Wednesday, October 30, 2019

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."


Friday, October 25, 2019

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. 

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

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.

Wednesday, October 2, 2019

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?"