Adam Fieled's Miscellaneous

This portrait of me was taken by New York poet Amy King in 2009, at the venue Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I am reading from When You Bit..., the month is August. Also on the bill: Nada Gordon, David Wollach. Like my tat?

Wednesday, April 1, 2026

Introducing Dawn Gailey

My friend Dawn Gailey, originally from Phoenixville, took several portraits of me at the Last Drop at 13th and Pine Streets in Center City in the fall of 2008. The bottom one here captures me looking quite like a rebel without a cause. More to say on the Drop, as we called it, in the months to come, as a crucial hang-out space in the Aughts, and site for day-to-day mischief. The basis, also, for Letters to Dead Masters.

Portraiture

This is Mary Evelyn Harju's masterful portrait of me on Avenue A in the East Village, also in 2007. Turns out, for several months in the spring of 1999, I had lived on Avenue A in Alphabet City, as the neighborhood is called. At that time, nothing had really coalesced around me and books. By 2007, I was a much more consolidated presence. The way Mary set up the pictorial composition here is amazing, and had to have been done on the fly. For a visual artist who took heat for being too plodding, too methodical, it proves that Mary could be inspired in an impulsive way, too. The wackiness of Mary's balance of elements often meant that when she had a camera rather than paints, she could indulge herself in impulsive moves, against the idea of too much conscious craft. In this case, all the elements came together in such a way that she managed to set up a compositional structure as satisfying as the ones in her best paintings. She was happy to let elements fall in place as they may.

Mariposa-worthy

You can see here, in the attached pic, that Mary, by the time we were back again as a couple in 2007, wasn't making an attempt to incinerate anyone anymore. She was OK being plain Jane. There we were, at Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a Mipoesias reading. The collision of Mary Evelyn Harju with Mary Walker Graham, as is also seen here, was notable. Ms. Graham was in New York for some kind of publishing conference. Briana Winter being there, from the Nineties Sidewalk Cafe anti-folk crowd, is amazing, too. After the reading, I took the train with the two Marys back to Manhattan, and we stopped for a bite to eat at a random East Village diner. The two Marys were cordial with each other, but Mary Evelyn's then-new restrained style meant that no sparks needed to fly. Were we completely sedate? That's not really fair, either. As people might have guessed, coke was out, for Mary Evelyn then; but all her earthiness and Mariposa-worthy vegan purity did not preclude the continuation of Mary's cannabis habit. We smoked together semi-constantly, even though I was also working as an academic at the time, and pursuing books along a careerist track that took us to New York and elsewhere in 2007 many times.