Opera Bufa

   Opera Bufa: “Divertimento Giocoso” or Coping with Absence?

Time, as a linear construction, tends to herd people into viewing their lives I in terms of memory, present sensual stimulation, and hypothetical premonitions. The English language reflects this structure by allowing us to speak in various verbal tenses, and narratives that employ multiple temporal settings can transport the reader or auditor into emotional states contingent upon a temporal location designated by the author. We construct our perceptions of the world based not only on language, however but also on images that elicit emotional responses and generate new thoughts or ideas. Memory works in a similar way, by cataloguing images corresponding to one’s emotional and physical state in the past, like a physical stamp on one’s brain that tries, then, to translate it into words. Memory, which can take such a strong hold on one’s perception, depends upon loss for its own creation, such that one must lose something in order to look back on in it memory. Poets have long been tackling the problem of forgetting and memory, coping with grief, mourning lost lovers or friends, and feeling out the concept of nostalgia through their work. In Opera Bufa, Adam Fieled builds an entire opera out of prose poems, weaving through it themes of sex, music, literature, and drugs, all of which become threads that attempt to explore this concept. His emotional release onto the page is a highly poetic form reduced to potent and poignant prose that describes losing as a means of artistic creation.

Throughout Fieled’s opera, he remembers past lovers and the loss of physical objects, but he continually highlights the arbitrariness of the “what” that is gone, profiting from a focus on the expression engendered by absence. Afterall, the first line of his poetic musical score reads, “Losing is the lugubriousness of Chopin.” (5) By equating “losing” with an interpretation of Chopin’s style he transforms the concept of absence into the great work of an infamous composer in six words. Fieled underscores the importance of what comes from the emotional reaction caused by deprivation rather than the object or feeling originally lost: “It is simply bereavement that leads us here, to these images.” (16) Loss engenders these “images” that eventually lead to new thought, creating inventive juxtapositions and fresh concepts. He goes even further by drawing attention to his own creative process and his reconfiguration of mourning when he says,

What has been lost thus far? It’s just tar on a highway, bound for ocean. Or, it’s the migratory flight of a carrier pigeon. It is all things that move and breathe, coalesced into sound…It is octaves, repeated in a funhouse mirror until a decibel level is reached that a dog alone may hear. I am the dog that hears, the dog that conducts, the dog that puts bones on the table. (50)

In this citation, the poet refers to himself as the ramasseur of the fragmented pieces created by loss. He “conducts” the broken pieces into poetry to be put onto the table for the public to digest.

Furthermore, Fieled directly mentions memory, saying that it is “as sweet as reality” (59) and then relates the two of these to dreams. This statement disregards any difference between the past and the present in terms of experience and one’s emotional state. His comparison to dreams, then, links them all together through their capacity to provoke strong emotional experiences and vivid imagery. However, he separates the dream world from the others by saying, “I have learned to what extent dreams are real. They may not be solid as a cast-iron pot, but they are enough.” (59) But enough for what exactly? Here Fieled suggests that dreams suffice as inspiration for artistic expression. A few, short lines after, he sums up this theory of creation in stating, “It is the hour of feeling, when singing must cease.” (59) Here, “the hour of feeling” refers to the present, profiting from the woman he finds himself next to in order to experience the moment as the present. However, as he states himself, these privileged instances of living in the present moment exclude the possibility of creative release; during these moments, “singing must cease.” In one of his other poems in which he references the power of imagination, he says, “I know that I had to dream an opera to really sing. I know I had to dream singing to really write.” (54) The poet’s creativity cultivated in this dream world derives directly from the concept of losing control. Once his subconscious eliminates all barriers constructed by reason or rationality, Fieled really starts to sing.

Opera Bufa bulges at the seams with drug references to describe an elimination of control. Cocaine and mescaline dispossess users of their governance over their own visual faculties, causing hallucinations and amplifying all external stimuli. This state of being induced by drugs parallels the dream state that Fieled exploits for tapping into new creativity. Drugs, however, grant extended access to this alternative existence in which one’s subconscious yields to consciousness, whereas the dreamer forgoes all control involuntarily. Fieled references the prevalent drug culture of the psychedelic rock scene in San Francisco during the 1960’s and 70’s to infuse his poetry with this theme: “stay where shadows press themselves in upon you. Stay with the purple riders and their sage buttons.” (16) This is the first drug allusion of Opera Bufa, and boldly opens the doors for others to follow. His mention of “purple riders” adorned with “sage buttons” points directly to the band New Riders of the Purple Sage, a country rock band that emerged from this drug and music culture of California in 1969. The term “purple riders” describes users of a mildly hallucinogenic aromatic herb found in Southern California commonly used in Native American ceremonies. Though Fieled makes this insinuation early on in his work, he picks up the thread again towards the end when Maria Callas says to him, “We are all purple riders” as she slowly exhales a ribbon of smoke. Though the author also mentions the use of cocaine, this theme of hallucinogenic drugs is more tightly weaved into his story as he openly associates it with Maria Callas, one of the narrator’s inspirations, his former lover, and the woman who performs his Opera Bufa.

