Ry Mullen: A Collage

Ry Mullen: A Collage attempts an entry point into the literary 2020s. 

After Andrew Marvell

Why I haven't featured After Andrew Marvell here before: I'm stumped. 

Winter Fragments

You start a would-be
      become a should be
but you never could-be

      because you don't
know what to be means

..................................................

Stopped for a funeral, stopped
      stopping, waited for it to stop,
it was my funeral & I left, dead

...................................................

Never known me,
     but I can guess the
  number of times I've
turned blackly around
     on a crowded street,
   wind-whipped, and
seen myself in a store-
     front window & then
  known more than I
did before about

what might be worth buying.

....................................................

I am is
back to
basics,

a tent
put up,
taken

down,
heaved
into a

back
seat, as
if used,

never
having
been

slept in.

.........................................

I was raking leaves,
I found a volume of
Shakespeare, I raked
it, I found a volume
of Milton, ditto, &
just kept raking until
I hit Jonathan Swift,
who took my rake,
raked me over coals
too hot to be blackened,
told me to go back to
Chaucer, what a rake-
nothing was finished,
nothing was raked.

...........................................

Listen to the Devil: A Mini-Opera

I’ve never listened to the Devil… 
he’s whispering in my ear now, 
telling me about chance— play the cards, 
don’t pretend you can deal the hand… 
I never tried to deal the hand, I tell him, 
because the deck has no card with a poet’s face. 
The Devil laughs at me, dumps a load of press 
clippings in a bag I marked Don’t touch—  
………………………………………….
now, it’s so cloudy we can only perch on rigid, 
bare ruined branches. We cannot fathom 
what the surface should be, why the inelegant 
is preponderant. Red flags whip our livers. Red 
hot prods in crowded rings circle us. There can be no 
twittering hope without notions of liberty, as means 
of using flies, flying, flown over the protests on Market Street.    
…………………………………………………
When you lift a Coca-Cola, you are pulling a lever 
for entropy. The cloying tickle of high fructose corn syrup— 
all dreams dried into anodyne.  Goods may be America’s 
heart, en masse; what in them beats? Sounds of horses 
hooves, trampling down corporate dirt, all in a bone-piled 
graveyard. Sounds of whinnies, conflagrations, blinker-viewed 
social situational Waterloos, & you don’t know (they won’t 
let you) who’s standing behind who, or you. 
…………………………………………..
An old, mad, blind, despised, dying king, 
says the country. We protect imagery, say others. 
Belief is testament to goodness, rigidity
means faithfulness to a spiel we all know 
like simple algebra, and that can be equated 
to squares. We are bellwethers of chicken egg 
home fries, I am a clucking and a shucking 
and jiving, you’re alive to little red roosters 
too lazy to crow for day. No facile Geist for 
this Zeit. It’s a time for knickknacks picked up like cordite. Shoot. 
……………………………………………
No Blogosphere back-draft, 
only post ahead, into cacophony: 
wire, networks, new wild west; ropes, holsters. 
Age-old books; angst, anemic. It’s sexily red, 
moral/ethical oblivion, hemmed in, quick as spurt, 
across oceans: thermo-genic press coverage, 
safe, free; corpses, numbers, brain lotions. 
…………………………………………..
That notion, “that I’m suffering well,” 
must be in Plato somewhere, or Nietzsche— 
now, it’s in you too. You don’t succeed in laughing 
at the shard-sharp world; it’s jammed too deep 
in your throat, with suffocated senators, 
black-robed judges, tentative press secretaries. 
You only cough up butt-ends based on others’ 
words. Laughter is solely for surprise autopsies— 
of an atrophied surface, what’s under incomprehensible 
to most, who know, very precisely, just how most they are.
………………………………………….
A gift everyone gets is a Pat Boon(e). 
Death & taxes are both Pat Boon(e)s. 
Truth, as always, is less pat. Truth has 
more to do with what I really glean 
from you, which is not a political (exactly), 
is (rakishly, richly) anti-politics, & is 
conveyed by swift skin-kicks. There is no 
place for this in the full frontal assault land 
we’ve been Shanghai’d into, & 
the dissemination of which is America’s ultimate Pat Boon(e).
………………………………………..
a soul's incision 
into your cerebellum 
which i can fill gingerly, not spill
onto a nail-bed you carefully made to ensure maximum viscosity

crank & creak the senator speaks
…………………………………………….

Book #13

Turns out: the recently released Argotist E-Book The Great Recession is my thirteenth book. To me, it marks a sea-change in both how I relate to my own books and how I relate to literature in general. Those who know Wordsworth in depth have seen: the Argotist blurb for GR borrows liberally from Wordsworth's famous Preface (to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads). It also takes a textual approach which shies away from the personal; or, as Wordsworth would have it, from the egotistical sublime. For the duration, my books henceforth will be dictated by an approach which takes for granted the at least intermittent desirability of staying "clean" of first person singular influences. So that: those who follow my work know that Something Solid is 75% written. I now am stating my intention to craft an initial 25% which does an advanced version of the tricks GR does. This, rather than making SS a paean to the personal, in a thoroughgoing way. 

