Live in Brooklyn: original file
The original Live in Brooklyn mp3 file, in its entirety.
Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound
If you noticed, and it certainly would be permissible if you did not, the title of today’s performance is Personal Mythologies II. Two, because we did the same thing last year at roughly this time (not me and Brian, mind you, but me and two other poets). One of the poets, Alexandra Grilikhes, was giving what turned out to be her last ever performance. She died in February, age seventy, and ending a life of great achievement in the arts. She was an editor, novelist, poet, promoter, and feminist. I was deeply moved by her death, which seemed so untimely, coming on the heels of her first novel’s successful release. Wouldn’t you know, my immediate response to her death was an extravagant outpouring of poetic energy. I wrote a fifteen-page mini-epic called Death Meditations, then abandoned it when I felt I couldn’t go on. The grief, and the desperate longing to create something good, were getting to me.
Tracing the evolution of this poem, I am reminded of an episode in the early poetic life of Ezra Pound. Ez was wandering through a Metro station in London, presumably waiting for his train, which may’ve been late, or simply unwilling to stop for Ezra Pound. In any case, Ez began examining the faces drifting and circulating around him, and these faces brought him to a moment of epiphany. Returning home, he pounded out (no pun intended) an elaborate thirty-page catalog of Imagist impressions. He let it sit for six months, and decided to scrap the whole thing except for two lines: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ petals on a wet, black bough.” This little haiku, In the Station of the Metro, has become famous, and is, for my money, Ezra’s best poem.
As you can probably guess, my Alexandra poem went through a similar metamorphosis. Coming back to it, I scrapped everything inessential, until the fifteen-page piece had yielded a single page of usable material. Hours were spent pruning, paring, crafting, until I finally felt I had done the deceased poet justice. Or, failing that, that I had tried my best to do so. The poem lacks imagery, metaphor, and other savory elements. It is what might be called a vegetarian poem— lean, mean, good for the digestion, but unlikely to titillate the senses. I recognize this, but it is, after all, a poem about mortality. What does death leave us with? It is my attempt to reach Alexandra, wherever she is. It is very hard for me to believe that a year ago, she was standing at this very podium, delivering a performance that unified the threads of her considerable body of work into an artful whole. Without turning this into a would-be séance, I would like to say that this poem is an attempt to evoke her presence, if only in the hearts and minds of those of us who knew her.
Hamlet and the Last Drop
It is a disappointment to the maturing poet, and probably no less so to the maturing garbageman, that life is mostly prosaic. We do the same things every day— think roughly the same thoughts, eat roughly the same foods (with the occasional pesto or curry thrown in, no doubt), watch roughly the same movies, wish for the same impossibilities, rue the same inevitabilities, consolidate whatever resources we have, and denigrate the ones we don’t. Why do we do this? One lesson of Hamlet seems to be that we don’t have to— that we can dig deeper, walk the razor’s edge, become an active participant in metaphysical debate. The risk is that, in the process, we will lose touch with everyday reality, and veer off into madness. Poetry has this distinct advantage over quotidian life— poets can, in the creation of their poems, see things as they are not with impunity. We don’t have to tell the truth, because we can imagine things better than the truth. Look around you— that weird-looking guy in the third row may be a Minister of Angelic Spirits, an embodiment of Dionysus, or even an official in the Eisenhower Administration. That asshole driver you passed, doing forty-five on the Expressway, was Nosferatu, the parasite that shined Richard Nixon’s shoes and recommended the Watergate Hotel as a friendly rest-stop, and the sleazebag who interviewed O.J. Simpson for Playboy, combined. And so on.
