A Note Part 3: Siren's Silence

Important to note: the Nineties revolutionary energy I noticed, seemed to manifest in spasms, and sporadically. For instance, with the time I spent in Manhattan in the late Nineties, I didn't sense that dynamism, that tempestuousness there. Center City Philly, in the Nineties, seemed to be in and out of the game. One manifestation which had to be noticeable to me, who was also active about doing Center City on my semester breaks, was the literary journal Siren's Silence. Siren's Silence was oriented around South Philadelphia, with a perma-hinge to South Street. I wandered into a Siren's Silence reading at Philly Java Company, which was then on 4th Street between South and Lombard, in 1997, and struck up a relationship.

Siren's Silence poetry editor, and flagship poet, Vlad(len) Pogorelov, was then churning out a brand of Bukowski-ish street poetry, tinged with an unexpected lyricism, which to me typifies Center City in the Nineties. This ferment pushed Philly into a place where poetry could be more real, more raw, more visceral, than it had been in America for some time. It paved the way for what I did in the Aughts, even as the Center City music scene remained relatively stagnant, as did theater (not unusual in Philly). Siren's Silence also exemplified the idea of multi-media—  like Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum was doing in Manayunk, visual art (like the Brian Willette you see on the cover here) was included in a package deal more well-rounded than what had come before, and revolutionary for Philly. 

Siren's Silence allowed me, in 1997 and 1998, to do State College-Philly— not an unusual route, to be sure, but explored here from a position of literary publication and dissemination. The dark side of Nineties revolution emerges— Jeremy Eric Tenebaum and the 'd' crew disliked Siren's Silence intensely, and the animosity was mutual. This is one reason Nineties Philly cannot get comfortable wearing a revolution banner— Philly then was notorious for generating cultural activity which could not form a harmonious whole. The cliche: Philly artists can't work together, so the city culturally is stunted, cannot fire away on all cylinders or get off the ground. Jeremy and Vlad should've been friends.

So: Nineties Philly is a half-inclusion. With what happened in Philly in the Aughts (which now appears to have been sui generis in Philly), it is unlikely that Jeremy or Vlad will be forgotten. Yet, as a signpost in State College that I could be a literary presence in Philly, Siren's Silence gave me, personally, something that was invaluable. Manhattan failed to do a similar trick. Nineties ferment may go down in history as just that— something very real, but something patchy, too. Cultural maps may later show in greater detail how this worked, and what the true damages were. 

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A Note Part 2: Jeremy in the Nineties

 Amidst all the revolutionary energy of the Nineties, the soul's journey of one Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum is one which needs to be, as the saying goes, explicated. Jeremy grew up in the South Jersey Philly 'burbs, and graduated from high school in '92. He then found himself at Villanova University, also in the Philly 'burbs, not far from where I am now in Plymouth Meeting. While attending Villanova, Jeremy attracted a coterie of other students as acolytes, as he went about doing tasks related to both poetry and film. The tip-off came towards the middle of the 90s for this group; Manayunk, a neighborhood in Philly not far from Villanova (and Conshy and Plymouth Meeting), had a lot of hot cultural action going on, and would be an appropriate locale for Jeremy and his group to cut their teeth on.

The history of Jeremy in Manayunk, which continues all through the Aughts (Jeremy's a Cancer, folks, and when he finds a home, he finds a home), starts there, but the Nineties version is special, with Jeremy carving an interesting cultural path from Villanova to Manayunk (never any prominent connection before or since) and back. Villanova-Manayunk is not as drastic as Cheltenham-Abington, but still something which could only happen the right way in an epoch of restlessness and ferment. Also worth noting that an apropos nest was waiting for Mr. Tenenbaum in Manayunk— the coffee-shop La Tazza, on Cotton Street, and its proprietors, Frank & Tammy, made it their business to give Jeremy a suitable base of operations.

Jeremy's essential activity along his Nineties circuit was the creation and dissemination of the literary magazine 'd'. Over several years, 'd' became popular and successful enough that I knew about it in State College (having done Manayunk on semester breaks). I submitted to 'd'...and was rejected! Yet 'd' enjoyed a wide reputation among younger poets on the East Coast then, and the ricochet from Manayunk-Villanova was a loud one. All the while, Jeremy was churning out serious poems...which are, as I have also explicated, difficult to find. Yet the essential Nineties fact remains— the welding together of disparate and unlikely places, in a spirit or Zeitgeist mood of revolution and change, was a widespread phenomenon. Jeremy's Nineties journey, like mine, is a representative one. This, even as, as we see in PICC (A Poet in Center City), the journey confounded the Aughts, and P.F.S., for him. 

