from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #2

 

Fast forward into the spring— it’s a chilly night in March. I’m sitting on a Septa train to Manayunk with Bill Rosenblum and Pete Lawson, two musicians. As always, Septa trains are a nightmare if you are, or happen to be, stoned. The no-bathroom scenario means you are forced to ride your buzz in a manner suited to suffering and general discomfort. Yet, as Center City develops for me, I learn the rigors of seeing what I can do when stoned. So, as uncomfortable as I am, I am also pushing at the bounds of what I can accomplish in the world as a guerilla-style Bohemian, a fighting flake. The weed we consumed at Bill’s apartment was Benzedrine-y. Christopher Severin, otherwise occupied on this night, is letting me run an open-mike night at a coffee-joint called La Tazza on Cotton Street. Bill, Pete and I are investigating the night’s buzz, digging in to the ambience, looking for apertures (of consciousness, of emotion) to fit into. I’ve brought a carton of eggs to break on my chest, as though our act was Iggy and the Stooges. But I wimp out, made fuzzy by E weed— I give the eggs to one of the attendees, once we’re ensconced in La Tazza’s red-painted basement, which has surprisingly high ceilings, making it an interesting place to read. Bill is short and stout, wears glasses and semi-rags— his day gig isn’t much. Having grown up and gone to college in West Chester, and forced to stay in West Chester until his mid-twenties, Bill has a permanent sense of in-built gratitude to be in Philly. The city was always to be his Manifest Destiny— doing an office gig while holding down keyboards for a prominent local band (while also working out studio wonk chops on Pro Tools) is not just what he wants, it’s levitational for him. Bill’s a talker and high-spirited and thus fun to get high with, whether he wants to discuss (a catholic-minded dude) the 13^th Floor Elevators, the novels of Philip K. Dick, or whether the PA system at Doc Watson’s has gone permanently haywire. Pete’s a lanky redhead with a bushy red beard— how he maintains himself is a mystery. Sort of. Pete spent his childhood, he says, in Chicago, and the confluence of circumstances which brough him to Philly is mysterious. Pete makes up for lacking Bill’s solidity by being an able leader-among-men kind of guy. He’ll direct action easily, set guidelines and strictures in place, draw up contracts, and his own gig at Office Cents on Chestnut Street gives him leeway to keep the store chop-chop there. Pete’s paintings are a graceful semi-rip on Abstract Expressionism, and he follows New York art closely, without having any concrete plans in that direction. The darkness of a kind of sadism is there— me and Bill have both watched Pete behave abusively by this time— but Pete and Bill and I are all bonded by a fierce determination to have a good time, no matter what, held-in piss (and held-in spiteful loathing of Septa) be damned. They’re in the game, as I am, to get high and have fun. At twenty-four, and in a state of constant excitement about what might happen in Philly, it’s enough for me to get attached to them, particularly Bill, because a studio wonk friend is important to cultivate, for music and books. I need man-power and they (Pete less so) need guidance. Christopher is a figurehead in his own right, centered here on Main Street, but his scene is master class but limited. The world converging around me is dynamic, shot through with people who mean it, but I’m obliged to shape it myself.

 

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Undulant on P.F.S. Post

Undulant, sonnet from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post. 

Undulant is available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound. 

Tangent 3: The rest of '98

Outlaw Playwrights in the late 90s in State College was wonderful for me, and for those of my kith & kin. Still, what I deemed most important at the time, what strikes me as most important still, is something else which happened in SC in '98. As of April, I entered a prolonged reverie-cum-writing frenzy, and emerged with my first substantial poems. Clean appeared in Philly's Siren's Silence, cover here shown, that fall. Prince and Disappear appeared together in Hinge, several years later. Along with some other malarkey...

Tangent 2: Otoliths 65

Maria Gingerich, here shown, was a stalwart townie girl in late 90s State College. The Coffee Cellar, the Diner, and all points in between were beats for her. Emily Dunlop was another stalwart townie girl, who moved in similar circles. This 2022 page from Otoliths 65 develops the idea that there was some softness to the last few months I spent in SC, writing Mortuary Puppies, witnessing the staging of Dada Circus and the rest. Jennifer in the poem is Jennifer Strawser, who is also documented extensively elsewhere. I lived, it so happens, in two different South Atherton Street sublets, one in '96, one in '98.

From Otoliths 65, in mp3 form, on PennSound. 