In addition, the poet dissolves boundaries signifying binary opposition to destroy conventional associations and meaning. Many images created by Fieled seem cryptic, and the reader must often wrestle the sentence into some sort of submission from which he or she can draw any digestible meaning. For example, he says things such as, “The history of popcorn is a minor third that can be squelched by intense bed-thuds,” (31) or “keep your pug-face for the aesthete tax collecting slobber-heads.” (28) He also tests one’s logic by using such hypothetical reasoning as, “If you were a cup of finished ice cream, I’d be a brown-eyed moon-goddess.” (11) These lines disorient the reader and also reflect on Fieled’s own state of mind during the creation process. In describing his own style, Fieled says, “As for fluorescence, those crayons were always my favorites anyway. If the color is off, it’s because my set collapsed, if not into nullity, then into plurality.” (54) He tears down the blatant contrasts separating nullity from plurality and life from death to create a space in between, seemingly void of sense and control, from which poetry and song spring forth in abundance. He says that “song cannot be spared when life and death adhere,” (56) and it is within this grey space that Fieled writes. Inside this space, in which everything seems arbitrary and undeterminable, people create new connections between words and images, create new meaning, and better understand themselves.

In losing control and sacrificing reason, Fieled actually gains control over his own creative style and the structure of his work. The opening sentence in which he mentions Chopin establishes the poet’s theme and perspective that he will tease out during the fifty-nine poems to follow. He relies heavily on the concept of absence and its multiple contributions to the creative process in the first quarter of his opera before he enters into other themes. In his first poem, Fieled says,

What’s lost might be a sea shell or a tea cup or the bloody scalp of an Indian; it hardly matters. When you are lost, the heart recedes from exterior currents, too much in sync with itself, its groove vicissitudes. Each encounter, rather than revealing new rhythms, is experienced as a clangorous din, a pounding…to push the heart deeper and deeper into pitiless darkness…We squirm within ourselves to the sound of the Devil’s opera bufa. (5)

He disregards what sends him into this “pitiless darkness” to focus on the experience he lives once there. Fieled plants the seed of an idea that should slowly blossom in the reader’s mind through their experience with his work and returns to the original concept in his final poems. Eight poems from the end, he begins an “inventory” of what is lost, of what remains, and of what has been gained. A few poems before that, he says, “What has been lost thus far? It’s just tar on a highway, bound for ocean,” (50) lines that provide deeper reflection upon an idea that was similarly stated in the first lines of his work. In using this structure, Fieled has created a strong thematic foundation that circles back on itself, and he fills the middle with layers of relevant ideas, juxtaposed colors and images, and a stylized imagery presented in a simple, yet very rich and highly poetic style.

Stacy Blair, Loyola University Chicago, 2008

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I was very fortunate to pick up a copy of Opera Bufa when I did. I went to see Andrew Lundwall and Daniela Olszewska read at Myopic Books and was browsing the authors-who-have-been-here shelf before it started. I went upstairs and sat down. Andrew was late; he lives an hour or so outside of town. I started reading.

I don’t know too much about opera, but I think that it would be a lovely experience in the spring, as is Adam’s book, as is going to a good poetry reading, which is what I meant that I was fortunate to pick up a copy, right now, especially, when the spring is creeping in and melting up a bit of winter’s hard and coldness. The book had some kind of similar effect on me, like music, as it is music, as it really is, and as it also uses as its larger metaphor.

The themes start and they start to mix. The way that they mix is the first part of the opera, a part which is sustained for a very large portion of the poem; so long, in fact, that I thought that was what the whole poem would be like. But it did change, and I very much appreciated that. I imagine that operas change partway through. I know our lives do. Adam writes, "as if you were a cup of finished ice-cream, I’d be a brown-eyed moon goddess"(11). Is this a good time to mention that I told Andrew after the reading that my favorite line of his was, "I want to eat some ice cream. I want to fuck my face with vanilla. Seems like it." Adam mentions right off that the rhythms are pitiless because we do not know how they began and this is a good example: "Rhythms become streams of possible shoe-lace, slugs of 3 a.m. Scotch, lust after thy neighbor’s daughter, mooning on the lawn"(7) and later "You become gum"(36).

Adam latches onto rhythms that are already at play in the world and sifts into them his mix of observation, word play, conjecture, description, subversion and other games of linguistic and logic, testing out our frames of reference. Many sentences land themselves in a music of metaphor that made me keep wanting more. In this weird time of wanting to start a book that I see wing past my window on Goodreads or having guilt about setting one aside that I’ve already committed to publicly, it was just an absolute joy to want to keep reading and reading until I was finished. And, though I hate to admit this for fear that it reveals something about my attention span, this is rare.