A Note on the Nineties

About the Nineties: specifically, about the Nineties section of Something Solid. Important for me to make even more explicit, what the book is attempting to explicate: the Nineties were a time of social revolution and turmoil. Many of the facets of media mythology and narratives often applied to the Sixties apply to the Nineties, too. I can’t fit everything into the book; one of the pieces left missing (implicit in Cheltenham) is that the wall dividing two neighboring, rival communities, Cheltenham and Abington, fell for a number of years, creating a raucous sense of controversy and unease in the two locales. I managed, through social connections, to remain on the crest of this wave for a number of years in the Nineties (esp. semester breaks, first in Gulph Mills, then back in Glenside). The Zeitgeist dictated that what was wrapped tight loosened, and the sense of euphoria and exuberance on Cheltenham-Abington nights, for those of us engaged, was marked. The euphoria of finding alternatives to the mainstream— socially, creatively, sexually, and every other way— was the up side to Nineties Zeitgeist energy.

Outlaw Playwrights, as it operated in State College in the Nineties, was similarly a maverick enterprise. The heat of it— a black box theater filled to capacity every Thursday night at 11:15 pm, for student, graduate student-penned work— was euphoric, for those who wanted to write for the theater, as I did. Outlaw Playwrights did, in fact, continue past the Nineties, but its el primo time to be radical, the right way, revolutionary, was the Nineties, when boundaries loosened and meant that the crest of the Outlaws wave meant real action.

The way Something Solid deals with my relationship to Jennifer Strawser starts from a premise related to these issues. The premise is what I’m explicating here— the revolutionary Nineties created an atmosphere or context in whish unlikely relationships (marriages or not) could be consummated, including ones which bothered to cross class boundaries. Jennifer’s home was a poor suburb of Harrisburg— Liverpool, Pa. Her family was settled in a trailer. I grew up amid comparative affluence (Abington, btw, is slightly less affluent than Cheltenham, but same general range). But we fell in love, and what happened, happened. A couple of Zeitgeist kiddies we were in State College (and Liverpool and Gulph Mills), acting out a scenario which certainly did engender controversy and unease, but which also innovated against the normative for PSU (and CHS) students. Emily, from Perfect, Lisa, Maria, and all the other townie girls were also up for the game of class-confounding.

The problem then arises, in writing Something Solid— how to express specifically these things, without sermonizing or engaging in sentimentality. The Nineties section of the book, like Equations before I imposed a dialectical structure on it overtly, is tricky to navigate, if a general sense of the Nineties Zeitgeist is not imposed on the book, and thus the book’s readers. This, I have no idea yet how to surmount. Letting histories, mythologies, and narratives arrange themselves around the Nineties through media influence, I cannot trust (the same way I tend not to trust accounts of the revolutionary Sixties). If there could be one poem which creates a mise en scene for the rest of the Nineties section, that might work. If not, a preface…again!

 

 

Elegy 702 and Form

Form, in the Cheltenham Elegies series, is meant to elongate an impression of plasticity. Form itself is, at its most congenial, a mode of implied Inter-Dialogism with an assumed audience. When the brain registers that a formal gambit has been made, the elegy (or any piece of writing which might be formal) at hand becomes something beyond a series of thematic gestures, meant to evoke sorrow, pity, and compassion; it becomes a way or manner of expressing that the elegy is being used as a mode of possible innovation, pushed into the front-lines or avant-garde, as the elegy has not very much been pushed before. In 702, an implied palimpsest over Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats puts the emphasis on a tone that mixes the normal elegiac imperative with archness. The apostate figure in the poem, who is obviously meant to be construed as a writer himself, casts a spell over the elegy, employing Keats’ formal parameters in a way that conflates Keats own melopoeiac imperative with a nod to both Modernist fracturing techniques and post-modern irony. The form becomes a tribute to the apostate’s vision, as channeled through a Keats lens, and also an implied jest at his youthfulness, and youthful sense of exultation in the Romantic. The form itself is fractured lens, because seeing through it as we do a succession of scenes which we are unlikely to find in Keats or Wordsworth, it manages to ironize itself:                                       

 

His heart ached within a drowsy, numbed trance.
     Cameras panned to him pacing the black-top, even
blacker at 3 am, which opens out on the expanse
      of Mill Road, down the hill, past the school. Night deepened,
he was lonely enough to cry, heartsick for being
      the only one of a scabrous tribe gutsy enough to say the name
           which even then had rent Cheltenham, riddled
with bullets like a dog’s corpse, assassins fleeing
     the site of the hit, where the one kid, bound for fame,
          did for himself the trick of ditching a tepid middle.