Tangent: Outlaw Playwrights

A tangent to Symbolists: for interested parties, here are three of the four one-acts I had produced in SC by the Outlaw Playwrights. The fourth, I felt, wasn't up to snuff. Interesting graphic art, too. 

Symbolists and Hallucinogenics Part 2

My first full semester in State College was the fall of ’94. My first real girlfriend in State College was Kelly McCabe. She grew up in the Philly suburb Lansdale, a twenty-minute drive from Cheltenham (though when I visited her on holiday breaks, I would do so from Gulph Mills, where my family moved that fall). Kelly’s interest in the arts was photography— she snapped this picture of me sitting by a tree in one of the quad areas around North Halls, where we lived. We had both chosen to live in North Halls— it was the hip dorm, the artists’ dorm, and the queer dorm. Kelly was 5’4 (average girl’s height), chunky, and cherubic, with blonde hair and blue eyes. I used to liken her (drolly) to a Dutch milk-maid. I soon found a way of annoying the entire North Halls community— when I wasn’t sitting in my room (322 Holmes) writing songs (which also requires one to open one’s mouth and sing, often in a fumbling fashion), I was in the Holmes basement pounding on the piano. The windows would’ve been open from both rooms. Where academic discipline was concerned in ’94, I didn’t have much; that came later. Most of my discipline went into writing songs, and I was certainly working as hard as any other PSU freshman, just on my own unique tangent.

The fall of ’94 was an interesting time for rock music— Kurt Cobain was gone, and it looked like Billy Corgan and Courtney Love might move in to take his place; Amer-Indie was still ploughing away, and all the new Amer-Indie crap was always circulating around North Halls; and we were the first on campus to take heed of what “Brit-Pop” was. Plenty of the North Halls indie brats would laugh at me and my music— especially when I took out my Les Paul and played lead guitar. For those kids, the code-word for actual, substantial musical talent was “classic rock.” I laughed at them right back. But because I knew and could play tons of Velvets songs (for instance), I’d wind up hanging with them too.

One pleasant surprise was that North Halls lived up to its reputation— it was a little, circumscribed world. I was always bemused by what East Halls was in relation to us— visiting East Halls was like visiting Kentucky. It was all football, jocks, Long Island tanning salon bitches and sleaze. The “circumscribed world” quality is what North and East Halls shared. Many of the other dorms, like West and South Halls, had a miscellaneous, grab-bag quality. All the dorms had the same food— and oh what food it was. I don’t mean that completely ironically. The standard meat-and-potatoes American fare was spiced up with Mexican, Italian, and (occasionally) French imports; and everybody, even the indie brats, loved the ice-cream machines. I, in the fall of ’94, happened to be a fastidious vegetarian freak (which I’m not anymore); and my food tastes were obscure in the extreme. But I didn’t starve.

What Kelly captured in this shot was my stance before the world in ’94— I was punkishly determined to be a rock musician at all costs. By the spring of ’95, I’d broadened enough to have literary and theater aspirations, and was writing poems and plays. If only the Outlaws (Outlaw Playwrights) would produce one of my one-acts— that’s what I wanted. All in the context of taking classes and doing homework like everyone else. Was I a bit much? Certainly; I even looked younger than my age. But North Halls was the right place at the right time for me, and us.

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One exciting aspect of living in North Halls was the dinners— not the food but the “meat market” aspect of Warnock Commons, and how far different residents would go to make themselves not only attractive but conspicuous at these meals. What could happen at dinner was always a perpetual highlight of each of our days— not just who sat with whom, but dialogues initiated and trysts worked towards. On a tangent, though our dorm rooms were sardine-can small and cramped (leading to the endless grossness of sex-in-front-of-your-roommate, or, even worse and inversely, their sex in front of you), Warnock Commons was very deluxe— within an hour of dinner’s conclusion, the snack bar opened and stayed open until ten or eleven. The group I fell into with Kelly McCabe instantly was punkish— a rough crowd for conformists or anyone not on our particular wavelength. One night in the fall of ’95 (by which time Kelly had abandoned North Halls and we’d lost track of her), my friend Jeremy and I decided to satisfy one of our punkish impulses and show up at Warnock Commons in drag (I wasn’t wearing a beard and mustache then and could still pull this off). We wimped out from doing this at dinner; it was too major a commitment, even for us.