Also related to spring, I felt very fortunate to be reading about so many actions that are happening outside from section to section, so much grass and color and even running along the Schuylkill, which makes me miss Philly in the springtime, too. In terms of the balance that Adam’s creating in the book from section to section, he’s bringing in a real record of the outside world to pour into his metaphors. This is not only a great springtime thing to think about, but also an important poetic for getting the poet outside of themselves. It was riveting to watch Adam’s real-time reactions as he wrote the world into the opera, which must ultimately be sung with a voice.

Well what do I want to say about the end of the opera. The opera begins to end and then it begins to know it is ending and then it is ending and then it ends. At one point, at the very beginning of the ending as I saw it, Adam writes, "I only knew two scales, and I played them every which way"(44) and then he writes, "I saw a thousand hues, and each was differently used" (49) and how can they both be true? Well they are in this opera. In the first statement, he admits that his initial range might seem limited, but in the next he shows that what he observes in the world is much more multiple. Although a bounded being, external experience is what, looking back to the first statement, allows him to create real complexity with his writing. A writer has only so many words but each encounter is new and provides new materials, new ideas, and new combinations of thoughts and words. There’s an attention that Adam is drawing to this paradox of language that poetry permeates as he draws his opera to a close. Perhaps one of the things about opera is that it transmits a vital energy; besides its mimetic purpose as theater, large swells of sound are projected with so much skill into the confined space of the hall. Within Opera Bufa, there is real life stirring inside the language as it finds a climax out of the constraints of its own conjuring.

I finished Opera Bufa while I was getting my hair cut, another spring thing, getting rid of the heavy mess of growth on my head that had gotten out of control over the winter. Now I feel lighter. I guess that when it’s time to finish a book of really fine poetry, "it is the hour of feeling, when singing must cease" (59). Adam writes, "If only I felt that life, concentrated into song, could be fruit juice for thirsty joggers. Alas, it is not so" (62). Well, maybe I’m in an especially optimistic mood right now, but I disagree.

Laura Goldstein, moria poetry, 2008

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An opera bufa (or “opera buffa,” as it is more commonly spelled) is a comic opera. It’s a term and a genre which Mary Evelyn Harju introduced me to. The idea of writing the poetry equivalent of an opera bufa is one that occurred to me as viable for a number of reasons, in the mid-Aughts. The first reason was practical— it was time, I felt, to begin writing books, rather than just writing poems in a scattershot manner. It was also difficult not to notice that avant-garde/experimental poets in my age group were having a more than reasonable amount of success with book-length manuscripts of interlocking prose poems. When a group of younger poets who had all done their MFAs at U of Mass Amherst (Mary Harju had also done undergrad time there) descended on Center City Philly in the mid-Aughts (Eric Baus, Nick Moudry, Laura Solomon, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Dorothea “Dottie” Lasky), they brought with them this bias and sensibility. Eric Baus, particularly, though he only spent a year at Temple (’06-’07), managed to impress on me the many advantages of approaching book-length manuscripts this way. I decided, however, that if I was going to bow to a meat-market trend and do what Baus had done, I was going to do it my way— with a strong narrative voice and backbone, and with thematics in general not neglected. The idea of writing a comic opera appealed to me, because it is an unlikely juxtaposition (avant-garde poetry with comic opera) and because it would allow me to explore the interrelationship between music, language, and performance. Not to mention the consciousness or cognitive capacity which can assimilate, codify, arrange and rearrange all three in art. The text, specifically, as a staged site.

Opera Bufa was my first full-length print book. It was released almost precisely co-terminously with the Blazevox e-book Beams in the early autumn of ’07. When I visited Chicago again in early ’08, I managed to place a few copies at Myopic Books in Wicker Park, where I had read in December ’06. Through an interesting collusion of events, it was picked up by Chicago poetess Laura Goldstein to teach at Loyola University Chicago; and when I visited Chicago in the summer of ’08, I lectured to one of Laura’s classes at Loyola behind Opera Bufa. It was included on their syllabus. Goldstein herself wrote a perceptive review of the book for the William Allegrezza-edited Chicago e-zine moria which is included here. Stacy Blair was an outstanding student of Laura's and became an avid early reader of Opera Bufa as well. 

Of all of my books, Opera Bufa is the one (along with Beams) which was born most squarely from the context of contemporary avant-garde poetry— though bits of Wordsworth and Eliot are woven into the text, it has the stamp of the mid-Aughts Amer-Po zeitgeist on it. It is still more continental than was common for that niche, which I designed it to be. One disadvantage which Opera Bufa has is that the book is more than the sum of its pieces; but when the pieces have been isolated and published apart from the ur-text, they cannot be representative. The book needs to be read as a whole, or not at all. It is also a book which has spawned some flagrant imitations, like Mark Strand's shameless Almost Invisible. The narrative voice here is light and whimsical (as befits an opera bufa), and not too fraught with multiple meanings or philosophical quiddities. Also: syntactically easy, the narrative voice, to imitate. In other words, and like Chimes (though for different reasons), it is a book Americans can accept. As such, it has been taught with some frequency in America (especially in the Chicago area), and embraced. Still, I would like to hope that the lightness and breeziness of the text carry some serious undercurrents— that literature, like opera, is a kind of performance; and that the performative nature of texts make them active, rather than passive, agents in the world. The text also argues for a frank approach to sex and sexuality; rather than the coy evasiveness then more common. That texts can and should be seductive is something Roland Barthes used to discuss; and Barthes and France are an influence here.

