A Dozen Leaking Buckets (2014)

For the years I've spent writing, among other things, The Great Recession (Under the Knife), it's been important to my literary practice to cultivate the ability to transcend the first person singular, the "I." The "I" is an important structural element which supported Apparition Poems, Cheltenham, and The Posit Trilogy. In 2014, I found a way and manner of keeping "I" alive, as I had with the PT in 2013, in a chapbook called A Dozen Leaking Buckets.

Poets on the GR Blog

When the invitation came to contribute to the Eileen Tabios Poets On The Great Recession blog in the fall of 2011, I was still in Center City. But the Aughts couldn't have been more over.

Drawing the Line

Some of the poems originally intended for GR/Under the Knife have bled into being used for the expanded edition of Cheltenham. This naturally follows from the fact that many of the characters I used when writing the GR vignettes were people I knew in Cheltenham, during the years of my childhood and adolescence. This 2013 Otoliths page demonstrates how ambiguous the line was and still is, in separating the writer's impulse to find genuine roots from the writer's impulse to explore a specific period of time.

The Great Recession Pt. 2: Under the Knife

Over the years, the never-quite-completed Great Recession manuscript developed a second title: Under the Knife. Some pages say GR, some UTK. Same still-developing book. And this 2013 page from Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona takes us to another recessional locale, and lets us wander around.

Four Quarters Magazine: The Great Recession

In 2012, I began work on a manuscript I wanted to call The Great Recession. The motivating idea was similar to American Tour; to devise a series of miniaturized dramatic monologues, which would lay bare what the state of the American psyche was circa 2012 and out, in the midst of all kinds of recessional down-turns. Some of the characters I was channeling were known to me, some I invented. This 2013 page, from India's Four Quarters Magazine, is as good a representation as any of how the manuscript looked. Even if it got stalled roughly halfway through, and hasn't found its way home quite yet.

Chimes #30

Through music, words emerged in my consciousness as another thing. There were musicians who used words and they showed me. I saw that combinations of words could be molten and that the fires they ignited could be contagious. They could be a door that one could break through into another reality: a place hyper-real, full of things that had the palpable reality of what is called real, but were nonetheless better than real: voices channeled from ether, expounding heroic worlds of oceanic expansive experience. This was another way of moving fingers artfully; more subtle and durable, yet so much harder to do because so stark: mere imitation would get you nowhere. I was on the bottom of another mountain that would take me where the creek ran effortlessly. Or, alternately, I was walking along the ocean-shore, where I heard: let’s swim to the moon…let’s climb through the tide…penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide. A wild congeries of energies coalesced in my brain— what it would be like to seduce N with my own words. To sing to her, or for her, and so ravish her consciousness that all boundaries between us melted, and we could be completely lost in each other like I wanted us to be. To swim with her together, to a place of unrestrained, unselfconsciousness abandon. It was all hidden in the depths of the music— how emotions could stir the human soul into wildness, abandon, ferocity. That I could be the agent for that— the connective tissue between a mass of people and the ability to access primeval chaos, and states of unity, of definition, within the chaos— I related personally to the songs and lyrics that moved me. You reach your hand to hold me but I can’t be your guide. To have that control in the chaos— to see the truth of who the human race were, and who N was, even in the grips of the most orgiastic dementia— I wanted that masterful control of people’s emotions. As I would later approve of The Hierophant as an interesting trump in the tarot deck, I sought to find a place in me which could channel hierophantic tasks. My exposure to these crucial songs dovetailed, also, with the most baroque period of telephone madness with N. We told each other our dreams; performed strange voodoo rituals involving the Bible, stuffed animals, things written, concealed, and revealed later; explored instances, shared and otherwise, of the uncanny. Like a true, soul-level brother and sister, we couldn’t stop shaking each other’s brains. The moon and the tides existed for us together. Music, I later understood, could be cheap, as a manipulator of people’s emotions; words were more durable. And, ultimately, even with all the songs in my head, it was a shared symbolic language which wedded me to N, an encyclopedia of personal references which only we shared. The chaos in the music hovered in the background, tantalizingly but with mixed or blended intentions.