We settled for the compromise of showing up at the snack bar in drag. Our friend Becca set us up with clothes— Becca, like Jeremy, was from the Pittsburgh area, and Becca and Jeremy had briefly gone out too. Patrick and Sam vibe. Nothing much happened at the snack bar; it turns out, we moseyed in and moseyed out. But I’d at least proven to myself that I could take certain exhibitionistic plunges. One paradigmatic change which shook North Halls in the fall of ’95 was a full-scale “hippie invasion.” Suddenly, North Halls was not only artists and queers but Phish-fixated, Frisbee throwing, shroom-imbibing suburban hippie types. They all lived in unisex Leete Hall (Holmes was all male and Runkle, all female) and were always hanging out outside— they were difficult to avoid. Sometimes, I’d write songs in the Leete basement as well as Holmes, and one of the hippie girls from the Philly ‘burbs would come down and smoke me up (or smoke me out, as they say on the west coast). As I found out years later, a good amount of the weed around North Halls (and all over the east coast) was laced— leading to the odd vista of suburbanite, day-tripping, middle-class hippies tripped out on PCP for years at a time.

North Halls being what it was, the artists and queers and hippies all wound up getting high together— though the hippies weren’t punkish enough to dress in drag. Our lives were no longer unmolested by authorities— Becca and Mandee (who me and my friends had dubbed “North Girl” or “Cure Girl” in ’94, though she more resembled Hope Sandoval, and who joined our circle in ’95) got busted for pot possession and had to appear in court. I noticed then (and later experiences in New York and Philly proved this true) that I have a natural aptitude for evading authority, and not getting nailed for my transgressions. Becca and I were funny that semester— we slept in the same bed number of times (both before and after the authorities at PSU separated her from Mandee and she was forced back to Runkle) without hooking up; whereas Mandee and I hit each other and ran. Most of us were being decadent about our academic work (and in the early Aughts I did harsh penance for this)— Jeremy wasn’t. He was always up shit’s creek if he went out too much, and he wouldn’t get high. We repeated our drag trick a few times (once on Halloween, if I remember correctly), and I learned the vagaries of walking around in pumps. Girls: is it really worth it?

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State College in the Nineties had quirks, and North Halls had quirks too. You’d think we wouldn’t go to frat parties, but we did. The rules for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights were pretty laissez faire and, where parties were concerned, anything was fair game. Frat parties were never that much fun for me personally. I developed a taste for hard alcohol fast in State College, rather than beer. Of course, you couldn’t get a Jack n’ Coke at a PSU frat party; you could only hit the keg like everyone else. They’d almost always have Bob Marley and the Wailers blasting, or an alterna-covers band set up in the living room (by the time I left State College even I’d played a few frats). We usually didn’t stay long. In State College, lots of people lived in raunchy, ugly high-rise apartment buildings and complexes, which made the small town seem semi-urban; the parties in these domiciles were bizarre, too. The apartments tended to be little more than studio size— and they’d try to do the whole “kegger” set-up in them. Our main priority was usually to find someone to share their weed with us, if we weren’t carrying ourselves. Stoned or not, party-hopping in the dead of winter in State College was onerous; we had to face the long-ass walk back, late at night and stoned or drunk, to North Halls. We usually stopped at Ye Olde College Diner (known to everyone in SC as just “the Diner”) first, which was open all night, and where we’d get coffee to warm and sober up. Thankfully, the dorms did have central heating.

On Sundays, we were generally zombies; and few North Halls residents could get excited about football games. Many of us got through our years in State College without ever making it to a PSU game. The big campus chant (“We are/ Penn State!”) never made it up to North Halls. As has been mentioned elsewhere, we lived in exquisite ignorance of Joe Paterno and everything he represented, in our own alternate universe. As winter turned to spring, North Halls turned scenic— beyond being the most individualistic of the dorms, it was also the smallest (three halls), and the quads were large and green. You could sit outside in March and April and enjoy yourself. As spring sprung, there were all kinds of festivals and mini-festivals, official and unofficial, around North Halls, too, including Northstock, which was usually held on the converted basketball courts and which featured some import bands and some musicians (like myself) who also lived in North Halls. None of the other dorms had anything like Northstock, to my knowledge; and if you decided to light up outside (which we did), the authorities might kindly decide not to notice. In fact, State College in spring and summer was a fantastic place to get stoned in peace— the quaint sections of the town and campus (like North Halls) could become beatific with the right weed around; and it was unlikely that anything would come along to make you paranoid. To get caught out, you’d have to be blatantly profligate (which Becca and Mandee, unfortunately, were); a reasonable amount of discretion could always save the day.