When You Bit...

As I've recounted elsewhere, the middle portion of When You Bit..., Dancing with Myself, was completed in 2007 but then had to be scrapped and re-written in the spring of '08. Listening to how this twenty sonnet cycle worked out, it strikes me that the ambivalence of the protagonist, how he's hung on a hook he might or might not want to be on, is the dominant theme or motif which emotionally charges the piece with pathos, longing. That pathos and that longing, expressed both directly and with imagery/metaphor, raises Dancing with Myself above the first and third sections of the book (Sister Lovers and Two of Us) so that it is the most fit to stand alone.

In terms of where the Dancing with Myself protagonist is headed: if he cannot admit how many bets he is hedging about what confronts him in this relationship he's had to push (briefly, reluctantly) to the side (this is in Palliative), it is because he probably cannot decide himself how many bets need to be hedged himself. The construction crew grinding away at pavement on 21st Street (Whiskey), and how this protagonist "lives in his churned guts," both make visceral the cognitive-affective meat-grinder he's been placed into. Yet, looking at Dancing with Myself in relation to the history of the sonnet, other meat-grinders, which have ensnared the likes of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder and Sir Philip Sidney, have tended towards more of a sense of grievance and complaint. Wyatt and Sidney whine, where I offer up resignation. Lingering in the back, also, is the issue of duration; how long can I get this love-object to commit to me? While Dancing with Myself is more than loosely based on a (Philadelphia, rather than Chicago) situation which really did happen to, and isolate, me (Julia), I will leave it to my readers and listeners to decide whether the sonnets justify the suffering or not. That, by the way, is one function the sonnet has as a poetic form (more than, say, an ode or an elegy): to let a protagonist show us why and how he or she is suffering, and then to ask us to accept and bless or sanctify their suffering in an embrace of the literary moment, which the sonnet has bothered to fulfill.

I have a few more things to say about Dancing With Myself. The perspective adopted by the author of a sonnet does not have to be a youthful one, but it tends to be. The youthful voice, exploring feelings of confinement, isolation, or (conversely, as in Keats' sonnets) euphoria and expansiveness, tends to hit us with a sense of something bubbling over or overflowing. The protagonist of Dancing with Myself adopts, uncommonly, a weathered voice and perspective, a voice already scarred by a lifetime of painful experience, even if the voice still believes in the redemptive powers of love and companionship. I think of Wordsworth and The world is too much with us..., probably the gravest, most profound sonnet of the nineteenth century; my exiled-from-paradise protagonist shares with Wordsworth's the sense of disenchantment and alienation from the dreary intercourse of daily life and its vagaries. Yet the melancholy of age and experience vie here with the poignant sense of not-yet-atrophied emotional responsiveness, and not-yet-atrophied intellectual curiosity to go right along with it. This protagonist is weathered but not defeated. Julia remains within reach.

Another bizarre Romanticism tangent, this time to Keats' Odes: the protagonist of Dancing with Myself finds himself exploring all the silence and slow time he needs, as Keats' does when he beholds his Grecian Urn. What these sonnets are drained of is the sense of original innocence engraved into the urn; that the urn celebrates youth, ecstasy, conflict, faith, and mythology, and Keats ricochets them back into his poem, mirroring the themes reckoned, adding his own gloss and prosodic richness; while Dancing with Myself explores age and aging processes, keeping the conflict, faith, and mythology, losing the youth and ecstasy. Part of the aged or weathered quality of the Dancing with Myself sonnets are expressed in their approach to form: rather than aping the Romantics, as a younger poet might, I employ what I call "clustering" or semi-formal techniques. Thus, I (hopefully) avoid the merely imitative, and express the maturity of a poet who can make formal compromises towards the creation of new forms. Disjuncture, in Sister Lovers, staples an avant-garde semi-agenda to the book, too, so that the journey from Beams is not an inchoate one.   