Trans

Kari Edwards was a transsexual poet and a major East Coast presence who passed away in 2006. In the months leading up to Kari's death, she published my poem Day Song, eventually released in the 2007 Dusie chap Posit, on her Transdada blog. I was honored.

Staten Island Baby

Those who know my work are aware that it has a geographic center: Philly and the Philly 'burbs. Part of When You Bit... is set in Chicago, New England makes its presence felt with some frequency, and so does New York. My 2011 Argotist E-Book Mother Earth happens to be set on Staten Island, one of the boroughs of Manhattan. This March '11 page, from Arielle Guy's Turntable/Blue Light (which is also itself based in Manhattan), is the nicest, most durable companion page to the book.  

Stray App Blues

Stray poems around published books are interesting sometimes, too. These two Apparition Poems appeared in COR (Cricket Online Review), numbers 218 and 219, but weren't quite right, I felt, either for Apparition Poems or Cheltenham. Close. Whatever book they're precisely right for, maybe a Collected in the next ten years, we'll have to wait for. But having them in COR is already nice.

Mirror Games

One of the original placements, as of 2012, and before the July '12 release of the first edition of Cheltenham, for the Cheltenham Elegies, was a Los Angeles web-journal called Quarter After. The " mirror flash" from coast to coast was unique; the great Aughts triumvirate of cities for innovative poetry in the United States was Philly-NYC-Chicago, rather than NYC-Chicago-L.A. That arrangement, Philly-NYC-Chicago, has managed to hold pretty steady for innovative poetry right up through the present moment.

Cheltenham Expands!

Cheltenham expands into a bigger, bulkier version of itself (2023).

denver syntax Part 2

My Blazevox print book Cheltenham was released on Independence Day, 2012. Leading up to its release, and that April, denver syntax published four Apparition Poems from the second half of the book: 540, 554, 557, and 563. The Teens were beginning to lay down the gauntlet of themselves.

Thanksgiving: The Teens & Continuance

Apparition Poems, which came out in 2010, is a pretty rich song-book. Rich enough that, through 2011 and 2012, new pages continued to appear featuring portions of the book, and/or outtakes from the initial edition (which have been included in later editions): from 2011, here is a page from Sawbuck Poetry, and from 2012, here are pages from On Barcelona and diode. Something to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. Happy turkey!

Seven Corners (7C): Ode On Jazz

I met Steve Halle in Henniker, doing my M.F.A. in the Boston 'burbs. Steve shared my penchant for the new, the twisted & the avant-garde in poetry, angled somewhat against most of the New England College M.F.A. faculty. We graduated together in the summer of '06. When I visited Chicago for the first time, that December, I stayed with Steve and his wife Monica in Palatine, a suburb about forty-five minutes outside the city. We read together at Myopic Books in Wicker Park (Guyville), Chicago's answer to Manayunk in Philly, and in preparation Steve uploaded this page onto his Seven Corners (7C) blog, which includes the Ode On Jazz. The Jazz Ode as of now has, in mp3 form, become a hit on a number of sound-file sites.

Hinge Time: COR (Cricket Online Review)

In the early Aughts, I met a writer/poet in Philly named J.D. Mitchell (later J.D. Mitchell-Lumsden). J.D. had migrated to Philly from the Mid-West. We commiserated, and while he was in Philly did one important reading together: with Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and under the aegis of Jeremy's There is such noise & gravity series, we read at Villanova University, Jeremy's alma mater in the Philly 'burbs, in 2001. For a number of years, we kept in touch loosely. In the mid-Aughts, and having migrated to the South-West, J.D. mentioned to me via e-mail that he and his buddies were starting an online poetry journal: Cricket Online Review. COR ran from the Aughts into the Teens, and I published in it a number of times. Most significantly, here are Apparition Poem 1558, 1571, and Sarah Israel from the Madame Psychosis section of Beams.  

