manuscript, on that front, as of the beginning of the year, was weak and inadequate. So, in the spring of '24 I buckled down and produced two pieces, the double-sonnet Feast or Famine and the sonnet Portal-ways, which focused as intensely and intently on Ms. Heller-Burnham as they possibly could. As spring turned into summer, Feast or Famine appeared in The Seattle Star and on PennSound. Now, it could begin to be discussed that Abby, who is a reduced presence in Equations next to Mary Evelyn Harju, had begun to blossom in the world the same way Mary had. Even as the dynamic tension she creates, about Philadelphia, New York, and the East Coast in general, must remain controversial. The most controversial lines in Feast or Famine, which suggest that Abby, upon leaving Manhattan for Philadelphia, "was ready" for Philly, inverts a well-worn cultural cliche, and turns the cultural relief map of the East Coast on it head. This, I am proud to have done, as a long-overdue addition to the East Coast cultural economy. The sense is, I mean, that for anyone who wants to write or paint seriously, you may, indeed, find Philadelphia more germane than Manhattan, which is a cultural mecca, it might be argued, mostly for kids and dilettantes. Abby Heller-Burnham is a genius-level painter who deserved better than that; Philadelphia was happy to give it to her. 

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.