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I set this particular book, When You Bit..., in Chicago, because I visited Chicago several times between 2006 and 2008. 2006 was another pivotal year for me— in many ways, the Philly Free School in its original form effectively ended (Mike Land’s 7/29/06 extravaganza at the Highwire being the final Free School show with all the “classic” elements in place), I finished my M.F.A. and began as a University Fellow at Temple, and, most importantly, harnessed all my energy (which hitherto had suffered some dissipation) towards writing and publishing seriously. I hit some open spaces and some walls instantly— Beams was published by Blazevox in late 2007, but accepted for publication in October ’06; roughly the same time my first poems appeared in Jacket Magazine. The walls I hit had to do with the infrastructure of the Philly poetry community. During the Philly Free School years, I was shielded from facing this infrastructure— by a vibrant social nexus, by our multi-media approach, and by my then-scattershot approach to publishing, not to mention a curatorial role I was fulfilling. Now, I registered a new, bitter, brittle, hard, cold world, and I found it alone (Mike, Nick, Mary, Abby, and the rest had gone their separate ways, at least temporarily). A socio-aesthetic version of Mad Max, to be sure.

The Philly avant poetry world, at high levels and where high-stakes publishing was concerned, was run by old money and what could be purchased, which was everything. Two or three tightly constructed and connected cliques ruled the roost, and demanded absolute conformity and forfeiture of control for entrance or acceptance. These cliques also frowned on sexualized behavior and sex-related artistic work; on attractive looking people in general; and on writers being judged by talent, rather than by strictly reined-in and by-certain-books behavior. This all sounds rather daunting, and it was. But the key figures in these cliques were also hopelessly untalented geeks, frumpy, and not particularly taken seriously by anyone outside of Philadelphia, or South Philly, where they tended to come from.. One of their funniest riffs was about talent— in their world, there was no “talent,” and “talent” was a myth created by naïve patriarchal authorities to impose subaltern status on their underlings, etc, etc. They also hated poetry— “it’s not the poems, it’s the thoughts about the poems.” They were pretty unabashedly book parasites or plebeians, there to replace the genuine, sanctimoniously, with the corrupt. To block the real stuff. The net effect of all this meshigas is that by late 2006, I had seen a new, waste land version of the city I loved. I was determined and ambitious— I wasn’t going to run back to curating Free School shows, and give up the idea of making my name as a writer. I also had some newfangled advantages— the Net, and particularly Blogger, were finding ways to save my ass. But the whole in-love-with-Philly, Free School vibe had turned sour.

As of late 2006, the new Philly for me was a monstrosity. If I was going to find romance, intoxication, and intrigue, I’d have to look elsewhere. Because, during the course of doing my M.F.A. I had befriended a Chicago-area poet named Steve Halle, it looked like Chicago might be an option. I made arrangements to visit Chicago in December ’06— to stay with Steve in the Chicago suburb Palatine where he lived, to read with him at Myopic Books in Wicker Park, Chicago, and in general to commiserate with the Chicago poetry community. My visits to Chicago weren’t anywhere near as baroque as the Free School years— moderate drinking and drugging, no carnivorous carnality. But I did find Chicago enchanting, and unique, particularly Wicker Park, which was always our first stop in town. Chicago reminded me of the best bits of New York and D.C. in composite form— the cleanliness of the one, the imposing scale of the other. I liked the fact that being in Chicago (even more than New York) was like being marooned on an island in the middle of America— and that middle America (places like Palatine) was a sight to see. I found life in Palatine like being on the moon.

In short, I found Chicago imaginatively stimulating enough that the weight of dealing with waste land Philadelphia was balanced. The idea for When You Bit… began from a small incident which happened at a bar in Andersonville after one of my Chicago readings in mid-2007— a Chicago poetess picked up my arm and bit it. She and some of her friends became the Muses, along with Julia Brodsky, for When You Bit… I decided, early in the game, to employ the sonnet form here— both because the emotions of longing and confinement were being investigated, and because I felt I could take the sonnet form someplace new, towards transgression and perversion. My particular Chicago Muses were two poetesses who seemed to always show up as a Dynamic Duo— as the initial portion of the book would investigate a ménage between a protagonist and the two of them. The middle section of the book would dwell on the protagonist’s interiority; and then the final portion of the book would reunite the protagonist with one of the Dynamic Duo. As I mentioned in an interview with Mipoesias in ’08, the narrative structure of the book is this: 3, 1, 2. The action is set in Chicago/Philly, but doesn’t necessarily need to be— the real activity is in the protagonist’s consciousness, as it and he sift through the vicissitudes and junk-heaps of the flesh to find something genuine.

P.F.S.: Mid-Aughts Mayhem

Summer '04 to summer '05 was the heaviest year to be on the street in Aughts Philadelphia. There was an explosive energy around everything— and my emotions oscillated, personally, between euphoria and dejection from night to night. It wasn't just the Philly Free School Highwire shows; because the Making Time DJ nights had a large national and international following, and all the DJs worked at the Last Drop, just to be in the Last Drop at that time was to be in a realm so supercharged that we might as well have been doing lines off the tables. Adam Sparkles, who shared my name and birthday, ran the Last Drop with an iron fist. If he was laconic with P.F.S., it is because at that time he considered us competitors; even as the place, owing to its location, couldn't not be useful for us. 