Twisted Limbs

One of the exciting things about the Aughts Revolution was the growth of internet literary publishing as an enterprise, hand-over-fist and in all directions. You could publish poems in multiple editions over comparatively short increments of time, either online-to-print (as happened to me, from Jacket to the & Now Awards/Best Innovative Writing anthology) or online-to-online anthology, and what have you. From '06 to '07, my poem Twisted Limbs migrated from Andrew Lundwall's Melancholias Tremulous Dreadlocks to Halvard Johnson's Big Bridge "Death" anthology, and was none the worse for it.

Beams in Henniker

Summer '06 marked my final residency in Henniker, NH. It coincided, more or less precisely, with my debut on the As/Is group poetry blog, which is still active today. For the length of the residency, I was writing a portion of a series of poems which would end up in the Blazevox e-book Beams: Madame Psychosis. Two of these poems, lizzie mclean and eye eye eye, were placed on the As/Is blog from the NEC library during the residency. More headiness, along with a little wistfulness. I was due at Temple in August: the Aughts fast-moving train was in full-speed-ahead mode.

Luzmag in Henniker

As of early January '06, doing a residency in Henniker NH, I sent Lars Palm in Malmo some poems for an e-zine he was putting together, called Luzmag. On the night of the 9th, I got the e-mail and saw that the page was up. I walked out of the NEC library carrying an intense sense of euphoria; the Aughts Revolution was on. And it was one of my best nights in Henniker.

Hinge Time: denver syntax

My poetry pages, even pages from many years back, which happen to be valuable ones, all must find their way onto Blogger to be hinged. It's part and parcel of a matrix-system around what Blogger is for poetry. Luckily, the matrix is a capacious one, and bottomless and fathomless the right way. So: these pages appeared in Luke Simonich's denver syntax in 2010 for, respectively, Apparition Poems 1339, 1343, 1497, and 1473. Now, they may begin to come into their own.

Twenty Years and a Song

As of twenty years ago, more or less precisely today, I was living in a West Nittany Avenue sublet in State College, writing my Song for Maria (Gingerich). At the end of November '98, I left. As is nifty, the British Library Wayback Machine several times captured the first of three versions of my Argotist Online poetry page, when all it had on it was one Beam, and Song for Maria, and as it was established in the mid-Aughts. Cheers. 

Feast or Famine

I knew the Manhattan you grew up in well indeed—
the Upper West Side— gruesomely built of blocks
of primitive brick & stone. But, for you, with two
orchestra musician parents, a ticket into New York
Bohemia, bagels & lox from Zabar’s, then nothing,
popcorn, then back to Zabar’s. Whether feast or
famine, no forced schooling for you, just days at
home with paints and canvases, from a young
age, for company, hours of repetition, breakthroughs.
Always unease, that what you wanted to paint
was too formal, too advanced, for the land
of Warhol & Koons. You were ready for Philly.
PAFA, drugs, dykes, all in preparation for
finding it, your mind’s precious Rosetta Stone.

Your vision grew limpid as your life went crazy—
ensconced in the Center City beau monde,
directing traffic, wedded to an Irish witch
who wished you the worst in the end, every
distillation of visual perfection in your brain
found refulgent form, as you found time to
fall into my arms as well, & I rode analogous waves—
why it was all lost then was simple— the girls,
your girls, didn’t like it. They were threatened
by a genius they knew to be easily trounced.
I never let you go. I still won’t: the halcyon
nights we spent remain the guiding light of
my life, in this world & beyond, you & Mary,
& bruises or afterthoughts be damned, Rosetta Stoned—

Treasure Trove

As is interesting, Trove, a subsidiary of the National Library of Australia, now has, as holdings, a collection of pdfs of entire Otoliths issues, including issues 47 and 50, and 53. Issues 47 and 50 feature a handful of sonnets from my manuscript-in-progress Something Solid. Issue 53 features the Ode On Waves. Peace.