New Argotist Online E-Book: The Great Recession

The new Adam Fieled Argotist Online e-book is The Great Recession. Many thanks to Jeffrey Side.

"The Great Recession focuses on several specific issues in poetry: the first, and most salient, is an attempt to rid the text of first person singular influences, and deliver a series of vignettes or miniaturized dramatic monologues, narrated by characters attempting to cope with the harsh, desolate landscape, the abrasions and depreciations, of the last decade to pass in the United States. This era the U. S. press often calls The Great Recession. The text should thus demonstrate a kind of cleanliness, apart from the ego concerns and obsessions of the poet at hand. The second issue is ancillary to the first: once characters are established within poems, how to make them interesting, and how to make the incidents and situations they are forced to confront emotionally and intellectually resonant on a wide basis. The third is what kind of language specifically this textual ambition calls for."

from Otoliths 25

This random page from Otoliths 25 (2012) features a poem from a series I began and never completed in any reasonable way. Still not sure what to do with it. 

Hybrid Page: On Barcelona

Literature online: authors devote web-pages in journals to sections of books. Standard operating procedure. What makes this 2012 page, from Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona, unique, is that it's a hybrid, featuring several poems from The Great Recession and a few from Apparition Poems as well.

Harrisburg

The sky yawned streaks of clouds; I

settled with my modest luggage on the curb.
Bus-engines growled. I spotted her;
she followed behind me as I went to buy
pretzels. Well, Stephanie, I thought, here
we go again. You’re here, in Harrisburg,
by accident, right? I would’ve noticed by
now if you were going to Penn State. What
is it you’re looking for; an apology? Is it
that hard to accept that I escaped you,
the Cheltenham creeps? An emissary from
Hades; that’s how you appear to me—
domed forehead, deliberate dourness.
You’re not for me to address. Next—

"as if, Adam; as if I had any idea how to handle
you, or us, or what Cheltenham had turned into
by then. You: always special, always different,
always such a fierce disruption against our lives.
Remember— I never liked you much anyway.
There's no room for special people where I
come from. What's special is the order of
who gets placed where when, & why. So, as I
followed you out that stupid door, it's with
no special anything. Philosophy? Where I
come from, its this: where you come from is
who you are, whether you like it or not. You
were lower than us, lower, & still are, you little shit—
& that luggage you had was pretty cheap, wasn't it?"

Deep Noir '19

Recessional times, such as are currently being endured in the United States; times of financial, cultural, and general societal instability; are inherently dark. Dark times call for dark art; when it’s literature, dark writing. Sometime mid-century XX, the appellation “noir” was affixed to all forms of creativity heavily tinted with darkness, brooding self-consciousness, and chiaroscuro perceptions of the world. What "noir" signifies, in popular culture, is an aesthetic condition of extreme stylization. Look at the elements which configure, say, the average Raymond Chandler novel, and which do not change from book to book; stylized elements— a hard-bitten detective (Marlowe) pursuing a treacherous villain, encountering a standard, cemented-into-place cast of characters. There's the coy femme fatale, attached somehow to a criminal underworld or with underworld connections, seductive nonetheless; dirty and double-dealing cops (police officers), who may or may not be trustworthy, and in on certain hits, games, “rackets”; and innocent bystanders drawn into matrixes of crime and hustle against their will. What stylization implies, as a kind of mold for artistic forms to fit into, is homogeneity, and the solidity of homogeneity— we, as readers, need never wonder what to expect from Raymond Chandler. To the extent that more serious artists develop individual and individualized aesthetic concerns and formal-thematic, consistent topoi, stylization in their work becomes inevitable— this is how we know Picasso from Manet, Manet from David; or, in literature, Byron from Browning, Amis from Updike; etc.

If I am interested in "noir," and in poaching "noir" from American popular culture and granting it another context, it is because the stylistic elements of my literary interests share, in the kinds of moods, impressions, and ambience generated, something with noir, and noir stylistic conventions. The entire edifice of twenty-first century cultural Philadelphia coheres around a set of imperatives, which lean towards the revelation of shadows rather than light, dark tones and hues rather than bright ones, and labyrinthine complexities rather than scintillating clarities. Levels of cognitive awareness, represented in books and paintings which seek to boast some philosophical import, particularly in regards to ontological awareness in the midst of extreme (even pornographic) vulgarity, separate our Philly drastically from the rote, pop culture consonant facility of Chandler's books.