Yet, for many of us, the euphoria of success was counter-weighed by the dejection of living a life more excessive than I (or Jeremy or Abby, especially) had planned in our comparatively "salad" early Aughts days. Abs and I picked a weird moment to consummate our relationship, but there it was. The low point of the year for me was confessing to Mary Harju, who was no dummy and knew the score. Mary and I had been separated for over a year, but still. The one Philly Free School show Mary deigned to attend at the Highwire (at which we showed her Dionysus), she brought her sister Laurie, who was as blonde and pixie-faced as Mary but sharper about making her way materially in the world. She was essentially conservative, and had a way of making us feel like heathens for being artists. Mary's "husband" that night wore a tie-dye, and was truculent. Ruth, the third sister Harju (or Hariu, as they sometimes spelled it), was more handsome than pixie-faced, brunette, and wavered somewhere between Mary and Laurie. So, oddly, my most promiscuous time passed without much real contact with Mary at all. She'd be back in '07 and '08. Hannah Miller was in, explosive, and then gone, as was Mary Walker Graham in New Hampshire. Jenny Kanzler had yet to emerge, but was watching with some curiosity from the side. Chicago, through Steve Halle, began to form as another Manifest Destiny locale, on the horizon. NYC beckoned, as usual, from right next door. 

Unsurprisingly, Mike Land was (or appeared to be) in heaven. Everywhere we went together, including the Highwire, and New York (where Mike's sister Anna lived in the East Village) we were treated like celebrities, because the Free School shows were big news— even the Philadelphia City Paper was in on them. It also didn't escape my notice that for these months, we were living the way the Beatles and the Stones (or Floyd)(or Steely Dan, our musical dope of choice at the time) were supposed to have lived. If Mike Land was a surprise and a superlative running buddy at a time like this, it is because he was good with euphoric moods, but also with dejected ones— he had a precociously developed appreciation of the human condition, and an empathy with pain and human suffering, which meant that (as, again, I was surprised by) he was no fair weather friend at all. I came to the conclusion— beneath the hustle and the good looks, Mike Land was a very old soul. Jeremy was crabbed and deficient this way (having sustained bruises we all knew about) and not someone to lean on; Abs and/or Ms. H, maybe. In the right mood, they could be stand-up friends. It also never ceases to amaze me that it is here, with all this tumult going on, that Abby fulfilled her destiny and painted her masterpieces.

attached photo of the inside of the Highwire Gallery, main space (Highwire 1) ........................................................................................................................................

As I have discussed at length elsewhere, 2005 was a hectic, tumultuous time for me. On a bunch of different circuits (including the Philly bar scene and the art scene, which in the Aughts were first cousins), the Philly Free School was a fire set loose. My writing life wasn’t (couldn’t be) terribly disciplined at the time— though I had written Wittgenstein’s Song in April at the Last Drop, and debuted it in New England. My spring M.F.A. semester was nonetheless a personal milestone; through Anne Waldman, I became steeped in nouveau poetry and the avant-garde; and my piece (written for Anne) Wordsworth @ McDonald’s came out in Jacket #28 in April, too. Being younger than thirty and in Jacket, which was the epitome of hip at the time, was part of my wild ride then. I was feeling cocky, and puckish. Obvious lines began to run, not only to Sydney but to London, from Philly. 

It was in character for me in 2005 to believe I could create a valuable, viable poetic form out of thin air. In truth, the eponymous section of Beams I wrote at that time is not a substantial formal breakthrough; what I call the Beam form isn’t that unique or striking. The poems have more strength in their thematic gist than in their formal inventiveness— lots of twisted, warped sexuality, precursor to the When You Bit… sonnets and the Madame Psychosis poems, written a year later. It wasn’t a stretch for me to be warped about sexuality in mid-Aughts Philadelphia. Or New York, where Mike Land’s sister Anna, in the East Village, had been more than accommodating. The Madame Psychosis poems of ’06 were formally and thematically more self-conscious; partly because I was trying to be painterly (in the manner of de Kooning and his Women), partly because the formal imperative was to compress (in the manner of Keats), partly because I’d been perverted by a period of promiscuity, and knew it. Many of the best Madame Psychosis poems were written in New England; debbie jaffe was written in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. I lifted the title of the series from Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which I read at that time.

One of my more odd discoveries then was that a huge puritanical streak ran, unabashedly, through avant-garde poetry in America. One female editor, in particular, castigated my pervishness in a memorable way, by laying down a gauntlet—if she was going to publish me, it had to be something more abstract or impressionistic, and not so sexualized. I wrote the original Apparition Poems (which later mutated in a more expansive direction) for her—some of them wound up coming out, also, in Jacket #31, and in a Lake Forest College Press anthology. As Beams was being written, my life tightened and became more focused- I finished my M.F.A., started as a University Fellow at Temple, and the Free School ceased to function as a cohesive entity. The Virtual Pinball poems, co-written with Swedish poet Lars Palm, were a kind of last hurrah for the profligate Free School period—written in an arbitrary, haphazard manner, often from whatever I happened to be listening to on the radio. By October ’06, I had compiled the Beams manuscript of the four series and sent it to Blazevox. It came out as a Blazevox e-book a year later.

