The night of the 2000 election is a strange one. I’m working a closing shift at B & N, and a call comes in for me from Elizabeth Yankel, editor of a regional print journal based in Philadelphia called American Writing. American Writing is ranked high enough (Christopher endorses it too, and they carry it at Borders) that this call from Elizabeth (to inform me that one of my poems, “Icarus in New York,” would be published in the next issue) gives me an almost unbearable sense of exhilaration. Like the rest of America, I’m up all night waiting for an election verdict. It never happens. But my ass is kicked into gear by what American Writing is, and the new task is to jump into poetry head-first. I want to be thorough— rather than sticking to the texts I know (Beats, Bukowski, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc), I want to learn the right histories and ground myself in them. I start with a vengeance— Pound’s Cantos, the Greek tragedians, Eliot’s Four Quartets. But the most profound breakthrough occurs one night at B & N, as I’m goofing off— on impulse, I pick up the Collected Poems of John Keats. I flip straight to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and when I hit “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ are sweeter…” my brain turns on its axis. This proves to be the most important moment of my poetry life— discovering the English Romantics. Discovering the Romantics wasn’t just discovering a group of poets— it was my entrée into a world of high-level formality in in art. This is a world the enterprise of which had always been undercooked in the United States. But Keats and Wordsworth drew me in and, as it were, sucker-punched me into an acknowledgement that formality didn’t have to mean sterile stuffiness— it could be warm, it could be human. How I related to Keats’ Odes, in particular, was as a challenge to develop and maintain a new form of consciousness, which made American poetry look like child’s play. That’s what was missing from New York art— a sense that a work of art could, or should be, beautiful. Also, that serious work should live up to a serious standard, rather than taking short-cuts and acting as a bellwether of degeneracy and trans-aesthetic mania. This was the ultimate irony for me— that when formality in art laid down a gauntlet and forced a response in my life, it opened the door for Trish and Tobi to walk through, and ushered in the most warm, most human era I had ever known. It didn’t lock me in an Ivory tower or force me to lose myself in narcissism. Rather, Trish and I, in about a year’s time, would start working on a relationship so all-over-the-place, so rich in fruitful contradictions, that I would have to spend the rest of my life recovering my wits. Trish was like N, but to the Nth. N-isimus. Including concupiscence. It all manifested because I saw in Keats and Wordsworth what she saw in Renaissance painting. As it stands, on this night I’m still ensconced with Lisa, who is tolerant but not shot through with electricity regarding these issues. Trish, before the fun starts, approves instantly. “John was like Lord Byron,” she says.
© Adam Fieled 2012-2023
