What Needs No Myth

 

What Needs No Myth was read by Adam Fieled at Personal Mythologies II at KWH on September 20, 2003.

after William Butler Yeats

The actuality of summer leaves wavering—
water gushing from springs— wind redolent
with sap— will never be enough to fill great
chasms of self-consciousness, emptiness of

death-fearing despair. If we could only learn
to watch waves of the sea— what needs no
myth never stops coming. No Sphinx waits in
the desert— nothing slouches towards Bethlehem—

no preternatural reality waits to replace what
never was. Ghosts predominate— slouch, blood-
dimmed tide built into them. Meanwhile, actual
falcons manifest the miracle of flight— harbingers

of the endless— winging the air, persevering.
It is a matter of mathematics, of where the numbers
end. Or space, our real home— inscrutably expansive,
unbelievable. There is no judgment in space.

Asteroids come out of the void— full-bodied, hurtling,
bent on something. Stars live and die, to no
appreciable avail comprehensible to us. There is
enough wonder in the Universe to befuddle

a thousand sages. Jesus on the cross is simple
by comparison. Each reductive model bends
the Collective Unconscious further towards
breakage. Sodden with suffering, the great

unassimilated incorrigibly search beneath
the stratosphere. Who understands that
breaking the circle is a precondition to well-
roundedness? Having achieved existence,

even Buddha sat by the bo tree a little
eternity, rounding myths into pebbles, pebbles
into myths—

Revealing Mystic Truths

 

Revealing Mystic Truths concludes Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

One primary accusation that gets leveled at modern poetry is that it exists in a sort of solipsistic vacuum, a little bubble. Poets write for each other, for the most part; there is no real audience. Sadly, it’s the truth. This was affirmed to me by a little Google experiment (if you’ve never tried the Google game, I highly recommend it; hours of ego-belittling fun); it seems that one song by The Who has more Google hits than John Ashbery, the big, bad, post-modern Daddio of American letters. One could derive two possible inductive conclusions from this— serious poetry is a sophisticated, demanding art, too demanding for the average money-grubbing, or Britney-worshipping, or Britney-grubbing, or money-worshipping American philistine. Or, serious poetry has degenerated into such an academic farce of linguistic hi-jinx that nobody gives a fuck, and rightly so. Regrettably, I would lean toward the latter conclusion.

It follows that I don’t take much inspiration from contemporary poetry. The post-modern ideal loses its potency on the page, for me at least. Where post-modernism finds its apotheosis is in conceptual art— installations, videos, some paintings. Bruce Nauman is perhaps the single greatest exponent of post-modernism that America has produced. For one thing, he’s simple. He’ll film himself painting his balls, or walking around the perimeter of a square, or imitating a fountain with his mouth. Psycho-minimalism, Frank Stella calls it. What it evokes is, perhaps not coincidentally, a stoner’s world— skewed, tweaked, a little bit uncomfortable. There’s something Beat about it, a bit of Zen, a bit of Beckett. It definitely has all the charm of novelty for an East Coast audience, who tend to expect bold, definite gestures, rather than vague, indefinite ones.

I wanted to write a poem that would capture all these elements in text. In this case, it seemed appropriate to live discipline, and conventional notions of craft behind, ending up with Kerouac’s “first thought, best thought” dictum being manifest. This is an unedited poem, straight from the belly of the beast, which, if the beast is called Poesy, may be a rather unpleasant thought. In fact, I have grave doubts about this piece, and if you’ve never seen Nauman’s work, it may make no sense to you at all. However, Brian likes it, and to the extent that I let him play Mikey, on the old Life commercials, it’s a good enough reason for me to share it with you. Just as postscript, I must admit that through dubious means I attained Bruce Nauman’s address in the New Mexico desert, and sent him a copy of this poem. I have yet to hear back. It’s just called To Bruce Nauman:

