Run Away With Me

 Faces to names, as Run Away With Me sprints into place.

Stumped II

 Channeling Rimbaud to cover State College news flashes. And hot. 

Javelin Frequencies

 Newly recorded: Frequencies and Javelins. 

Stumped?

A word of note about what just got published in Art Recess 2. The poem dear gr, by Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, was published in Columbia Poetry Review 12, out of Chicago, Illinois, in 1999. The poem is resolutely set in State College, Pennsylvania, in 1996. Jeremy was about to graduate from Villanova University, in the Philly 'burbs, at that time, but found time to be in State College, too. As of then, Jeremy and I were acquaintances. Gretchen, in the poem, is one Gretchen Stump. As of early '96, when I began to date Jennifer Strawser, here shown, Gretchen and Jen were best friends. 

In the piece, Jeremy, or an anonymous narrator, is wry with Gretchen about Jen and I being troublemakers, and leading towards a troublemaking marriage. We were, indeed, banditos for a number of reasons. After that, readers may draw their own conclusions, as Jeremy sifts through the grab bag of influences like E.E. Cummings and Frank O'Hara, and finds his own, Nineties-classic, voice. 

The preponderance of 2005 Pt. 2

Mary Walker Graham's two poems in the September issue of Poetry prove that poems which employ the stratagems of official mainstream verse— conventional narrative structures, standard poetic devices— can still achieve the effects of avant-garde or innovative poetry. In an established mainstream context, where we expect to find the first person preening, Graham subverts mainstream conventions by creating what seems to be an anti-epiphanic "I." That is, these are (more or less) lyric poems, which pay close and loving attention to syntax, craft, and melopoeia; but the protagonist of the poems goes out of her way to preserve moody mysteries, reject closure, keep the reader compelled without imposing. This, rather than walking the proverbial dark woods to gain, via an ecstatic moment of realization, knowledge to didactically, bombastically impart. Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski used camera angles to create subtle moods of alienation and unease, attraction/repulsion dynamics; Graham uses her "I" in much the same way. These are the closing lines of No where, No one:

Drowned or owned,

I'm now here. My face breaks with a bit of blue—
a bit of bruise and some rawness in the rushes.

Many mainstream Amer-Lit poems slobber all over us in an attempt to gain interest and approbation. Graham's do not. Graham throws a veil over herself and dares us to peek beneath. It is a dare because Graham is complete and self-sufficient in her isolated, purgatorial stasis; she doesn't need us. Exquisite alliterations in these lines, but they don't cloy, because Graham seems to be throwing them out merely to create ambiance around an introspective exercise. She thus moves beyond the faux-intimacy of Confessional poetry, into a realm of Impressionistic, free-associative chance and/or roulette. The anti-epiphanic I is sustained in Parts of a Story, but No where, No one is the essential piece, the most pure expression, it seems, of Graham's original narrative gift, edged as it is enough to be "avant." It's encouraging to see Poetry taking a chance with some fresh, intriguing new voices. It's even nicer to see Ms. Graham deconstruct the mainstream lyric poem and put it back together in such an original fashion. I hope to see more from her soon.

And a note about post-avant

Following on the heels of attempted, definitive (for now) renderings of Neo-Romanticism, the Creatrix, and the Philly Free School, it stands to reason that something should be said about post-avant, a term which floated around extensively in avant-garde circles in the Aughts. When poets and pundits in the Aughts employed the term post-avant, they generally seemed to mean anything au currant which took things further, formally or conceptually, than previous generations of avant-gardists. Post-avant was thus a catch-all phrase, and vague. As of 2009 and 2010, I tried to pin it down, as is documented in Stress Fractures. This paragraph, from Stoning the Devil, does what I hoped would be a definitive rendering trick:

Many definitions have been posited for post-avant. There was a flurry of action about five months ago, in which I and a handful of other poets had it out over what post-avant means and what it does not. It was my impression that no general consensus was reached, and that much had been said but little of it had a substantial impact. This goes, certainly, for the things I said too; I do not privilege my own formulations here. Nonetheless, I think the discussion is a worthwhile one, and thinking about it has led me to some new conclusions. Here is the original definition I posited for post-avant: the diasporic movement of Language Poetry towards a new synthesis with erotic and narrative elements. That's roughly it. What I have been thinking over the last week is slightly different, and simpler. It is defining post-avant poetry as anything with an edge. This begs some immediate questions. What do we mean when we say that a poem, or a book of poems, has an edge? How do we strictly define edgy poetry? Colloquially, if it is said that something has an edge, it usually denotes that it is pointed, direct, sharp, and that it skirts the uncomfortable or the unsettling. It may deal, thematically, with a difficult issue, or it may take an unusual stance on an issue that has become stuck in a rut of settled representations....

The connection of post-avant to Language Poetry does a genie-from-the-bottle trick of manifesting exactly what the Aughts were like in avant-America. Lang-Po, as we referred to it, still loomed as a formidable presence, under the aegis of post-modernism, and an elders-created gauntlet which had been laid down. Post-avant thus became our attempt to take Lang-Po and make it more felt, more real. As terms, both Lang-Po and post-avant hover around uncertainly in 2025. But just as something, possibly ephemeral, that colored all of our lives twenty years ago, a note of notice is not uncalled for. 

P.F.S. : A Working Definition 3

At the beginning of the Aughts in Philadelphia, I attempted to found an artist’s co-op, to stage multi-media art events around Philadelphia. I called the first co-op This Charming Lab. It met with limited success. By the middle of the Aughts, the situation had ripened. I now had the man power and venues to stage the events I wanted to stage, which would involve multi-media, around ideas and interpretations of Artaud, the Theater of Cruelty, and what could be made of Artaudian spectacle with the resources at hand. My essential partnership in the initial-model Philly Free School was with three fellow artists: Mike Land, Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, and Nick Gruberg. Matthew Stevenson and Hannah Miller also proved to be invaluable. Abby Heller-Burnham, Mary Evelyn Harju, and Jenny Kanzler all contributed as tangent artists. As of the early Teens, I began to use Philly Free School as a moniker employed to cover my entire cultural life in Aughts Philadelphia. This created a context for Abby, Mary, and Jenny to be representatively Free School artists, as well. Not to mention, those who had participated in Free School events in Chicago and New York, and everyone who had been published in Philly Free School Post (P.F.S. Post). Why Philly Free School acts as a correlative to Neo-Romanticism and the Creatrix is that it is, to be obvious, based in Philadelphia. On a less obvious note, “Free” and “School” together are meant to imply a group of artists on a vision quest, past the confines of post-modernity, multi-culturalism, and academic feminism, to learn what keys will turn what locks where so as to establish a maximum sense of residency in the most spacious, loft-like socio-aesthetic, socio-sexual, and generally socio-cultural rooms; to know, if it will be known, the boundless. Then, to begin to define the formal parameters of boundlessness in art, if they can or will be defined. And not bypass the imperative to understand what might be boundless in human life and thought, too.