Strange Angles

Way up in the mountains, the air itself
is a drug, & hippies stand in a driveway,
smoking pipes. An inquisitive thirteen-
year-old boy tours a long, winding, high-
ceiling'd bungalow, property of two
antique dealers, stuffed full of junky
trinkets. Their redheaded daughter is
his age, and invites him into her room.
Within a few hours, he remembers nothing.
Thirty years later, a woman stands in
a driveway in Woodstock, New York,
wondering who her parents are, surprised
at what must be the altitude, skewering
her thoughts, cutting into her at strange angles.

Feel on PennSound

Feel, in Eris Temple mp3 form, on my PennSound Author Page. 

Feel on X-Peri

Feel: extended, narrative, incantatory; up on X-Peri.

Feel is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound. 

Ode On Psyche at This Charming Lab...

This recording of the Ode On Psyche was made at a This Charming Lab reading at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia on March 27, 2004. Early Aughts odal ecstasy.

Chimes, 2nd Ed.

The 2nd, emended edition of Chimes, now in a newer, more permanent place.

Chimes, 2nd ed. on mp3. 

Answered Prayers: The 90s

In the days before the arrival in my life of Mary Harju and Abby Heller-Burnham, I approached high art tasks as a kind of lone gunman in the world. This led to a sense of isolation which was difficult to conquer. The determination was there (and redemptive) enough, however, so that a body of work was in place by the time they showed up. During the four years I spent in State College ('94-'98), I gradually migrated from a disposition rather casual in regards to the more serious side of art to one more itself more serious. What I might be reading at any time in State College was miscellaneous— not yet ready for the Romantics and Milton, the life-rafts I found included the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine) and other texts in their tradition, not to mention the philosophy texts I was compelled to study in school. The Symbolist sense of the hallucinogenic or the phantasmagoric— that human life consists of a series of dream-like vignettes, looped together only by visionary consciousness— informs Answered Prayers and Willard Preachers, the collection of the best of what I wrote in Nineties State College. Here, we see the lone gunman sensibility shot through also with a youthful fascination with intoxicants which I had going then. 

On a life-level, my relationship with Jennifer Strawser, which occupied most on '96, was about two renegade kids being banditos in the world. It was us, we felt, and our total destruction of class and sexual boundaries in all directions, against everyone. Written from the perspective of a young poet maudit, who, moreover, had reasons to feel a deep sense of foreboding, Room 510 Atherton Hilton and The dawn broke over our bodies both make the case for a sensibility impressed with both an ambiance of enchantment and of damnation. Jennifer herself wasn't exactly creative, the way Mary and Abby were to be; but she was a punk, a rebel, and also a soul tormented by a lot of depth she didn't know what to do with. She was also a blonde goddess, and one of the bigger sirens in State College history; as was Emily Dunlop, the heroine of Perfect. Maria Gingerich, who adorns the cover of the book, was too, though a brunette.

Lone gunman though I was, my years in State College were informed also by a compelling interest in theater. The reason was a collective on campus known as Outlaw Playwrights. Outlaw Playwrights, every Thursday night at 11:15 pm, in a black box theater in the main theater building near North Halls where I lived, presented a one-act play written by...whoever! Sometimes by theater majors, sometimes by theater graduate students, sometimes by lone gunmen (or girls) such as myself from anywhere in the State College populace. It took me a few years to become integrated enough with the Outlaws crowd to have them begin producing my one-acts. I spent those years experimenting with different approaches to writing for theater. The approach I settled on was an experimental one— to push at the boundaries of what theater writing could do or be, rather than settle for the representation of conventional dramatic situations. Dada Circus, produced in September '98 a few months before I permanently left State College, is not exactly French Symbolism put on the stage. Rather, it's a hodge-podge of different approaches, meant to convey a sense of comic absurdity, and also the shadow of the existential, of what it means to "act" in the world. Mortuary Puppies, produced in February '99, by which time I was living in Manhattan, is a linguistic free-for-all, which I invented out of thin air. What it explores is the dimensions and dimensional weirdness of pure language, and poetic language, fused with a dramatic imperative, but an unspecific one. It was an experiment, to see if poetry and abstraction could work onstage. From what I was told in '99, it was more or less a success.