It also became difficult, in North Halls during the spring months, to maintain any kind of academic discipline (by spring ’96, I’d managed to establish a low maintenance level of such discipline, barring courses in my major); everyone wanted to be outside. For some reason, the spring of ’96 was particularly intense, partly because North Halls suddenly had a line in to getting as much pot as we wanted, and many of us were being more promiscuous than usual. The energy had real fertility and hopefulness in it, and it was difficult not to feel hopeful then. It was a brief moment of peace which little intruded upon.

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Indie State College was a real place. From the spring of ’96 forward, I dwelt in it at least part of the time (until I left State College in late ’98). The rules were the rules— to gain entrance into the charmed circles, certain prerequisites had to be met. Obviously, you had to pledge allegiance to indie rock music, to at least some extent, and not just the local stuff. Folkways in these circles deemed most commercial (corporate) rock music detritus; however, the Alternative Revolution had created a context in which indie bands like Sonic Youth could be signed to major labels and maintain credibility, so by the mid-Nineties in State College opinions were fluid on that level. Holding on to vinyl and having a vinyl record player was an inestimable advantage; and vinyl was not only hip but cheap. State College was tiny enough that all the charmed circle indie kids would be listening to the same records at the same time— and one facet of the State College indie scene I appreciated, and which wasn’t replicated in other cities’ scenes, was a scholarly attitude towards the history of rock music. It wasn’t conservative, but preservative; and it meant you could be just as au currant with the Chocolate Watch Band or Love’s second album with Orange Skies on it as with Spiritualized or Guided by Voices.

Some tastes particular to State College I didn’t share, like Robyn Hitchcock and shoe-gazer bands; but the State College guys would sit and bullshit with you for hours on end if you had half-decent musical tastes. Although I liked Guided by Voices, for a long time my major hinge to these guys was Big Star and Nick Drake. The Big Star discourses, especially, went round and round in a million circles, and I carried them to NYC and Philly and straight into 2013. State College hipster-ism wasn’t extreme; and you could still like the Beatles, Stones, Hendrix, etc. These guys were scholars— they would consider anything. What was frowned upon (unusually) was just listening to your friends and your friends’ bands; people with catholic tastes actually got along better, which was perfect for me. Like many scholars, these guys weren’t necessarily ambitious— they weren’t on a quest for world domination. They could be clannish— you couldn’t push your way into the circles. In many ways, they were quaint, like the nicer bits of State College itself. The White Lodge, where many Amer-Indie bands passed through, was also quaint; set on the edge of a forest with a highway running on the other side of it. The way the White Lodge was run influenced the Philly Free School shows at the Highwire— there was free booze around a good part of the time, and the vibe was warm and congenial.

What influenced State College indie even more was that the scene produced no conquering heroes on a national or international level; which meant that, even if it didn’t have that high a profile, social climbing was kept to a minimum. What I remember most distinctly are the records I borrowed to try and get into, having caught and internalized the scholar’s curiosity— I couldn’t get into late-era Byrds or Gram Parsons, or Richard Thompson; but I acquired a taste for Pulp and solo Brian Eno which I’ve never lost. State College indie was so mellow I was stunned by the Machiavellian gymnastics in other scenes I saw later on. If I did cross swords with the State College indie crowd, it was for this reason— the players were extraordinarily intelligent, bordering on brilliant, but semi-comatose nonetheless. They were not only pot-heads but acid trippers, and I tripped with them. I learned: you haven’t been frightened until you’ve heard Pink Moon on acid. The creepy underbelly of State College’s quaintness revealed itself when I tripped— and the indie crews, despite their low-key brilliance, could be creepish. Maybe that’s why I stuck to 3^rd/Sister Lovers and Pink Moon so much in State College— that dark underbelly was my favorite part of the town, and scene.