Indeed, the chiasmus between noir and serious, sustained intellection is, as far as I know, a novel mode of stylistic inquiry and exploration. One equivalent of Chandler's shocking plot-twists and peripeteias are linguistic innovations which multiply meanings and make key words and phrases serve dual, or triple, ends; so that these words and phrases are set in place, figuratively, to split the heads of their audience, towards recognitions of hidden semantic-thematic depth, and against surface ("surface-y") orientations and sensibilities. That is why I call this version of noir "deep noir"— Philly Free School art is crafted, on some semantic levels, from similar molds— towards chiaroscuro and the enchantment of multiple meanings. It is also easy to notice that the work being referred to is, in fact, haunted by coy femme fatales, dirty-dealers, and an interrogating, interrogative protagonist ("I"), who attempts to sift his way through mazes of psycho-cognitive, and psycho-affective, complications. The pieces shudder towards satori-like head-split semantic inversions; and whether any give satori ends its poem or not, the ultimate stylistic effect is to startle, unsettle, and re-wire the minds of the audience who reads them. Chandler, in a pop culture context sans intellectual heft, is far less unsettling. Century XXI Philly creates mysteries and remains centered in them, in a negatively capable fashion, while Chandler's level of stylization insures easy, unchallenging comprehension. Still, I like "noir" as a stylistic formulation here nonetheless, because this imagined landscape creates and maintains a shaded ambience, which is recognizably itself from artwork to artwork. I have spoken of the "body heat" passed from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, in spite of the new century's reservations— and, as one level of inheritance which takes what I have envisioned to a secure hermeneutic locale, "noir" and "deep noir" both work surprisingly well.

As to the issue of why, in 2019, a "noir" aesthetic, inclusive of formal-thematic depth, would be of wide interest once placed into circulation— the reason is fairly simple. On many levels and in many variegated contexts, few sensibilities other than "noir" could be generally and widely representative in America, against the facile breeziness of post-modernity. The Great Recession has created a climate, both within and without aesthetics, of entrenched circumstantial darkness and shadowy languor. Inspired or not by political developments (which seem to evince not only corruption but flatulence, at regular intervals), untold, unreported catastrophes may have wiped out entire sectors of the population— yet the media chirps away as though nothing has changed. American pop culture is in an advanced state of erosion and deterioration— there are no new rock stars anymore, and new American cinema not only isn't selling but is divested, for the populace, of the perceived glamour which used to enable it to sell. The secret passageways which used to make America interconnect have largely been severed; even as the Internet has created new labyrinths and passageways which often amount to a subversive conspiracy against the normative.

The truly noir facet of the Internet is that it allows the American public to understand how and why it has been duped; and what is left of a thinking American populace is cognizant of these things. What I call the Philly Free School (P.F.S. Post is Philly Free School Post) was created to hold down a cultural fort radically on the side of serious culture and thoughtful inquiry, scribed by individuals from within the bounds of the United States and elsewhere. For those watching closely, and who know how the American literary landscape has largely been configured over long and short periods of time, this congeries of circumstances is a rebellion and an innovation. That the Philly Free School is not only indigenously American (if standing, aesthetically, on the shoulders of historical Europe) but indigenously Philadelphian is another innovation— the creation of literary Philadelphia, in the twenty-first century, has to do with the noir elements already built into Philly as a mythological construct.

Philadelphia, much more so than New York (which offers, to experienced eyes, nothing labyrinthine beneath a bold, brusque surface) is perpetually ravaged by contradictions and conflicting internal imperatives— the Main Line surface/patina is all about the prestige of old money, while Conshohocken and King of Prussia boast world-class architecture; South Philly prizes blue-collar, ethnic simplicity, but falsely and disingenuously (against the complex and baroque machinations of an active South Philly underworld); underworlds also appear at least partly in other suburbs supposed to be middle-class, and standardized to American suburban norms, which they are only intermittently; and the architecture in Center City Philadelphia is also world-class. The "noir" sense, at the end of things, is that Philadelphia is a shadow-plagued city, and what you see is certainly not what you get here. The representatively Philadelphian surface/depth tensions are what make the city fertile ground for serious art, rooted in formidably intellectual narratives, slanted towards the stylized chiaroscuro of noir symbolization and signification.

Make no mistake— Philadelphia makes a more than reasonable microcosm of the United States, because Philadelphia has many things to hide. Every thoughtful Philadelphian has their own Philadelphia narrative. That Philadelphia is often misrepresented on the surface is one of its noir allure-features. Philadelphia, in fact, may be taken as the secret capitol of America, and much of America's internal darkness is exteriorized and embodied with precision in our labyrinths here. From a certain angle, for Philadelphia to produce representative American art is no stretch at all— higher art requires higher faithfulness to complex human truth. Because complexities are difficult, both to perceive and to assimilate, they are, or can be, dark. If my version of noir borrows stylistically from the likes of Raymond Chandler, the substance of the art is uniquely set within its own thematic manner/mode of confused, perplexing darkness. Yet attempts to unearth deep truth, when performed skillfully, are always cathartic, as pitiful and terrible as the deep ("noir") truth can be, and in this, this newfangled art finds its strength and metier.