The Mister who goes beyond recognition
of clichés of iron-bound self-hood
regenerating new notions that clank
mad paint onto our being, beating at
the doors of universities like Genet a thief
but a marijuana consciousness of absurdity
epitomizing West Coast anti-notions walking around
the perimeters of art definitions in a ten-gallon hat,
with mescal on tap and breeding horses to boot, boots jangling
among the mind’s fatal mood clowns, with
hard-ons to be bent over, so wicked into
the art-world that will not recover
from earnest strangeness made concrete
creating new forms like something else,
a convention of Jehovahs Witnesses,
better yet the troupe of players that caught
the conscience of Claudius doing Beckett,
Nauman playing Pozzo, Picasso’s ashes set
onstage in place of Vladimir and Estragon,
while Lucky gets to be Jasper Johns or
something, concluding that to make up is
to fall down, to fall down is to take form,
to take form is to become a fountain,
and some fountains are worth making—

See him square the circle in white shirt
as the day rages blankly outside, too tired
of its ephemeral heart to even conclude
immediately, squares of seasons apt to linger,
then emptiness, as though this funny project
were a mandala of Buddha, to prove that life
is not a circle, but rather sharp definite
edges, with many clusters of shoddy wood between
loaves of stale craving-bread, one shoulder
raised higher than other, bare feet slow
but mad as Nijinsky, make it a ritual
to feed soul’s need not for religion itself
but for the feeling of religion, the joy of
being bounded, picture itself presented as
square, tiny in a little book I ordered
two years ago in a fit of delirium, now
I’ve propped it up like a collapsible urn of
ashes of dead heroes, only the captain
sits with horses watching the wheels of
temporal anti-tenderness spin, conventional
concepts raised up then razed, as in r-a-z-e-d,
does he still have the black pants I wonder?
Maybe he’s just a ghost or an astral spirit,
somebody’s Ariel—

Simple, strategic, rolling around on the floor
looking into the camera’s un-droll eye with
hyper-droll drollness, essence of droll but
somehow twisted beyond mere Dada ha-ha
into indeterminate snickers of profound weirdness
that will eventually beget a sullen fame
spreading but not reaching cactus-y wilderness
where in summertime the living I guess is easy
at least more so than playing with your balls
not that the minimal has no weight but
that such weight leaves no room for developments
of a righteously figurative nature unless
one has sophisticated intellectual equipment
which, of course, he does—

The Tapestry of American History '03

 

The Tapestry of American History '03 was used as an introduction by Adam Fieled to Personal Mythologies II at Kelly Writers House, on September 20, 2003.

Two young writers, with similar roots and a similar itinerary— Philly ‘burbs to State College to NYC to Center City Philadelphia— letting loose, talking turkey, letting turkey, talking loose. We will open up vistas for you that have, as of yet, remained unexplored. We will prove that Dave Eggers does not hold a monopoly on Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius; that Jhumpa Lahiri is not the only uncannily masterful Interpreter of Maladies; that Zadie Smith is not the only wunderkind with White Teeth. In short, we are staking a claim for ourselves as potential literary lions, and definitely established literary cubs. We are asking you to join us on a magical mystery tour through the perilous interior, the delicately structured psyche, the exquisite nooks and crannies of the artistic temperament.

We know that Mahmoud Abbas has stepped down; that President Bush is asking Congress for eighty-seven billion dollars to complete a misguided debacle of an imperialist conquest; that more than half the country is aware of the current administration’s idiocy, yet remains convinced that Bush will be unbeatable next year; that Tony Blair has inordinately big ears, as does President Bush; that Donald Rumsfeld is best post-modern poet since Robert Creeley; that Condeleeza Rice brings a bag lunch to the White House every day, containing pb & j with the crusts cut off, a Little Debbie snack, and a Juicy Juice. Amidst the awful offal of an empire in decline, what place for an artist?

We’re the ones that blow the horns; the ones that snicker venomously into typewriters; the ones that see portents in a garbage truck, and an Imagistic firmament of the boardwalk in Wildwood. We’re in Montreal, strutting down the Rue Saint Denis, rehearsing fragments of Baudelaire poems with which to astonish the natives. We are teaching a classful of students on 9-11, running from a building, experiencing transcendent horror, hugging strangers, being impressed by metaphysical scallywags. We are not here to be noticed, but to notice ourselves. We are not here to change things, we are here to watch things change. We won’t cure anything, or we might, but we won’t know it. In short, we are here to create the tapestry of American history, 2003, because, like it or not, we are Americans.

