The Kinks

 

Always a harangue, to get anywhere new the avant-prof clan from twenty years ago with the idea that hetero sex might be interesting to write about. Queer sex got off the hook, for being trailblazing. But men and women, forget it. Better to spout the usual stylized gibberish. In any case, who you see here is Danielle (Dani) Diendorf. And the major, newly revised double sonnet about her is Flaming Red Hair. The tie-in to Stoli from earlier this year is simple: the kinks. 

The Schuylkill Moves

 

The Schuylkill moves cleanly, despite
all the murk, as the Expressway looms
on the other side of it. The trees, as
usual, are Heaven, rooted much too
deeply for us to fathom, stacked at
solid angles into a receptive Universe.
I am waiting, writing on the edge of
wars, chopping through the cesspool
of centuries old shit, stunned into an
awareness of you, Abby, and of our life’s binds.
When I imagine you, it’s with a sense
that we’re both standing at the river’s
edge (we are, of course), and as long as we see,
your way, the trees shade into the sky, the binds hold—

© Adam Fieled 2017-2026

The sonnet The Schuylkill Flows was originally published in Otoliths 44 in 2017.

The Wilderness Sequence

 The Wilderness Sequence gets a new Ocean Queen. 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

In a game not unlike Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the newly revised Side-Armed can sit right next to Frequencies. I saw a version, incidentally, of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in London as a teenager. It was almost as risque as the movie. I would also choose to note that these two pieces incorporate dialogue in a theatrical way. Is this a technique I learned in Pittsburgh? Not quite. The Pittsburgh zinger, if there is one, is that a Pittsburgh '92 actress did show up for me in Manhattan in the mid-Aughts in a major way. There it is again: Les Liaisons Dangereuses. 

Letting in drafts II

More work on 4325 Baltimore Avenue. Remember: you are, as you read, supposed to know that Diana and Jenny Kanzler are the same person. And that Abby Heller-Burnham was ensconced with us a good part of the time, too. And Zooska, the cat. 

Starship Trooper

 

As many of us in this country have learned, American print publishing is often its own third-world shenanigans. It's about locking down, throwing out, ad infinitum. No emendations, no second editions. By world standards, baby publishing. Not suitable for the first tier of serious art, philosophy, and science. So that my redone version of Trooper, from Something Solid, a paean to Jeremy's explosiveness in the Nineties and the price he paid for it, can't be emended in Monday Journal from '21. The sense of the corrupt nature of American print publishing does mean that if you want to publish world-level material for real, you better be ready at any time to take matters into your own hands. I refuse to be locked down. To the extent that American art is now getting distinguished on a world level, it's about throwing the lock-down travesties and enterprises out. Of course, Jeremy said the same thing in 1995. 

Old Main becomes Silly Putty

As is disturbingly about time passing swiftly, it happens to be thirty years, to the day, since I broke up with Jennifer Strawser. Those who know the narrative understand, that a few fortnights passed, and then Jen was away from the PSU campus forever, Daily Collegian bylines be damned. Rewriting Silly Putty, for the Nineties section of Something Solid, I was able to ascertain that writing about Jennifer didn't have to be about hellfire and damnation. Their could be some lightness of touch, amidst all the class dismemberment and the rest. Over nine years, Silly Putty evolved from, and out of, Old Main, which came out in The Argotist Online in 2017. What you see in The Argotist was eventually employed as the second sonnet (double-sonnet structure) in Silly Putty. I have now excised it completely. Things disappear into each other, become other things. Such is poetry. As for Jennifer and I disappearing into each other, and becoming something else, I answer that with an affirmative. But the shape, form, and manner of what we each turned into, individually and as a composite entity, will always be difficult for me to grasp. Perhaps someone needs to teach me metaphysics all over again. I await the Practicum.