Beams is as close as I’ve come to publishing something representatively post-modern— a book which prizes quirk, anomaly, and disjuncture over depth, form, and intellect. If I had to move past it instantly, it is because I found the strictures of post-modern verse too limiting. There’s too much human reality which can’t be expressed with quirk and anomaly; and too much ephemerality in the post-modern approach for a disciple of British Romanticism to accept or embrace (even if UK poet Jeffrey Side connected Beams with Blake in an ’08 review of the book). If Beams has a claim to some enduring importance, it is because I dared to tackle a serious theme (human sexuality) in a few novel, skewered ways, and without unduly obfuscating what the theme was. The title series, also, goes past sex, into the pure surreal. 

P.F.S.: Jerome McGann

How scholar Jerome McGann defines romanticism in his tome The Romantic Ideology— an unthinking, unquestioning belief in a certain circumscribed ideology/set of ideological assumptions, aesthetic and otherwise— does apply, in a more limited sense, to the Philly Free School and most of the other key players in the Aughts Philadelphia Renaissance. Yet, as I noticed while studying at Temple in the late Aughts, there is a double-bind and a contradiction built into McGann’s famous, and famously ambiguous, formulation— the entire gist of ideology (and ideologies) is that different groups and sub-groups expend cognitive effort to develop and establish ideologies, so that no worked-over ideology does not have cognitive effort built into it; in other words, developed ideologies presuppose thoughts and questions. What McGann seems to be suggesting about English Romanticism (first and second generation included) is this: once the ideological parameters around their artistic endeavors were set, no more earnest cognition was devoted to anything but ideological consolidation— the Romantic Ideology was taken to be axiomatic enough that ideological interrogations and revisions were deemed unnecessary. The Romantics were self-expressive, self-reflective, and self-determinative; they saw and toiled to manifest the explosive potentialities of the subjective. To be reductive (and cute), they put the “I” in ideology, and sought the indirect route to objective truths through subjective ones. They were consummate individuals.

Here’s another split between myself and most of Aughts Philly— if, as a collective, we have a patron saint among the English Romantics, it must, for a number of key reasons, be John Keats. One reason his Odes have aged so beautifully is that, despite (like his cronies) putting the “I” in ideology and developing his subjectivities in characteristic Romantic fashion (torch filched from Wordsworth/Coleridge by imaginative cunning), Keats presents himself and his visions in a prescient (anticipating not only Neo-Romanticism but countless strains of century XX culture before us) mode of noir or deep noir; the darkness and monotony of Regency London, in the midst of an impinging and strictly-speaking unnatural Industrial Revolution and factory-culture, and the place of a classical-minded (enlightened elitist/classicist) poet generating friction-sparks by struggling against it. My own early Aughts odal period borrowed Keats' sense of formality but moved in a direction more straightforwardly celebratory and (arguably) orgiastic.  Among the Odes, Nightingale and Grecian Urn create a gestalt-world not unlike The Lost Twins and The Skaters— all is shadowy, spectral, and obsessed with an evanescent past; and all manifest meanings are multiple, and create cognitive multiplications for their audience. The implicit split, for me personally, from Aughts Philly had come to fruition in Apparition Poems, and has to do with William Wordsworth, and an odd aesthetic attachment I had/have to him, even in the turbid depths of noir; a kind of compact I refused to break. Wordsworth’s aesthetic, much more so than Keats’, includes vistas suggestive of moral interests— that high art need not evade morality and moral issues, but take cognizance of them as an act of defiant, individualistic courage and courageous, passionate humanism.

I both do and do not mean to imply that Aughts Philly was characterized by immorality, or immoral impulses or amoral ones. It was not particularly questioned, in our collective ideology, that all of us were on a vision quest for personal socio-aesthetic and socio-sexual fulfillment, and did not very much mind applying a little elbow grease to ride roughshod over people and situations which stood in our way. The conflict of wills among us could be terrible— yet one thing we had going for us, also, was a streak of Romantic Sincerity, which guaranteed that, despite all the circumstantial twists and turns of our lives, we were (many of us) able to cut through the bullshit and commiserate with each other on profound levels. We embraced emotions, and passions, and lived in them without the thought of too much objectivity— in other words, we were authentically young. Whether McGann could align us successfully with the English Romantics is an interesting question— but the key weakness in McGann’s formulation, from the beginning, is that he never seems to stop and think how his Romantic Ideology paradigm applies to any artist or art-group worth their salt— for genuine artists, unsettling ideological assumptions is less important than remaining emotionally, sexually, socially, and creatively fluid and fluent, ideology and ideologies be damned.