I spend a lot of time hanging out at Thirteenth and Pine, sometimes writing or reading, but mostly watching people. So it follows naturally that I’d want to, in my own modest way, immortalize it. On two diagonal corners, Thirteenth and Pine contains the Last Drop Coffeehouse, which really deserves its own poem, teeming as it is with the young, lusty, luscious, and generally alliterative, and Dirty Frank’s, which would merit a Dante-sized epic, detailing the Inferno-like rings around which spin the old drunkards, new drunkards, and in-between drunkards. I was sitting at the Last Drop, thinking about all these issues, and I really started to identify with the Hamlet archetype. Is this all there is? For how many years will I be sitting at Thirteenth and Pine, waiting for an elusive enlightenment? Am I destined to follow my father’s ghost into the abyss? Luckily, I had a pen with me. That stopped the corrosive gnaw. It was suddenly just another night. Almost.
Proust and Love
Love has been addressed in myriad ways, by myriad poets, to such an extent, that it seems hard to justify writing another poem about love. For a long time, I shied away from writing straight ahead love poems. I’d write about carnality, desire (in all its manifestations and permutations), feeling connected or disconnected, but the big L, both as a signifier and as a thing-in-itself, was off limits. This attitude endured until I encountered the prose of Marcel Proust, which showed me an angle of approach that I hadn’t known existed. Ironically enough, good old bed-ridden Marcel doesn’t tend to approach love directly, either. Rather, he approaches it as he does his memorialized sensations— as an abstraction to be danced with delicately, expansively, tangibly yet philosophically. The funniest anecdote about Proust and love doesn’t actually exist in his text. Rather, biographers claim that Proust’s appreciation of Albertine’s “ruddy cheeks” is actually a displaced euphemism for Proust’s appreciation of his gay lover’s sensuous buttocks.
The point is that Proust showed me how to take an idea into the air, let it ride the currents of my imagination, toss about in the winds of memory, then be brought down gently in a philosophical curlicue. So all praises go to the unseen powers that chained Marcel to a sick-bed, and an ink-pen. For the form of this poem, I wanted to use the lyric “I”, that most neglected and slandered first-person conventionality-turned-rarity. It seemed logical to me that however abstract my sentiments, the poem wouldn’t work if I didn’t express some passion as well. For inspiration on that level, I turned to John Keats, that most passionate of Romantics, and ransacked the ten-line stanza, ABABCDECDE form he used for his Odes. It’s a form I’d used before, sometimes with success, sometimes with none. In this case, I felt a lyrical form would enhance the flavor of philosophical sentiment, as gravy to meat. John Keats, let it known, was crazy for beefsteak, as befits a sensualist and born-again Pagan. And this poem, which is actually online now, is called On Love.
Stoning the Devil (3-27-04, KWH)
In Baudelaire's famous prose poem, The Generous Gambler, we follow the narrator, ostensibly Charlie B. himself, as he encounters a mysterious stranger on a Parisian boulevard. The stranger, lo and behold, turns out to be Lucifer himself. Baudelaire depicts him as a man of wealth and taste, who has, indeed, been around for many a long year, and stolen many a man's soul and faith. Of course, Baudelaire follows him. They get regally smashed, and the Devil reveals to him the secrets of the universe. For Baudelaire, stoning the devil means getting him stoned, wooing him, bringing him into the human fold for a little Dionysian sport. The problem with the Baudelairian method of Satan-handling is that you lose your soul. The Devil corrupts you to the point that right and wrong have no meaning; irony enters the blood and chills it; paradox becomes poison; everybody looks like a leper; and you can't feel anything. It helps to remember our good old read-it-in-seventh-grade friend Young Goodman Brown. His encounter with Beelzebub leaves him embittered, disenchanted, but at least he still has a soul (or, as much of a soul as a tee-totaling Puritan can have). Young Goodman Brown stones the devil by rejecting him out of hand. Stoning here means throwing stones: even if it be from the glass house of mortal ignorance.