Jacket 40 Apps in Trove (NLA)

The Apparition Poems in Jacket 40, caught in Trove's (NLA's) Wayback Machine.

E-Mail: Kelly Campbell (Wofford College) to Adam Fieled, 2008, i.e. Beams

Syllabus: English 412: U of Oregon: Fall 2009

from Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Jell-O Mold

The Universe is a jell-o mold-
set, yet possible to pierce through
in novel ways, once you understand
the script- once every possible
change in every possible atomized
bit of matter has set in with the peach,
apple, pear pieces, improvise a symphony
against the surface, just firm enough
to liberate sense- rivers, trees, sky,
grass, all have a way of getting there
you will never know- the brain casts
itself into space, as, somewhere
beyond the Universe, something
eats us for dessert- tasty?

The Byron Book

I'm now in the habit of calling Opera Bufa "the Byron book." The Byronic levels built into Opera Bufa as a text are there: playfulness, whimsy, raciness, spiky humor, satire, an emphasis on a light (sometimes deceptively light) approach to textuality; and the weird sense of tumult around some of the (scandalous!) circumstances the book has generated is Byronic, too. I'm ready to flee to Italy, or Chicago...

Port of Call

Another UKWA port of call for The Posit Trilogy, and more. 

The Four Quarters Magazine ('13): From The Great Recession

Two Poems on Ex-Ex-Lit

Two new lyric poems on Ex-Ex-Lit. Many thanks to the editors. 

No Con In Consolidate

Another few perma-venues for my Argotist Online poetry page, with (now) the ur-page offline. 

from Greying Ghost Press blog

Highest Review(s) Placement

Here 'tis. Thanks again to Jeffrey.

Highwire Gallery: Calendar: September 2008

Highwire Gallery: Calendar: February 2009

Facebook: The Esthetic Apostle: 05-01-18

Philadelphia Weekly: 3-26-03

Prose intro: Stoning the Devil: KWH: This Charming Lab: March 27, 2004

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.

Highwire Gallery: Blurb: Philly Free School: Philly Fringe Festival '05

Highwire Gallery: Calendar: September 2005

Highwire Gallery: Calendar: July 2004

Hannah's Blogroll 2 (2006)

Blogroll: HannahMiller.net (2005)

Advert: April 2005: HannahMiller.net

Stoning the Devil (Wayback Machine): Random Notes: May 2007

Closing Remarks: P.F.S. Presents (Philly Free School Presents): 05-12-07

from The Philadelphia Independent 12: On Improving Philly

from Philadelphia Weekly: 05-14-03: Between the Covers

from Philadelphia City Paper: 10-06-05

Bowery Poetry Club (NYC): Calendar: July/August 2005

Closing Remarks (Philly Free School Post): Poetry Incarnation '05

Opening Remarks (Adam Fieled): Poetry Incarnation '05

Addendum: Cheltenham Elegy #420

The craftier angle is to hear them: hover
in the doorway, in total darkness, hands
held behind your back. She takes a stand
against him in the shadows, as her lover
flails, barefoot on carpeting: jabs, another—

these two miserable adolescents, tokens
of the dirge that was this tepid Philly 'burb,
clown choruses pining for images, curbed
words replaced with scripts, minds unbroken
finally meeting ends in winter rain, soaking,

drenched with venom against the solid.
What to look for: register his life-force
energies against hers, for the first course
her rhetoric takes against him, her stolid
defiance, sharply defined, against knowledge

that she's veered over into eerie wilderness.
It's true, the abyss laughs around her, & him,
but she's slightly more bound up in it, thinned,
bruised beneath surfaces to embrace the abyss,
all he needs is a caress given really, a kiss—

he won't get it. What he'll get is the meaning
of the surface she's chosen: bone, dust, webs.
Yet they stand exalted as they taste the dregs—
someone's watching elsewhere, & scheming.
Transmutation must happen, past dreaming—

that spirit, against the animal, is real in them.
The doorway is hinged to show you two souls—
unvarnished, electric, whether riddled with holes
or not, & love of a kind is being made, & gems.
The craftiest angle is not you, if you will, but them—

Highwire Gallery: Calendars: January/April 2005

Post to Buffalo Poetics List: Poetry Incarnation '05

Hannah Miller on Poetry Incarnation '05

Highwire Gallery: Calendars: October/November 2004

Graphic Art: Fliers: Outlaw Playwrights: 1998/1999