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The story of me and the Outlaw Playwrights is another funny one; and, oddly enough, it begins with music. In the fall of ’94, many of the theater department queen bees were living in North Halls. The first mini-festival I played was backing up my friend Jason Liebman; he was playing his songs on an acoustic, and I was playing lead on my Les Paul behind him, in a converted North Halls lounge in Warnock Commons. In dramatic, diva-like fashion, one of the theater girls draped herself over a chair and made eyes at us. When the set was over, she gave us a rap— not only about the theater department, but about what Outlaw Playwrights was. Jason didn’t seem interested but, having some theater experience, my ears perked up. Outlaw Playwrights did seem to be one of the few hinges the theater department had to reaching a wider public than just theater majors— every Thursday night at eleven p.m., they put up a student or graduate student written one-act play, in a context open to the general public, down in the bowels of the theater building near North Halls, in a black box theater space.

The problem was, I thought I could go and be inconspicuous; I was wrong. Maybe because everyone from North Halls knew me for my music; maybe because I’d done Carnegie Mellon Pre-College for drama in the summer of ’92, and one of my fellow pre-college students was now in the PSU drama department, and thus some kind of rep preceded me; I felt gawked and pawed at instantly. The first time I went to Outlaws in late ’94, I got awful butterflies. This quickly became a tradition— for my four years in State College, I couldn’t descend into those theater building bowels without feeling like I’d just been struck by a polo mallet. Without wanting to be smarmy or obvious, Outlaws was always a very dramatic experience for me. As of early ’95, I was feverishly writing one-acts; but Outlaws was clannish— I still wasn’t socially connected enough to get my plays up there. In late ’95, I managed to get Nick Dobson’s (my gang called him “Nick Bloke”) play, called The Gut, up; that was a decent first step; but it wasn’t until (literally) my twenty-first birthday in ’97 that one of my one-acts went up.

Luckily, ‘97/’98 saw a kind of regime change. “Outlaws, the Next Generation” was much more germane to me than the original crew, who were immersed in a good amount of pride and prejudice just because I wasn’t actually a theater major. By ’99, I was in New York, and they’d produced four of my one-acts, usually unthinkable for anyone but a theater major. It’s also true that, by late ’98 when I left State College, I was in good standing enough with the theater kids to be invited to their parties, which were at a huge tangent to State College indie parties. Theater parties at PSU were like little staged plays themselves; different arranged scenes and interactions played themselves out. If one of the major divas decided to “shotgun” you, it was an event. The theater kids had odd taste in music, too, like Soul Coughing. I could go to their parties, but I never got particularly comfortable with them; the unease element never changed. Getting stoned with them was a surreal experience, for that reason— I knew it couldn’t be that comfortable. Perhaps it was because, as I sensed, they weren’t that comfortable with themselves. I still don’t know why they couldn’t get loose, especially the first gen theater crew, who, from what I saw, lived their lives as if they were staged by Ionesco. Slightly creepy.

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The poem Le Chat Noir from my book Posit is about an actual black cat. Few in America would remember what the original Le Chat Noir (“The Black Cat”) was— a hotspot in decadent 1890s Paris, where denizens like Toulouse-Lautrec would indulge in absinthe, opium, and filthily erogenous, transgressive sexual intercourse, straight or queer. Of all the places in America to replicate the richly sleazy vibe of Le Chat Noir, State College, Pennsylvania would not seem to be high on the list— most would say New Orleans or San Francisco (among others) first. I wasn’t able to visit New Orleans or San Francisco in the late Nineties; maybe they did have their own Le Chat Noir replicant. But, oddly, State College in the Nineties did also have its own Le Chat Noir— it was called, simply enough, the Coffee Cellar, and to descend into the Cellar (it was below street level, adjacent a tacky take-out pizza joint) was to submerge yourself in a subterranean realm where there were no limits or bounds, no bottom. Of course, there was a major difference between the Cellar and Le Chat Noir— the Cellar served coffee, rather than booze. But, importantly, the Cellar was tolerant of substances brought in; in other words, you could smoke whatever you wanted to over your coffee; and it didn’t even have to be in the black-painted, mirror-laden bathroom that you did so.

Needless to say, the sexual raunch at the Cellar was also intense— mostly because the less green of the teenage townie girls made it their home away from home. Many of them considered themselves “Goth” or “vampires”— they smoked clove cigarettes and wore fetish boutique clothing. I myself liked to wear black leather pants and a Celtic Cross at the time. People had different ways of passing time at the Cellar— because we were often stoned, time tended to pass strangely. There was an acoustic piano, some kind of quiz-game machine, and a little stage where artists occasionally performed. I spent most of my time writing— during the fall of ’98, I was spewing out an attempt to meld poetry and theater, which was later compressed into a one-act called Mortuary Puppies and produced by the Outlaws in ’99 while I was in New York. It was a strange place to fall in love, but I did fall in love with someone at the Cellar. Not all of the townie girls, including the Goths and vampires, were bitches— and many of the scenes started at the Cellar were continued elsewhere. As the fall of ’98 progressed, things at the Cellar got looser and looser— not only were there heroin rings created and oriented around the place, acid and E were easy to find, too.