So, somewhere between the Baudelairian and Hawthornian models of Lucifer-human relations, we may find an ideal solution. We can lure the Devil into drunkenness and then bash him over the head with a rock, or we can bash him over the head with a rock and then slip him a joint to ease the pain (mostly our pain, of course). The Devil, the epitome of imperviousness, will go on being the great professional Ironist he is (a bit like Frank Zappa). The reward of this balanced approach for us, as writers, is that we can lure the Devil close to us, just close enough to learn some of his simpler tricks, then send him on his way when he starts demanding blood. Muslims the world over "stone the Devil," but I fear their ritual lacks a certain subtlety and understanding of Satanic grandeur- how it can be harnessed, refined, made to serve human ends. The Devil, more than any other Being, understands the complexity of existence. I would guess that things are as complicated in Hell as they are here. In the end, what is a art but a testament to the complexity of life: manifold levels and layers, perpetually enclosing us in a wide web. One could make the argument that art is essentially ironic, in the sense that it posits unreachable worlds that we long for, but cannot touch. We must face it: art is a Devil's game. We're here to play, and we guarantee you it will be more fun than Yahtzee.
Dominique
So many stories are wrapped up in this next poem, some hilarious, some harrowing. It all revolves around a single woman and her phenomenal ability to enthrall men. Her name was, and is, Dominique, and I've never met anyone like her. When I met her, I was a high school junior and she was a freshman. She was stunningly beautiful, with a seductive, feline grace that suggested both Lolita and Liv Tyler. This alone wouldn't qualify her to play such an interesting part in my life and the lives of those around me; there were a lot of beautiful girls at Cheltenham; but Dominique had something more. What do we call that ineffable IT, that compelling magnetism that certain people have? Is it merely beauty, or charisma, or youth? For me, Dominique's charm lay in all these things, and also in something extra- a certain mischievous glint in her eye, a certain toss of her head, that suggested a sort of supernatural ecstasy, as if she were walking around in a narcotic trance all the time (which, I was later to learn, she was). Dominique was, quite simply, the most compelling female I'd met up to that point. Oddly enough, I didn't fall hard for her at all. I was able to keep my distance because, to a certain extent, I saw a hollowness beneath the charisma, an unwillingness to dig beneath surfaces and live truly. Dominique for me was a sort of caricature of adolescent sexiness, and I loved her archly condescending smile, but it didn't pierce me to the bone.
My best friend at the time, however, was absolutely, unbelievably, and pitifully smitten. He hung on her every word as though she was Godhead incarnate, recorded every encounter in an especially prized notebook, and just basically made an idiot of himself whenever she was around. Then, Dominique started dating another one of my friends, simultaneously making me her "Man of the Month," and things started to get really messy. A fist fight for me outside math class; a death threat; notes for me in the mail inscribed with lipstick, reading "He finds a deep satisfaction in pain; for that pain comes from her"; and other such nonsense. Basically Chris, aka Mr. Smitten, never forgave me for going after Dominique when he was so desperately in love, while Adam, Mr. Better-Attack-Me-Outside-Math-Class, became contrite years later and started randomly showing up at my gigs, camera in hand.
Having given you this background, you'll probably understand why running into Dominique on a sultry night in the East Village was such a big deal for me. I was lonely as hell in New York, overwhelmed, numbing myself with huge quantities of pot and speed pills. Dominique, for all her cattiness, rose to the occasion and delivered a knock-out performance as supportive friend with benefits. Unsurprisingly, she supported her academic career at NYU by dealing drugs, and I thought it would be fair game to throw that in, seeing as it was honest. Formally, this piece is me trying my best to write like Keats, sort of the same thing William Carlos Williams was doing in his early twenties. For me, WCW's Keatsian poems aren't that good, probably because he didn't know Dominique. She's a Muse- a real, honest-to-God morsel of madness. Not that I've ever forgotten her implacable selfishness, remorseless narcissism and insufferable insularity; but it pays to remember what's best in her.