The lone gunman era of the 90s was marked by ambivalence. I had committed myself to an artist's life-path, but distinctions between the high and the low were still tentative for me. In terms of concrete guidance I might've received on these levels from other human beings, there was none. I had no tutors or mentors. Because that space remained a blank one, my life as a writer and a creative artist was about coping with loneliness, and feeling my way along. By 1997, still based in State College, I had made the acquaintance of Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, who was about to begin publishing seriously, including poems set in the 90s. When Abby and Mary arrived in the early Aughts, also, it was easier both to feel warmth and to express warmth to others. Others arrived as well, compadre figures who made Aughts Philly such a vital ride. Yet, the weird luminosity and demented stoner quality of 90s State College, illuminated by a few warm flash-points, was fertile ground for producing some writing of note.    

Edition Consolidation

Through ways and means inhering in the Digital Age, these two edition consolidation pdfs now occupy cyber-space: one conflating the two existent editions of Posit ('07/'17), one conflating the two existent editions of The White Album ('09/'18). And a second front for Posit 2 Editions, and a second for TWA.

Eris Temple: New & Selected

The new New & Selected: just something that's around.

Ode On Psyche (2001)

Sitting in Psyche’s parlor, I almost touched her—

    she stretched herself towards me, cat-like,

closing ice-blue eyes full of crocodile water,

     & her stomach bare, & her hair blue-striped—

like a Sphinx she reposed, with a riddle of flesh,

    to be solved in tongue-touching tenderness,

         despite Cupid shooting off on the phone—

like a moon she arose, & her lips mine enmeshed,

       I clutched, clasped her in a teenage caress,

          her Mom didn’t notice the moans.

If youth were faithful, Eros be damned,

     Cruel Cupid would never leave home—

back seats would stop rocking, beds be shammed,

      & Venus would go home alone—

in parks, in bars, the war went on,

    in which all is fair but fairness,

       all full of joy but the spurned—

in darkened cars, on new mown lawns,

     enraptured or raptly embarrassed,

        ripe-full of the pleasures that burned.

Years passed ‘til I saw Psyche again,

     ripe for a time & then jaded—

we kissed, talked, she bade me a friend,

      her beauty unworried, untainted—

no elfin grot enclosed her, no cave,

    Manhattan she recklessly roamed,

       courted by rich men & thieves—

wild eyes pin-wheeled on parties, raves,

      small morning hours her home,

          for nothing & no one she grieves.

I fell at her feet, she flung me away,

     her friend came, some E hits to buy—

I tossed on a tape, she laughed as it played,

     “Roxannneeee” came the heart-rending cry—

she counted five hundreds, hid them away,

    pulled out her poems, asked me to read them,

        walking her friend to the door—

I weighed all my options, if I should stay,

       holding the poems, not wanting to read them,

          feeling absurd on her floor.

She padded back softly, opened a window,

     stretched herself out on the sagging bed—

I moved in beside her, close as a shadow,

      moved in to touch her with joy & dread—

she stopped me at her silver belt,

      sensing why my words were soft,

           not about to blow her stolid cover—

I couldn’t burn her surface off,

     couldn’t make her armor melt,

         that wouldn’t let me be her honest lover.

Stoned in the gloaming, dead on my feet,

      the Village I hit & then ran—

did she like me, or did my bluster defeat

      my manhood, slipped out of her hands?

To her body, taut with muscle,

    a goddess of bed, Venus unseen to her lover,

         notes torn from shadows of sighs—

my body, all I’d hustled,

       seemed irrelevant, dead, & like a crab with no cover,

            crawled into the “D” train, & cried.

The Ode On Psyche originally appeared in American Writing: A Magazine in 2002. 

Flaming Red Hair

The Last Drop lost its joie de vivre in 2009— Dani
enforced this, acting out a script (tease/taunt/topple)
written for her by South Philly goons. Why I'm now
bemused by the gaucherie of Dani's gestures— cheap,
black, low-cut dresses worn to reveal ample cleavage,
flaming red hair styled always in plummeting cascades—
is that in '18, no one's titillated by anything, let alone Dani—
negligee stores derelict. How I pined for her on those nights
the grim reality of the recession still hadn't sunk in— as though
the revelation of her breasts could deliver me from shadows
which impinged, but (it seemed) possibly only temporarily.
Once, in her Pine Street apartment, she bothered to walk
around before me in a bath towel. Why was I a gentleman?
The twist in the tale was to stick the thing in, & win.