With that, let us begin at a moseying pace towards our Olympian destination. Brian Freedman holds a BA from Penn State and an MA from NYU. His writing has appeared in Wine Spectator, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and in the vaults of heaven. He has just completed his first novel, Shock Art.

Halloween and the First Personal Singular

 

Halloween and the First Personal Singular was used to introduce A Feast of Halloweens at Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

A funny thing has been happening to me lately whenever I attempt to compose a poem. Maybe it’s age; maybe it’s maturity; maybe it’s the pervasive influence of post-modernism and its paradigmatic exponents— Ashbery, Creeley, and the rest. Whatever the cause, I suddenly feel very shaky whenever I find myself using “I” in a poem. In younger and more innocent days, I would bandy the first person singular about with unbounded relish, as though my subjective impressions, emotional vicissitudes, and personal experiential reactions were the stuff of Muse-worthy poesy, and, you know, sometimes I was right. Maybe one in ten times. I could afford to shoot my poetic arrows recklessly because I wasn’t really an adult yet, with adult concerns, responsibilities, and hang-ups. Now all that’s changed, I see the broader realities, and “I” seems like something that must be transcended.

The catch is that I still like to write autobiographical poems. The truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and I’ve certainly been through my fair share of mishigas. So, to write a personal impersonal poem, or a poem that effectively balances this polarity, has become of paramount importance. The key, I guess, is to channel one’s experiences through an objectivist lens, making inductive leaps along the way, to lend universality and perspective. So, the poem is narrated from the second or third person, and the self becomes just another character in a larger mosaic of circumstances, images, actions. This is much easier said than done. It is a temptation to slip in an “I” here and there in the same degree that it’s a temptation to fit one more little scoop of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch into your bowl. Truth be told, used sparingly, “I” lends authenticity and a certain warmth to a poem, a sense of “there-ness” that nothing else would give. So I like to think of “I” as the Ben and Jerry’s of poetic creation— it is gratifying, but needs a sense of restraint to allow it grace.

This is an occasional poem, for an occasion that never transpired. An online journal called Hinge published a poem of mine this summer. They also issued a call for poems about Halloween, for their fall issue. Gotta do it, I thought, and came up with this piece. Then I realized that the majority of journal demur from printing the same poet in consecutive issues. Undaunted I sent this piece to a fledgling journal called Cake Train, and it was accepted immediately. Once in a while, navigating the straits of the Bay of Poesy, you get a miracle. That’s what happened here. Twenty-four lines, one “I,” and it’s all about me. Am I getting grown up or what?

Poets and Prophecy

Poets and Prophecy was read as an introduction the poem What Needs No Myth at the Personal Mythologies II reading at Kelly Writers House, September 20, 2003.  

It’s been a long time— probably since Allen Ginsberg unveiled Howl— San Francisco, 1955— since America has produced a convincingly authentic prophet-poet; although you could make an argument for Dylan as one. I do, but the academic establishment does not. Yet. And, ladies and gentlemen, guess who writes the history books. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, poetry at its best is a prophetic art, capable of making its best voices, in Shelley’s words, “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming twenty years before the ascent of Adolf Hitler, the rough beast to end all rough beasts. T.S. Eliot wrote his celebrated Waste Land as a requiem for post-World War I Europe, and wound up anticipating calamities beyond anything he could’ve imagined.

Poets today seem content making smaller statements. They tend to call what is actually a lack of imagination, “maturity.” Witness the effusion of poems weaving dainty nostalgia into tapestries of tepid imagery, and over-polished technical proficiency. How often can one pick up The New Yorker, or The Paris Review, and find one’s self not only moved, but ravished? One sees, in the modern poet, a lack of confidence congruent with a lack of imagination. Modesty is now the balm for all aesthetic ills, the panacea to keep the docile, lamb-like scribe out of the looney bin and on the tenure track. The problem, is that all great art has an element of madness in it, of the Dionysian. Technical proficiency alone won’t do. You have to have something to say, something ineluctable, transcendent, maybe even, dare we say it, prophetic.