Coca-Cola Dream
Coca-Cola Dream debuted at the Personal Mythologies II reading at KWH in 2003
Something happened to me for the first time this year, something more or less momentous. Something I’ve been waiting for jealously since I began to write. I had the dream. The dream in which a succession of images appears in such a way as to make the creation of a poem not only necessary, but inevitable. I’ve always envied the Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s of the poetic world, who could smoke a bit of opium and come out with a Kubla Khan. I’ve tried writing in various states of intoxication but wound up, as Ginsberg would have it, “rocking and rolling over lofty incantations that in the morning were stanzas of gibberish.” This time I got lucky. Here's the dream: I’m standing at the corner of Walnut and Broad, under the awning of the ritzy hotel there, I forget what it’s called…the Bellevue! I’ve got an edition of Shelley in my hands— hard-backed, blue, looks like it’s been sitting in an attic for a few generations. I come across a curious poem that begins with the word “swimming” repeated eight times. My response, in the dream, was to make the assumption that this was Shelley somehow anticipating the last moments of his life— splashing around amidst an infernal storm off the coast of Italy, ineffectuality trying to keep his head above water.
Then I noticed something else curious about the poem— it made frequent and loving mention of Coca-Cola, which seemed to be the leitmotif of the piece. Of course, we know that Shelley died a century before poets began to imbibe the carbonated wonder. I found this perplexing, but (hey!) it was a dream, you know. It had its own sort of logic. End of dream. I woke up, I had some time to kill, I remembered the dream, and felt it incumbent upon me to take the hint of the Muses and write the poem that Shelley never did. To be frank, I’ve become something of a Coke-a-holic in the last year, anyway. Have one with lunch, dinner, with a midnight snack. Anytime. What I like about Coke is that everybody drinks it. As Andy Warhol said, “The President drinks it, Liz Taylor drinks it, and, just think: you can drink it, too!” Coke is America, and America, in a very real sense, especially culturally, is Coke.
As I began to write, I found myself using the standard Whitmanic technique of putting the rhyme at the beginning of the line, rather than the end. This technique has the advantage of creating parallel structure, with cadence, rhythm, metric symmetry, without the encumbrance of a formal rhyme scheme. It is economical, utilitarian, and eminently American. Poetic apple pie. God only knows what Shelley would’ve thought.
The Disfiguring Gaze
Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me, done in her co-op studio space in Spring Garden, North Philadelphia, does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far shadier, and nastier, than John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean (Michelangelo, Renaissance, not Jacques-Louis David) elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. Instead, from her, what might be called a disfiguring gaze. The disfiguring gaze amounts, from the painter's perspective, to a radical power trip, a revenge fantasy fulfilled, The Other's energy is tamed and muted, if not decimated. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun nonetheless plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made, disfiguration-wise (not decimation-wise), for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.
.......................................................................................................................Having ascertained what the pertinent cultural evidence is, the conclusion is inescapable—
I was Mary Evelyn Harju’s muse. Or: she used me, my physical apparatus, as a site to start from in exploring the issues she found the most interesting. A muse-site. The sense of intimacy with me thusly implies a preference Mary had for warmth or nearness. A purgation of the objective in favor of a warped, sexually charged, polyglot subjectivity. The exploration of the subjective as a labyrinth would’ve been valued by Miss H as a way of building depth (self-contained, self-perpetuated depth) into her visions. Humanism, the Renaissance manifested again, against the arid frigidity of the post-modern art which dominated East Coast gallery spaces during the Aughts.
How I react to being a muse, or, to not belabor the intimacy involved in this instance, a Muse— no sense of drollery, but a sense of bemusement nonetheless, that I relate to my own physique, rather than my brain, as having accomplished something culturally meaningful in the world. Mary and I, indeed, were physical people together, physically involved. The recognition, which includes bemusement, is that Mary Evelyn Harju regarded me as a body first, a brain (a perhaps distant) second. As a nascent writer in the Aughts, with my own set of socio-aesthetic concerns (starting from Symbolism and English Romanticism, but encompassing philosophy, literary theory, including Deconstructionism, as foundational materials in a self-made matrix), it is amusing that Mary needed naught but my body to be delivered into an expressive realm where she had leave to say what she wanted to, to the world and the times she lived in.