P.S. Another twist in this tale.

Mary Harju '18

Ode On Love (2003)

What is the essence of a too-brief kiss?
   The rigor of reaching the thing-in-itself,
from subject to object, chaos to bliss,
    our frail intuition of heavenly health?
Our love is not molecules, dumbly colliding,
    nor it it knowledge, formal and static,
       nor it it accident, reasoned and plumbed—
it's real, meta-rational, soaring and gliding,
    felt like an earthquake, bringing up panic,
       taking our parts and achieving a sum.

The greater part of love is sacrifice—
    flesh intermingled, tensing and tingled,
this is the secret I learn from your eyes.
    Giving my body- knotted, single,
tiny eruptions that come from my tongue—
    plunging down surface, slicking the flesh,
       thoughtless as leopards or hurricane winds—
watching you shudder, watching you come,
     rapt in the throes of an innocent death,
         giving my life to an inch of your skin.

Thus, we trade in secure oblivion
    for reckless reality, messy and fleeting.
Such is the cosmos: creation, carrion,
    motions of molecules merging and meeting.
Nothing is lost but notions of self-ness,
    hard ideations that closet and clatter,
       rages of ego that strain at their walls—
nothing is gained but a sense of the deathless,
    "there-ness" of spirit, "there-ness" of matter,
        ultimate "there-ness" that scares as it calls.

Eratio 26: The White Album (2nd Edition)

The new issue of Eratio (26) features, in its entirety, the second edition of the e-book The White Album, initially released by Ungovernable Press in 2009. Many thanks to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. 

If Life Is Making Your Head Bleed...

...then beat a hasty retreat back to 1488.

Ode On Jazz

Physical beauty, Formal Rigor of God—
spiritual beauty, Economy of God—
Natural Will, Transcendent Will,
Facile Will in all its’ dismal “there-ness”—

Piano broken chords breaking down space
like watching bits of paper collect,
contained in a 12-bar blues; root
notes you tend to lean on,
or maybe a honking minor third,
a harmonic multi-colored sharp…

Follow your compulsion into flurries,
clusters of connecting phrases,
then a pause to sanctify as the progression
resolves after lingering on the fifth
for the appointed time—
pentatonics mainly w/ some suspensions,
sheets of sound, there it is...trademark leaps
only found in Coltrane,
like watching a rainbow erupt
out of the placid bowels of street-lakes,
sparrows in the gutters,
Eliot-esque alienation syncopated
impossibly high & mighty…

Repeat the repetition now into major scale—
Ionian gold, major-third suspensions again,
almost midnight for tremulous trees,
also hipsters, flights of birds, rabbis
in the wilderness as blues ends; here’s a quicker
quirkier jarring bit to cut
your teeth on…

Base bottom notes natural like ferns,
ride the ride cymbal like musical fellatio,
roll w/ rolls & kick-drum ejaculations,
what Hart Crane heard in bridges,
only blues (so bridge seldom comes),
stasis achieved nicely replicates movements,
bowel, kidney, heart-beat, daring snare of lip-ness,
thickness, quickness,
get it all out for all of us into the brick-laden city,
mutter of exhausted midnight buses
as vibrato notes shiver, miniature
solos on the toms creates energy
of emptiness among the weird abundance,
concluding w/ roll on the snare, now bass
also investigates metaphysical space,
not so much implacable as inexhaustible
eruptions; spring of autumn,
autumn of spring…

Seasons of balance, compromise,
away from extremes; Middle Path exteriorized,
oh piano on a minor seventh which bespeaks
longing for a more ethereal world,
elegiac as the last apple of October, eaten
by a Halloween camp-fire, beyond blues
of Earth into cadence, dying fall of pure moon,
ravaged, torn from the throat of persistence,
mute existence destroyed completely
and on fire, a universe of fingers & mouths,
looking down the tide of Death into eternity,
square-shouldered & erect,
freezing into whims of Ultimate “there-ness”,
beyond ordinary notions of quotidian abyss
in one long sitting pow-wow peace-pipe corn-cob
wholesome dinner of Voidness,
but insinuated only to drive away singularity….

