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.  

Pittsburgh Heritage

It's come to my attention that people are wondering why I haven't written more about Pittsburgh. The heritage I have with Pittsburgh is this: I spent the summer of 1992 in Pittsburgh, as a sixteen-year-old kid. I was doing the Carnegie Mellon pre-college program for drama. I happened to be a year younger than everyone else there. What I learned that summer was simple: I was a reasonable actor, nothing special, but possibly an extraordinary writer. By the time I got to State College in 1994, I was a philosophy major. Then, a long break, even if I did meet a number of people who became my friends in State College from Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh burbs. In 2004, I was included in the classic, Pittsburgh-based initial issue of Cake Train, ed. Donna Weaver. Then, another break. The Beehive in Oakland was a hangout place for many of us in the summer of '92. I saw Blue Velvet there for the first time. Even as I can always boast that through having done Philadelphia, State College, and Pittsburgh, P.F.S. has the state of Pennsylvania covered, on some kind of el bizarro reconnaissance level. So, there it is. The perks of being a state-hogger. 

Letting in drafts

What follows is another piece for which the writing process extends over twenty years. The first draft of 4325 Baltimore Avenue was written in the Rittenhouse Square Barnes & Noble break-room in 2004. Had it around, read it up in Henniker a few times, and Jeffrey Ethan Lee published this early draft of the piece in 2005. After dusting it off in the Twenties for possible inclusion in Something Solid, I applied a maelstrom approach, of discipline (has to fit the double-sonnet format) and a limber approach to recreating connective tissue, including syntactic levels. So, here we have it on P.F.S. Post: buffed, polished, and radically tautened. To restate, 4325 Baltimore Avenue was an artist's co-op where Mary Evelyn Harju lived for a few years in the early Aughts. I was a frequent visitor, of course, and spent several months worth of nights there. Abby Heller-Burnham was a constant presence, too. This shot was taken of Mary on the third, top-floor of the row-home, in 2001. Mary doing a wonted fashionista routine.  

The genesis of Chicago

Chicago, now on P.F.S. Post with liner notes, is a random Andrew Lundwall (far left in the photo) masterpiece from the mid-to-late Aughts. The story of how the poem was composed is about a woozy morning, probably the morning of July 7, 2007 (the morning after this picture was taken), for Steve and I. It had been a very long, epic, as the saying goes, if also antic, night. Some of us kept our stomachs; others vomited. Steve and I stumbled around, doing whatever, woozily. Andrew, from his mattress set up in the corner of Steve's living room, was scribbling, and asked not to be disturbed. He was writing Chicago. After maybe ninety minutes, he handed me the draft and I transcribed it onto Stoning the Devil. The version of the city in the poem is a killer one, a monster one. Slight culture shock for Mr. L from the mellowness of Beloit. An easy and profitable match for Center City Philadelphia, also. As we all fell for the Lady in Black, as you see here. Worth noting that later that year, Andrew moved to Rockford, Illinois, with Melissa Lenee. I twice visited him there, with Steve, in 2008. 

Twenties Chicago Trinket

 

The biggest trinket I have from Chicago in the Twenties is the publication of the sonnet Portal-ways in William Allegrezza's Moss Trill. The page is an almost perfect one. The piece itself is a meditation on Abby Heller-Burnham, and her painterly journey through Aughts Philadelphia. Moss Trill here is beefed up by P.F.S. Post and PennSound. Chicago and Philadelphia together. Two big, real cities. Which, of course, is deceptively simple to say. In practice, Chicago and Philadelphia being big and real is about a version of America more wholesome than other city-visions or mind-scapes. The wholesomeness which inheres between Chicago and Philadelphia, about bigness and realness, cuts out the middle man about blood ties being established in wholesome ways. Not that Abs ever made it to Chi-Town: she did not. Abs own East Coast soiree, of New York to Philadelphia and back, was about waves of East Coast-ism buoying her up, and the chocolate-vanilla New York-Philadelphia dynamic animating everything she did. For Chicago to make meaningful space for a piece this raw, this determined to tell the absolute truth about a real, individual person, means a great deal to me. It also means the inter-city communication now is as wholesome as it was twenty years ago. Big, and real. If luck will cooperate, built to last, too. 

To Stacy Blair on P.F.S. Post

 

The love poem To Stacy Blair begins, of course, in Chicago, Illinois. Whatever else you might say about a piece supposed to be that intimate, I can only say that Stacy, who was a critical genius, remains the number one reader of my books, even now. There are top tier reviews I've received as substantial by other people; but nobody means it like Stacy does. And the many letters she wrote me did break my heart. After that, it's all best left to the imagination. Except to say that, in a way experiences can have of marking or not marking an individual, I was, indeed, marked by the time I spent in Chicago and the Midwest in the Aughts. The world I felt open up then was about boundlessness, and about dreams coming true. A poet who was truly on the road, was always who I wanted to be. When I walked around the Loop, or hung out in bars in Bucktown, it was not worth questioning anymore whether I was on the road. I was. Chicago and the Midwest will always mean the road to me. Maybe an uncommon association (nowhere near New York, where I also did plenty of road-time, or San Francisco, where I did not), but so what. And To Stacy Blair brings home to roost that most effectual time I spent on the road, with the most sense of hinges to the roads that are, or could be, the eternal ones. So, the poem linked here is one I began in the late Aughts and never finished. In 2026, it's now finished, ready to be aired. 

So its been: Chicago, a road-place for me, by which I was marked, among others, also of mine: New York, New England, Central Pennsylvania, Montreal. A quirky map, to be sure. And other places that might need to be rejuvenated at any moment: Pittsburgh, Florida, New Jersey. Back to Chicago, and the sense that through the latest two rewrites here presented in The Stacy Saga, I've done justice to everything Chicago meant to me in the Aughts. Also an acknowledgement, especially regarding Pittsburgh, that there must be more work to be done, because roads can develop out of old situations, and time creates strange loops whereby time past that wasn't, or didn't seem, relevant, imposes on time present to revivify, reinstate, even electrify it into awareness. So we can all live and die as Emperors of Eternity. Also noting that the summer of 2026 for me was about time loops. The Time Warp. And if the process of creating time loops does have Rocky Horror-ish dimensions (come up to the Lab, and see what's on the slab), it is amazing to me that time, which is really only matter eternally changing form (there is no time) really can be looped, and moments exist inside each other in uncanny ways. 

Different kinds of Frequencies

John Tranter takes a crack at mid-Aughts Henniker, gets tangled up in blue. 

And back to Frequencies.