The radical sense of physicality was vertical for Mary here. The Muse Mary Evelyn Harju was looking for, to exalt, mystify, or disfigure, was centered, as the Italians had been, on physical dimensionality. On another level, my emotions cannot not be engaged by the realization of my servitude as Mary’s Muse. It is with a combination of pleasure and pain that I begin to understand the sojourn in her towards flesh-spirit, soul-body unity, through art and sexual intercourse, back and forth. Pain, because staying grounded in physical reality cost Mary the better ride she could’ve had, had she been more attuned to intellect, dissevered from physical presence, and presiding over physical presence as well.
To be the enfranchised Muse as raw meat does put me in a false position— I myself am dissevered, as aesthetic Object, from the kinds of cognitions that see and manifest bright vistas on all sides beyond just Bodies, or my own body, and sexual intercourse. Becoming a major Muse based on raw physical presence is thus only semi-empowerment. Nonetheless, for what Mary Evelyn Harju’s particular sensibility was, which could only take the Bible and the Renaissance together and channel them into revelations of carnality (which could also be seen to ricochet back and reveal the feminine or Woman), I served, at a younger age, as fulsomely as anyone could. Even as the recognition of what was in my brain, my own cognitive capacities, had to be consigned to the shadows, or to the chiaroscuro of half-existence.
On being painted as David
The solvency of Mary Evelyn Harju's The Fall, from 2008, is about form and formal rigor. It would be easy, just from this piece, to call her a formalist. In Philly, this is a dread categorization— Manhattan has always accused Philadelphia of bland, tepid formalism— but if the Harju piece is charged into being more, placement within proximity to other Aughts Philadelphia products, writing and photographs (a benevolent matrix structure here), transcendentalizes the piece into being something more. The similarity of how I am painted here to Michelangelo's David, the ideal male nude in art, highlights both Mary's twin obsessions, the body and the Renaissance, and the sense of a relationship narrative laid down, also similar to what I do in Equations. The phenomenology, for me, of being painted as David, is about an era in which raw physicality, the primordial physical, was both valued and fetishized. I participated, as has been established— threw myself into the Aughts matrix, with all the freshness and naivete of a young adult, not yet seasoned by continual intercourse with the material or cultural world. My version of David is thus one of original innocence. Adam, if you will, before the Fall. The narrative of the painting is specifically about innocence transformed into experience. Eden, or the Edenic. The piece freezes before I make my choice— to bite from the apple or not— and thus destabilizes that the outcome must be a predictable one. On another level, this is my ascendent moment as a pin-up— full frontal nudity establishes that— and, as a classicized version of a pin-up, the painting is meant to be as seductive and provocative as representations of raw flesh can be. The image here is not chaste.
............................................................................................................................A few more things to say about The Fall. Axiomatic things. Like, for instance, that Mary Evelyn Harju’s representation of me as David is just that, and precisely that. The similarity is there, and unmistakable. Mary’s fascination with the Renaissance is already well-documented. As is her sense of erotic fascination with ideal male nudes. Also notable that who I am in The Fall, as someone being represented, is someone true to life. I really am 5’9, slightly over 5’9, actually, with a pronounced tendency to lankiness. I’m not secretly 5’6, and chunky. Or 5’8 and a half. Those who might see me will not be surprised. These tokens of complete aesthetic legitimacy have to be established, in a country where carnival-rules have made show biz standards the norm. The Fall has a number of ways of being for real that are striking ones. No show biz.