Jazz is plural,
they give you a space, show you its’ contours,
allow you to move around & drown
if you want over hilltops of remorse, created
by Love or dolorous longing & especially
Central Parks of the soul & intellectual Bordello
life cut & pasting its’ bleak outline over rooftops
& bluebirds —

Side-Armed

She said, undressing, to love is to be
an orphan hiding from a hurricane in
a church made of glass. Impractical, I
said, & I don't like metaphors in bed
anymore, in my old age, any more than I
like spiders. Then, as we made love, she
said, you're an orphan, hiding from a hurricane.
Oh, I said, are you a church made of glass?
Well, she said, I'm a little cracked, aren't I?
Outside, cars slithered by, oblivious, exhaust
fumes tingeing humid summer air. You're
cracked alright, & so is your sister, I said,

baited her to collapse onto my chest,
throwing stones from my glass church, side-armed—

so, she had me on her chopping
block. A month later: the City Hall court
yard blazed with summer heat. We
were over, that was it. She wanted,
she said, some order & discipline in
her life. Chinatown simmered under
our feet; I looked (futilely) for a Go
board; she bought some incense. She
turned quickly, I tried to kiss her; she
resisted; it was close. Two brains tried
to coalesce into one, about love & us.
Epochs passed; I've got order & discipline
right here, in these lines, Ruth. I trust
you understand. Much of the rest is dust.

Philly Free School '18

Of the girls at CHS...

...few would've believed that ten years ago this month I'd be doing this task. 

Hearkening Back to 1342

In recessional times, people find it difficult to connect the right way. 

Walkin' On Down the Hall

As of almost June, and the new Otoliths page, I've reached a moment of reckoning concerning the manuscript I'm working on called Something Solid. The manuscript, as it subsists now, is comprised of three sections: the first covers the Nineties, the second, the swingin' Aughts, and the third are miscellaneous poems that cover a range of times and themes. Most of the poems are, or could be called, sonnets; and yet they have so little in common with traditional sonnets and sonnet writing that they might just as well be called fourteen line poems. I don't honor sestet and octave conventions; the volta may happen at any time in the poem; and, most importantly, an impulse is honored in the Something Solid poems which has nothing to do with lyricism, and more to do with a hard-bitten, earthy, empirical devotion to the darker side of human life and truth. The poems are not "little songs," they're glass shards. And the next step is a fourth section I am planning but haven't written yet. I want it to cohere around a central theme, an event, individual or time-period, and harness the rest of the book's energy into a burning, laser-like focus on...we'll see what later.

Ode On Jazz: I'll Be Your Mirror

Over the last few months, the Ode On Jazz, as was taped at KWH at Penn in April '04 and broadcast on WXPN, has shown up in a few new places and continued to do well in a few others. There's a few things I'd like to say about the poem. The first is this: a theory I have that if the Ode On Jazz has gained a certain amount of popularity, it can be attributed to the poem being not only about music, but intensely musical itself. In the Jazz Ode, as can be the case in Keats' Odal Cycle, the musicality of the language (melopoeia) is the basic purport or gist of the poem's appeal. Just the way that music is meant to act as a balm on people's emotions, the Ode On Jazz is designed to do an analogous task. It can thus resonate with people's emotions in a way that harsher, less musical, or more intellectual poetic material cannot. The musical task of the Jazz Ode, when I wrote it in the fall of '02, was clear: to translate the Bach-level density and richness of musical expression found in the Keats' Odal Cycle (1819/1820) into the forms and specific dynamic richness of jazz music, as manifest in Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the rest. 

Poems in Otoliths (50)

Five poems out now in Otoliths 50. And from Otoliths 50 in PennSound. Many thanks to Mark Young.