As is worth mentioning, the place was dimly lit (even during daylight hours, owing to its windowless place below street level, though the front glass façade let in some light), had low ceilings and amounted to a long, narrow strip; regulars like myself usually sat towards the back. The little stage wasn’t closed off; there were tables on it. The strip was long enough that if you lit a joint at the book, the staff wouldn’t necessarily be able to smell the smoke at the front. Not that they’d care if they did smell the smoke. The black-out bathroom could be a trip when you were stoned; it was large and spacy for the long, narrow room, and couples often went into it to hook up— the effect was half Poe, half Sixties London. I was once tripping balls enough to get caught in there for half an hour, not knowing or being able to remember where I was. If there was a deficit in comparison with the original Le Chat Noir, it was that the Cellar closed early, at ten or eleven, and there were no bohemian bars in State College. The bar scene, in fact, was as pure Paterno as it could be. If we adjourned elsewhere, it was to someone’s flat, or house; many of which were equipped to extend the nights well into the morning hours.

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The center of State College proper consisted of two parallel streets, College and Beaver (Ave.), both of which were comprised of strips of restaurants, bars, book and record stores, knick-knack/paraphernalia places, and, at the far end of College Ave. near South Halls, McLanahan’s, the great all-purpose semi-supermarket outlet for PSU students. The side streets running perpendicular to College and Beaver were more of the same, with an emphasis on bars and pricier eateries. The Coffee Cellar was also on one of these side streets. As has been mentioned, the bar scene in Nineties State College was stagnant; hang-out places for jocks, would-be jocks, and middle-of-the-road types. Away from the two-street strips, State College was structured very much like a typical American suburb; street after street of middle-class consonant houses; that was the surface layer. But many of the middle-class consonant houses amounted to boarding houses for PSU students and young State College residents, including townies— and they (myself included by ’98) tended to live in clusters. House-party culture in late Nineties State College depended on these clusters— for months or years, a house could establish itself (occasionally an apartment worked too) as a happening party venue, and receive the elite of the State College hipsters and bohemians every time it opened its doors.

The most fortuitous house-strip was always West College Ave., where the houses were capacious enough to comfortably hold a hundred guests and a band. When I first began to attend these parties in ’95, they weren’t particularly elaborate; possibly a keg or band, just people hanging out. By ’98, a new baroque era of State College house parties had set in— often there’d be a nitrous tank, which meant free (or cheap) whippets; and, in ’98, you could get not only pot at these soirees but imported hash and opium. The pace at these parties was usually leisurely— people would wander in and out. The social mores were not particularly rigid in these contexts either— even though the indie kids and townies tended to dominate the action. On West College, sometimes you’d see indie kids, jocks, and middle-of-the-roaders together— there were crossroads involving music and drugs where everyone could and did converge. One of the biggest Madame Verdurin salon/ house party locales was run by two guys who weren’t particularly indie kids— it was colloquially known as “Bob n’ Rob’s.” In ’98, their house parties were the biggest, and most lavish. Everyone went, and met, and mingled, and I knew the truth even then— for the indie kids to get the drugs (especially pot and hash) they wanted, they had to “play the game” just like everyone else. Bob n’ Rob imposed their version of Machiavellian politics on the indie crowd, and the indie crowd just had to accept it.

So, we all endured the middling music being played and the kegged out ambience, and even the Guided by Voices acolytes stood in the big lines with smiles on their faces. Truth be told, it wasn’t that squeamish— the Bob n’ Rob set-up wasn’t all Dave Mathews Band and sports trivia. There was, in those days, a specific kind of ska-listening State College hipster who walked a fine line between indie snobbery and the broad interests (including sports and beer) of an Everyman; Bob n’ Rob were archetypal examples. They were hybrids. I got in line and drank the beer. For me, quite honestly, it was more about gawking at Rob’s girlfriend, who I was half in love with. On good nights, we could migrate from Bob n’ Rob’s to something else going on. House parties weren’t particularly tight in State College in those days— there would always be some middle-of-the-roaders around. It was to our credit that, among us, no one cared that much, or played possum about it.

