Art of Writing interview in TAS

 Many thanks to Malcolm Curtis for publishing this interview segment in TAS.

Philly Free School: catalog page

Otoliths 16

Otoliths 16 (WebCite)

Philadelphia City Paper

Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. 

Golden Notebook (Hannah Miller)

Sharkforum

PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

Highwire Gallery (Calendar 2004/2005)

Me-Tronome (Larry Sawyer)

Switchback Books

Lamoureux 

Myopic Books

Kate the Great's Book Emporium

Molly's Bookstore

PhillySound

Bowery Poetry Club (August 13)

Lame House Press

King.org

Cavalcade of Poets & Independent Artists (e-mail group)

Buffalo Poetics List

Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. (2)

Late Late Capital Bootleg Sessions

Golden Notebook (Hannah Miller)(2)

Late Late Capital Bootleg Sessions (2)

Flickr: Timothy Yu

p-ramblings

p-ramblings (2)

Rhode Island Notebook (Gabriel Gudding)

Moss Trill

Goodbye Blue Monday

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?

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.   

East Falls Mary

So, it's now been established: Mary spent the mid-Aughts living in East Falls. East Falls is an obscure neighborhood, within the city limits of Philadelphia, but far from the action of Center City. It happens not to be far from where Jeremy was stationed in Manayunk. Two Septa stops. Her story about herself then is that she was being a technical writer. Good pay, she said, but no insurance benefits. Abby and I didn't know whether to buy it. Mary had no training to be a technical writer at all. Was she trying to one-up us? In any case, worth noting that in the second half of 2006, when Mary moved back to West Philadelphia and became part of the Center City scene again, she was more restrained, less flamboyant then she had been. Mary as a mind-blowing tornado, prepared to grandstand if necessary, was replaced by Mary chastened and sobered. She declared herself a vegan and worked part-time at the Mariposa co-op, not far from where she lived. Provocative attire was replaced with practical. Wherever grandstanding Mary had gone, she'd been replaced with a convert to the religion of fastening one's self, joining one's self to the Earth.