Walkin' On Down the Hall

As of almost June, and the new Otoliths page, I've reached a moment of reckoning concerning the manuscript I'm working on called Something Solid. The manuscript, as it subsists now, is comprised of three sections: the first covers the Nineties, the second, the swingin' Aughts, and the third are miscellaneous poems that cover a range of times and themes. Most of the poems are, or could be called, sonnets; and yet they have so little in common with traditional sonnets and sonnet writing that they might just as well be called fourteen line poems. I don't honor sestet and octave conventions; the volta may happen at any time in the poem; and, most importantly, an impulse is honored in the Something Solid poems which has nothing to do with lyricism, and more to do with a hard-bitten, earthy, empirical devotion to the darker side of human life and truth. The poems are not "little songs," they're glass shards. And the next step is a fourth section I am planning but haven't written yet. I want it to cohere around a central theme, an event, individual or time-period, and harness the rest of the book's energy into a burning, laser-like focus on...we'll see what later.

Ode On Jazz: I'll Be Your Mirror

Over the last few months, the Ode On Jazz, as was taped at KWH at Penn in April '04 and broadcast on WXPN, has shown up in a few new places and continued to do well in a few others. There's a few things I'd like to say about the poem. The first is this: a theory I have that if the Ode On Jazz has gained a certain amount of popularity, it can be attributed to the poem being not only about music, but intensely musical itself. In the Jazz Ode, as can be the case in Keats' Odal Cycle, the musicality of the language (melopoeia) is the basic purport or gist of the poem's appeal. Just the way that music is meant to act as a balm on people's emotions, the Ode On Jazz is designed to do an analogous task. It can thus resonate with people's emotions in a way that harsher, less musical, or more intellectual poetic material cannot. The musical task of the Jazz Ode, when I wrote it in the fall of '02, was clear: to translate the Bach-level density and richness of musical expression found in the Keats' Odal Cycle (1819/1820) into the forms and specific dynamic richness of jazz music, as manifest in Coltrane, Sun Ra, and the rest. 

Poems in Otoliths (50)

Five poems out now in Otoliths 50. And from Otoliths 50 in PennSound. Many thanks to Mark Young.

Here is Otoliths 50 in its entirety. And in print.

Listenlight

Also strange, in a recession, to see what gets preserved and what doesn't. 

Ungovernable Press: The White Album

The first Ungovernable Press edition e-book by Adam Fieled, The White Album. 

Hanging Out in 1613

In recessional times, folks, you never know who you might run into.

Apparition Poem #1488 (French Translation)

magasin d'alcool, linoléum

étage, vin qu'elle a choisi

            était toujours rouge foncé,

            arrière-goût sombre et amer,

            contrairement à son torse nu,

                        qui a dedans

                        tout ce qui a été

                        d'ivresse

manquer terriblement quelqu'un,

à la fois être amoureux, comme

elle coupe les choses parce que

            elle pense qu'elle doit ...

            torture exquise, c'est

            un torse nu différent,

(le mien) c'est incarnadine-