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.