Here is Otoliths 50 in its entirety. And in print.

Listenlight

Also strange, in a recession, to see what gets preserved and what doesn't. 

Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

Molly strips at The Office
in Center City Philly: high-
school drop-out, pot-fiend,
child in second grade, puffed
up from downing lager during
down-time. She told me her
story because Desmond beats
the hell out of her, she needs
a better gig. Health insurance
does not exist for her or the kid,
she lives in fear of Italian Market
ruffians bearing down on little Bradley.
I brought her back to my pad,
fucked her, told her I would gladly
be a father to Bradley if I had
the time, or the money, but I don't.

Hanging Out in 1613

In recessional times, folks, you never know who you might run into.

Apparition Poem #1488 (French Translation)

magasin d'alcool, linoléum

étage, vin qu'elle a choisi

            était toujours rouge foncé,

            arrière-goût sombre et amer,

            contrairement à son torse nu,

                        qui a dedans

                        tout ce qui a été

                        d'ivresse

manquer terriblement quelqu'un,

à la fois être amoureux, comme

elle coupe les choses parce que

            elle pense qu'elle doit ...

            torture exquise, c'est

            un torse nu différent,

(le mien) c'est incarnadine-

New Jersey Blood

I.
The first bedlam-infested Free School show:
I caught Jeremy doing his reconnaissance routine,
ribbing audience to leave. I didn’t realize
then who Jeremy was, where he came from
(South Jersey), & why he worked, in Philly,
to stay (& remain) small. The Highwire shows
were too high for his, & Jersey’s, leveled lowliness;
who had no recourse but to (hostilely) spy on us.
New Jersey squirmed, itchy for its Philly;
Jeremy slunk back, wine in hand, began snapping
pictures again. As he knelt to get a special
angle on Mike Land, who stood reading at
the podium, I remembered Avalon as a teenager,
New Jersey at midnight— waves into emptiness.
 
II.
The dirge droned over the dimly lit dance
floor, “Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before,”
& Tara, a bowl-headed Jersey redhead, heaved
against me. Suburban Jersey slowed her pace
like a sprained ankle; tall tales, excuses abounded
of potential husbands, other elaborate entanglements,
making it dodgy to take her too seriously.
She sought ins with us; we always said yes;
yet we bled something out of her style & self-possession.
Mike Land, who (oddly) was no dancer, drank
our grungy group under the table, in a short-lived joint
off of Rittenhouse Square— Tara made 
a gesture to her girlfriend to step outside. “It’s
a conspiracy;” I kidded Mike, “bring on the shots.”

Butler Pike

The entropy, enervation of a recession—
consciousness rots, abraded by the obtrusiveness
of a dull, jagged populace— I stroll down
Butler Pike, snapping pictures of the houses,
& the buildings penetrate into my brain,
more than the people. Architecture is its
own phenomenological explosion, occupying
space inside/outside the mind, standing in now,
for better or for worse, for the people who
could occupy similar space— what I notice,
as sentience emanating from the buildings,
is that architecture is how the human race
expresses its relationship to nature. Here,
our choice is a sturdy yet ethereal harmony,

formidable, eerie, which foresees who might
occupy the houses, & yet chooses to manifest
the ornate over the plebeian, or merely practical.
When the ornate (the aesthetic) is set in place
in the Philadelphia suburbs, it is an expression,
also, of the region's apparitional vision, relation to
a wider world than even material nature; out
into physical space, into the cosmos, against
the restraining force of the earthly. So, in a
roundabout way, I get closer to the individuals
who have planned or charted the buildings
through allowing them (both) to seep into my brain.
Relationships, in recessional times, abstract
themselves— I stretch towards acceptance, gratitude.

From Otoliths 47, print edition, p. 76

Equations: 2nd Edition

I am proud to announce the second, emended print edition of Equations on Lulu. And here you can read Equations 2nd ed. online. Many thanks to Raymond Farr.

P.S. Equations, 2nd ed. on mp3. The Jade Episodes, 2nd ed., on PennSound.