Excavation and Recuperation (and Contextualists and Dissidents)

Built into the structure of the Internet is a certain amount of depth and density. Google searches do not bring up everything; some sites are "embedded" more than others, and it varies from country to country, continent to continent. Excavation can become a wonted task, and old texts that were not widely noted upon release can be recuperated. Excavation and recuperation are not just Internet processes; they are artistic processes as well. One goal I set to/for myself with the Blazevox book Apparition Poems (2010), was to excavate and recuperate certain aspects of the Romantic ethos. More specifically, the ethos that was set in place by William Wordsworth in his Preface (to Lyrical Ballads). That the task of the self-respecting Author was to enlarge the mind-capacity of his/her audience; that the dignity of the human mind is inherent and indestructible; that the human mind may be subtly, rather than grossly, stimulated; and that common situations can embody portentous meanings when recuperated with and by imagination; this corpus of notions hinged on other interests that were certainly not Wordsworth's (what about sexuality and sexual situations?) Almost precisely eighteen months after the release of the Blazevox book, I was able to excavate the following List-Serve directed (and quite jocular!) missive from a UK website, scribed by Desmond Swords:

Bob Sheppard's Star Student Scott Desmond's Words Flyte Fielded.

Yes, yes, one read the pose by this 'poet, critic, and musician' colleague, currently where erm, you were a year ago, nearing the end of that long hard road to attainment as a pro in doctoral po-biz, Jeff - collegiately alleging a claim that nearly everything to follow Four Quartets has been 'dross'.

One chuckled at the ambition, audacity and foolishness of deploying such a term in the forum of Letters; before turning one's focus to adducing the verse and other critical prose assays by the author Adam attempting to pull off such a theatrically audacious play as this.

"She told me I love boy/girl poems, love

scenes in them based on a deep degeneracy
inherited from too much heat around my
genitals, as manifest in tangents I could only
see if I was getting laid. She told me this as
I was getting laid in such a way that any notion

of telling was subsumed in an ass as stately as
a mansion, which I filled with the liquid
cobwebs of my imagination."

Yeats would be proud of the cant and ergo argoist, very very classy Adam Fieled's verse. Proper spillage. High Art indeed from our playboy crown-prince doing what one does.

Effecting agreement among this reader, on X and Y being the only two one is on collegiate amity and perfect accord with Adam about, as a bosom buddy chum and prophetical practitoner with the imbas to know why, when, what and how, for example, Eliot can successfully operate as a symbol for agreement between Fieled and oneself.

High and Low Art in the 'making' of verse activity, you know, as a 'poetry'— there's often very little agreement about, and in America, poetry atomized into 10,000 different individual, unique and original practices, all curated by a genius with big ideas about what kind of reality Poetry is, adam, the only critical debate in AmPo parish at present, as you know, has one essential point of agreement most practitioners of contemporary American poetry found as your datum: MFA.

After this, a forking occurs and we diverge into our own pool of plod and production sailor, not believing any of it matters. That our thinking is nought but a performance in print, anything other than that: Not real. Thought, Fielding.

Have a think about it. I'll get back to you.

What is interesting (and gratifying) to me about this piece is the context it arose from. I had just published a piece in the UK online journal The Argotist Online entitled Century XX after Four Quartets. The gist of the piece was that poetry in the English language decayed horribly in the second half of the twentieth century. Other critical forays from this period, like On the Necessity of Bad Reviews and The Decay of Spirituality in Poetry got a bigger instant public reaction than this one did. A response that defended me with my Apparition Poems, and their excavated/recuperated Romantic ethos, was written and placed in a manner that straddled public and private spheres. Did Mr. Swords know he was being archived? The letter mixes jocularity (even, at points, to the edge of absurdity) with serious overtones. What could have been a post-modern performance from Mr. Swords was nudged in the direction of the Romantic by earnest edges. The dynamic between Century XX..., the Apparition Poems, and Mr. Swords piece are interesting; on one level, radical and provocative conservatism is getting "filled in" by the ironic humor which is post-modernity's metier. The Apparition Poems form a middle ground here, as a site— not bereft of absurdities or earnestness, ironies or direct statements. The meta-nature of the poem quoted is heightened by an intellectually challenging and substantial narrative. Mr. Swords chose to defend me with a poem that would be offensive to a "pure" Romantic ethos. It includes sexual slang, and pornographic overtones. But that I was excavating and recuperating something Romantic (and many consider Yeats a latter-day Romantic) is hinted at. The structure of the Internet has created many circles like this in poetry. Excavation and recuperation are processes that force the issue of repetition. What is, and matters most, must be repeated.