Revolver: Take arms against a sea of troubles...

The murk and sludge of 2008 engendered a wide variety of responses. When I could get high in 2008, it was on the wings of a writing bender which wound up seeing me into the Teens. In the triumvirate of e-chap/e-book publications in ’08 and ’09, Revolver distinguishes itself by a vested sense of sobriety. Revolver is not me burying myself in alcohol, nor is it me wallowing in the urban menace atmosphere of filth and scum. Revolver is where I respond to the sleaze and scum by fighting back. Wide awake, the protagonist here takes in the world around him, and sees what unholy, bitterly corrupted lights he can shoot out. Beneath the sobriety and the fury, Revolver also reads as a last will and testament of and for my relationship with Mary Evelyn Harju. I’m watching her moves, and watching mine, and trying to discern why the impasse between us must be, or seem, permanent. Blood on the Tracks time. There’s always a rift where the physical and spiritual play a violent, spiteful game of tug-of-war. The criticisms and recriminations which inform Love You To, lead to molten melt-down of She Said She Said and then the complete and totalized entropy of For No One. As the final salvo of the e-chap, Tomorrow Never Knows consummates a willful imposition of the physical on the spiritual and vice versa, into a sense of life being conceived in a dissolution of individual consciousness. This is where the lovers cease to exist, and commune in something like a Universal consciousness or Mind. Where sex means something. Where Mary and I are concerned, the final fuck (half-metaphorically meant) is the most profound. The revolver carried by the protagonist annihilates itself, as it self-exhausts, and the ecstasy does not exclude sobriety, faithfulness, or discipline. What actually happened between Ms. H and I in the second half of ’07 is tangled. Some of our raw material got transmuted, some rendered with (again) an adequate faithfulness. Released as a Scantily Clad Press e-chap in ’08, Revolver’s solution for recessional entropy is a commitment to cultivating presence, reality, individuality. These are seen to be worth fighting for. Entity, unthinking consciousness, is not to be trusted, as a weakening agent. All shot through with a patina of raw, divorced pain. One way home.

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                                          The Fall: Mary Evelyn Harju: 2008

Rubber Soul: Vino Veritas

 

Vino veritas, translates from the Latin, roughly, as this: truth-in-alcohol. The phenomenon by which we tell more of the truth when drunk. Is vino veritas something real? I wouldn’t venture a definitive guess. Different people react different ways to different stimulants and/or depressants. I would only say that, in my life as a writer, I’ve only dived (delved) into these murky waters once, i.e. written an entire piece (in this case, a chapbook length manuscript) while alcohol shit-faced. Rubber Soul was written and published in 2008. I have made a point of pointing out, in other places, that I was not playing the game straight for much of that particular, recession-trundling year. I wasn’t compulsively shit-faced either; I had (for instance) to function at Temple, both as adjunct prof and graduate student, and I did. But it was a saucy time, of old games turning up loose ends, and, where the recession was concerned, micro and macro levels converging in my life, and the lives of those I cared for. Even as I found, of course, that I couldn’t take care of them anymore. So: I was drunk enough of the time to take my stab, for instance, at the Jack Kerouac of Big Sur. The narrative voice emerges, as in Big Sur, fuzzy, hazy, staggering, stumbling. Drunken. Also channeling my old family relation Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild said of Morrison, When he was being the shit-faced kamikaze drunk, it was odds-on against getting him to do a vocal. You might look into it. Paraphrase for a writer churning out a brief book: I looked into it.

The narrative Rubber Soul voice is, in fact, too fuzzy, too hazy, to attempt anything classic. Keats keeps getting leaned on, Manhattan juts in absurdly, as does a bizarre overlay of occult/New Age/Golden Dawn baggage. Amidst all the glass shards, who I am as a long-suffering male protagonist in Girl is clearly, and precociously, taking on the task of relating/mythologizing the years on the front-lines with Mary Evelyn. Eight years, to be precise. The Word finds me sounding not like Kerouac or Morrison but like Charles Bukowski. He becomes another absurd overlay, amidst the fuzziness and the Crowley bric-a-brac. The overall tone of Rubber Soul, I would say, is not morose like Big Sur but frenzied, chaotic, hysterical. Much of it’s supposed to be funny, too, the kind of funniness The White Album sacrifices at the altar of still-cherished classicism. Rubber Soul can be taken as a romp all the way through. Ungovernable Press, btw, which published The White Album (1st ed.) and Rubber Soul in ’09 and ’08, respectively, is based in Sweden, and emanates from editor Lars Palm at the center. Part of the ’08 fracas was about weird worlds colliding online. Philadelphia to Malmo? Why not. And me and many others did have a sense of largesse, then, about how many books and chapbooks we could publish. A nifty compensation, as it were, for all the drunken nights. And a clue as to why some of us have been able to survive all the melees.

Trish: A Romance

 

Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. As I said, I was never to interact with her in a prolonged way again.

Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.