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.