Mary Walker Graham

This picture was taken in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2007. In it, we see casually dressed Mary Evelyn Harju standing up so that I might be allowed to sit next to her again. This being, not incidentally, the back room at Stain Bar, where I was reading that night for Mipoesias. Also in casual red attire, across from Mary H. is Boston poetess Mary Walker Graham. Graham is someone I had done my MFA with in Henniker, NH, in the mid-Aughts, and also dated. Mary Walker Graham is worth mentioning because the poetry she was producing then was raised high above the Amer-Po median average. I was happy to publish her in P.F.S. Post and Ocho #11, and write the critical piece Sex and Shadows about Graham and Stacy Blair.

P.S. Only semi-incidentally, on this night in Brooklyn, Mary Walker Graham submitted the poem Double to me, which was then published in Ocho #11 and later P.F.S. Post. 

20th Anniversary Pt. 2

One thing I would like to distinguish the Philly Free School: because we were and are all complicated people, we reserve the right to maintain and consolidate our complications, neurotic or otherwise. To cut to the chase: Mary H could be an angel and a sister of mercy, or she could be a crazed banshee. On some nights, she could be both. Montreal, precisely twenty years ago, was no exception. We were reverent before the classiness of a serious city, but there was one night on which Mary lost it completely. Hard to tell why, and Mary could be fathomless that way. Thus, Apparition Poem #555 on PennSound.

P.S. This treated image began as a photo booth shot of Mary and I taken in a Montreal metro station.

20th Anniversary

 

It is the twentieth anniversary, almost to the day, of this shot being taken (August 20s) in a garret room Mary and I were sharing on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal, Quebec. I chose to align the shot, which I treated in the late Teens, with Leonard Cohen's Sisters of Mercy, because Cohen himself is famously a native of Montreal. Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game are both set in Montreal, and the Cohen mural in Montreal now is one of the city's most famous emblems. Also worth noting that Cohen attended McGill University in Montreal, which Mary & I visited while we were there. Confidentially, Mary looks a little like Marianne Ihlen, does she not?  

Multi-Media

Mary Evelyn Harju was never especially a multi-media enthusiast. Abby Heller-Burnham's engagement with multi-media amounted to a daredevil maneuver, by which she subsumed her entire painting career so far beneath her rock star princess front that few even knew it existed. The Philly Free School shows at the Highwire Gallery in the mid-Aughts were selling multi-media, but I'd like it to be known that there was a theoretical underpinning to our enterprise, as is reflected in this 2010 piece in Otoliths. There was no notion for us of multi-media without a commensurate notion of the spectacle and the spectacular. Hence, our own engagement with our good friend, French dramatist Antonin Artaud. 

Abby's Random Collage

This collage is one Ms. Heller-Burnham never emphasized that much. Nevertheless, I thought it would be useful to feature here, because, as you can see, we see in it Mary Evelyn Harju in profile in a Puritan head-wrap, juxtaposed over someone, y'know, playing an electric guitar. Any audience here are free to read in whatever meanings you choose. I will say, that if Mary disapproved of the rock-ism I shared with Abby, she chose not to express it to me. What she said to Abs is anyone's guess.

dear gr

When Mary Evelyn Harju was angry with or frustrated by Abby Heller-Burnham, she often hurled this epithet at her: the little rat. Among other epithet-hurlers who dwelt among us was Gretchen Stump. Gretchen Stump, when I met her, was Jennifer Strawser's best friend. When Jennifer and I began to go out, in early '96, Gretchen was jealous, for a number of reasons, and none too pleased. Remember: Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum then has lines running to, and minions in, State College, from Villanova/Manayunk. When he bothered to write dear gr, which appeared in print in Columbia Poetry Review in 1999 and online in P.F.S. Post much later, he was wryly commenting on Gretchen's travails, watching a shotgun marriage unfold. Not incidentally, when Gretchen later appeared in late-Aughts Philly, I wrote After Andrew Marvell for her. 

Early Books

 A locale where Abby's work has been used to good effect: the Early Books pdf, featuring Chimes '23.