 He levitates past himself, flies with bugs into crevices,
       is the pilot of the few airplanes wafting by, Pegasus-like
for a mind intent on flight, meeting divinity, heaven’s bliss
       from a cockpit. Myers’ schoolyard glistens like spikes.
She knew him then, at her end— saw how the spine
    imposed truth on empty gesture, feeling on pretense,
       vital life on the living death of their shared enterprise.
This, he could never know; yet without knowing how, why,
    he strode past her emptied house that night, tense,
        sweating in summer’s stew, pallid in cold surprise.

 The apostate flies around a small room, piles of books,
    papers scattered, forests of drafts, faintly heard bird-song.
Verdurous plains suggest themselves; moss-softened nooks;
   just out of time, to a mind o’er spelled by word-song.
He can only fly as he reads, over & over, the lays
      already fastened to moss & flower, secured above
          shallow stream. His friend waits, in stealth. 
The early morning ride he caught then, from love
     given, wasn’t her— she had gone the way
         there is no coming back— yet he slept himself back to health.  
   

The topos which is mixed into the Cheltenham Elegies series— a community maintaining a shared fixation on ostracizing a threatening or menacing individual— takes flight here, into a sense that the characters most prized by the series are the ones who hold out against this impulse, towards a stance of entrenched rebellion and non-conformity. John Keats, as a poet, is not a Byronic outcast or a Shelleyan pariah— he tends to present himself as middle-grounder. Yet, the co-opting of his form to perform a literary task which raises this topos puts Nightingale in a new space, where Keats is emphasized as something with, potentially, an explosive sense of rebellion and non-conformity built into him, beginning with the odal form, invented by Keats himself. Keats is unwitting here, but everything about the poem leans on the odal form to make its own obstinate statement of the individual’s triumph over a community, and the sense of embracing a writerly identity built into the form itself, which Keats may or may not have intended (but one which one thinks Byron or Shelley would have smiled on, satanically). Co-opting the individuals who have supported him into the matrix of the poem, with form embraced as  a mode of punkish rebellion, so destabilizes the Keatsian impulse, perhaps even deranges it, that the palimpsest over Nightingale makes an awkward fit with the original model, towards a recognition that the usage of Keats, or at least a portion of it, leans towards instrumentality. Yet, ultimately, and oddly, the poem is about love— individuals rising up with certain integrity to defend the innocent. Because this is the truth, the betrayal of John Keats is not a complete one. Even if love here is more beleaguered by worldly concern than is usually found in Keats.   

  

 

Elegy 427 & the Self-Posited

 

The tensions inherent in Meta-Dialogism— competing voices vying for a place in a single consciousness— are re-explored in Elegy 427. Here, self-consciousness fights back against its own power to discern, and the battle is seen to be a losing one. The drama which attends 427 as a construct is itself attendant on an edifice erected by an individual, for the edification of an individual— a self-posited, self-sustaining pact with a place (Glenside, a borough of Cheltenham Township, and the borough which has the most claim to reality as an autonomous locale in and of itself), which becomes a rampart employed by consciousness against a sense of uselessness in the world:

When she starts at Rizzo’s, winds her way around
to Easton Road on Saturday night, it's with full
control, absolute mastery— here’s where Glenside
stands, where it’s going, here’s why. The game
continues over to Limekiln Pike— Wawa, Tail
of the Whale. Not just the surface, but who’s
hiding where, with what, & again why. Yet deep
in her heart, the ultimate why, life or death in
a sense of purpose, remains barren. The spider
in the glass case, frozen in the Humphrey’s
Pest Control window, is to the point— Humphrey’s
never answers anyway— the spider tells her
where the real action is. Then the beauty of it—
her sacrifice to/for Glenside— becomes just another
heist in the world. Limekiln Pike is too steep to climb.

This individual desires that the voice of the self-sustained, self-posited pact should subsist as something dominant in her consciousness. The drama of fluctuations and oscillations, wherein the pact is either workable or nullified by both the corruptions inherent in Glenside and in the human race in general, enacts itself in Meta-Dialogic acknowledgements, an array of voices which command the narrative sense built into her brain. When what speaks most eloquently refutes the possibility of the pact (or, as in the poem, sacrifice), and affirms the reality (or spider) of an anti-idealistic world, predicated on the prevalence of killing, massacre, destruction, the interior voice which knocks the pact from its perch is about futility, and the impossibility of sustaining an ideal in the face of spider-webbed realities. The mimetic process, for the reader, involves itself building up a rampart, wherein this character (heroine) is someone we can believe in and take seriously, against the impinging sense of doubt and disbelief that she can be dismissed as impractical or romantic, or both.