The other thing I wanted to discuss is more interesting. The Fall was modeled for and painted in a co-op studio in the Spring Garden section of North Philadelphia in 2007-2008. On a narrative level, the painting suggests Mary and I in the garden of Eden, and locates a portion of its narrative in the Bible. Mary coming out of a Christian Right family is significant, as is the outre Aughts-Philly peccadillo of her Renaissance obsession and eroticism. The sense of Philadelphia as an Eden, or as Edenic, is an intriguing one. If there is one facet of Philadelphia as a city which establishes that it can manifest as an Eden, or as Edenic, it is the sublime nature of Philadelphia’s architecture. What a city is, primordially, is a collection of buildings. Because Philadelphia, from City Hall on out, was constructed, at its best, of buildings meant to endure over decades and centuries, and to fulfill rigorous aesthetic criteria, it creates a physiology, in Philadelphia, of levitation, transcendentalism over the mundane, and of an atmosphere in which history moves forward, lives and breathes. Because Philadelphia is built, at its best, of living, breathing history, it offers a sense of shelter and amnesty to those who wish to pursue living, breathing history itself. Thus, it could be an Eden, or Edenic, for those of us in the Aughts, who wished to create to do something other than degrade, or reenact show biz. Philadelphia, in short, is built past swinishness. It’s a real city, by world standards. The Fall could not have been painted, I would tend to say, anywhere else, nor could David manifest as David, or Mary and I as Mary and I. Even the inbuilt sense of doubleness in The Fall falls into place with the idea of history which subsists as history, but also lives and breathes. Is, thus, double. And tolerates the phenomenology of doubleness.
............................................................................................................................Acutely worked into both the surface and the depths of The Fall is a semi-obvious contradiction— to the eye of the painter, I can be both Adam Fieled and Michelangelo’s David. The work of art is a conduit to a color-form reality in which a frozen moment allows this apotheosis into doubleness. Yet hewn into The Fall is the troubled and troubling narrative of a relationship gone wrong. This narrative itself is skewered and doubled by Biblical intimations. Mary Evelyn Harju was, in fact, raised on the Bible. So I, as a figure in the painting, split into a triumvirate: Biblical Adam, Adam Fieled, and David. If you look closely into the depths of The Fall as a work of art, the emotional heart and soul of the painting is not the Biblical or Renaissance resonances. The felt core of what is being expressed is about the vicissitudes of my relationship with Mary. The creation of levels in the painting is important— as high art is supposed to do, it classicizes and historicizes what in itself is unimaginative, overly familiar material. Yet beyond the sense of levels to be engaged, the most central and centralized level is a genuine human relationship— a marriage—gone asunder. Mary and I were never legally married. We didn’t need to be. We were married in blood and in art. The terrible conflict in Mary— what is forcing her to stumble in the painting— is a complex congeries of material and psychological realities which made it that, in the Aughts, Mary could paint only intermittently. Ferocity and delicacy were oddly mixed in her.
Remember: Mary and Abby were plugged into the mid-range at PAFA. As usual, an academic context was not prepared to handle to emergence of something profoundly new. But the criss-cross of influences built into The Fall— Bible-Renaissance-Aughts Philadelphia— are a soul’s potential journey into a world never felt or experienced before. Inappropriate, I feel, to speak too much of what I went through with Mary then. I’ve done that abundantly elsewhere. Back to the main, where David fits in is its own criss-cross, for Mary, into the issue of perpetual temptation, and potential damnation. David tangibly manifests for her, as a male ideal, her own potential sense of physical, consummated deliverance. David, for her, is about lust. Mary was not a delicate woman about fulfilling her lust. She was libido-empowered by a Manifest Destiny attitude attendant on the realization of Renaissance ideals, and notions of the body. The Humanistic, at its extreme of expressiveness. Courageous, also, given her background. The Fall, is, in fact, a courageous work of art. Classicizing and historicizing the personal, and indeed, as boldly personal as any feminist could wish or hope for. The David level, about lust, melds back into being Adam Fieled, and us being co-joined as partners. Returns, in a loop, to the beginning, and to the singular. Other eyes will see how it moves in other ways. But the points of origin, I prophesy, will remain roughly the same, where The Fall is concerned. They are, or will be seen to have been, sturdy ones.