I don’t want to create a great build-up for what’s just another one of my poems. I apologize, in fact, for getting a little bit carried away here. Whether or not the poem I’m about to read does carry a little bit of that old prophetic fire, that was my, perhaps overambitious, intention. Only things, as they are wont to do, got a bit twisted, and the poem I wrote wound up expressing the futility of all human prophecy. It is, in fact, a direct refutation of Yeats’ Second Coming, which I espoused not thirty lines ago. If this seems a bit confused, hear me out. The basic crux of this diatribe, which I am only now getting around to, is that poets need to start thinking big again. They need to rage, to tremble, to bleed, and to do it on a large scale. Don’t let a Ploughshares-touting professor mislead you. Big statements are a big deal. If they often lead to big failures, then that’s just a chance we’ll have to take. With that I’ll shut up and read the poem, and hope I can do so without you conspiring to lynch me.

To March

To March is the concluding piece read at This Charming Lab at Kelly Writers House, on March 27, 2004.  

It’s funny, how we can find ourselves playing into stereotypes and still persevere in cliched behavior. I don’t call myself a poet anymore, I rather think of myself as someone who sometimes writes poems. But I do sit in coffeehouses and write, like every two-bit, sub-beatnik, Ginsberg and Bukowski worshipping amateur you’ve ever seen. I often feel self-conscious about doing this, but I force myself to anyway, because if I didn’t, it would mean I care far too much about what the other schmucks in the coffeehouse think. Since the coolest thing in the world is not to give a fuck, somehow in the equation, as calculated by me, I wind up ahead by being resolutely uncool. Besides, there’s always a chance I’ll meet a poetry-imbibing female with a Shelley fixation, or something. Not likely, you say? It so happens I picked up a girl on a train to Manayunk, took her home and scored, all on account of a tee-shirt I was wearing that read, I am as wayward as Shelley.

Now, let’s go back to the poem you’re about to hear and let me explicate, to whatever extent I can. This to me is the ultimate coffeehouse poem, in the sense that it was conceived, written, revised, and completed at the Last Drop Coffeehouse on one day. There’s a certain stillness you get in March, when you’re in the plateau that glides just over winter and just below spring. When I think back to what it was like writing this, I remember that stillness, that I was alone, that it was a cloudy day, semi-sodden, that I was reading Middlemarch at the time, and that it all seemed to blend together in a sort of unforgettable fashion. A timeless moment. But that doesn’t mean the poem’s any good, and in fact the moments that feel timeless while we live them often turn out to be useless, while moments that seem useless are the ones that live on. Whatever. You’ll have to decide for yourselves. You own my work as much as I do, you may not even want it, and God knows I don’t a lot of the time either.

So, look for timelessness, trash, and that weird March mood of suspension, of hanging, of god-damned green-wearing Saint Patrick’s Day and spring training. The poem is called To March:

Tremulous time— rain-laden flowers

threatening to burst forth— sodden
branches quiver. Exhalations still
visible, people linger in watery streets,
hydroplaning tires glisten.

Blue patches line the sky—
droplets engorge terraces— cups
of coffee, especially poignant for
winter-weary souls in still cafes.

Nature at the end begins to forge
invisible buds— suppressed grass
dreams succulence. Clouds shroud
puddles. Lengthening days.

A correspondence exists in me
for this— hovering on fertility’s edges,
writing to find the entire note,
the perfect kiss, moments of grace after
longing, fighting. Every cloud echoes
my reaching. Wanderlust for forgotten forms,

skies abandoned by vapors fixed
to the earth. My mind is hung with sun
flowers springing, lands uncreated,
dim, unpupil’d eyes, needing deeper

roots for a sturdier birth. A trumpet call—
thought processions— friends, loves.
Hands molding, fretfully, with nascent
skill, permanent tapestries. Mud below,

shadows above. Planted seeds poised—
movement, chasms filled. Words
on a wing, where are they? Could I be
writing them now, this normal day, over

cigarettes, George Eliot, coffee, sadness?
Before the bud erupts, it issues a sigh for
the effort, like of priests or of lovers—
crafting the genuine, born out of gladness.

Abby Heller-Burnham by J. Tenenbaum