Ode On Psyche at This Charming Lab...

This recording of the Ode On Psyche was made at a This Charming Lab reading at the Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia on March 27, 2004. Early Aughts odal ecstasy.

Chimes, 2nd Ed.

The 2nd, emended edition of Chimes, now in a newer, more permanent place.

Chimes, 2nd ed. on mp3. 

P.F.S.: Answered Prayers: The 90s

In the days before the arrival in my life of Mary Harju and Abby Heller-Burnham, I approached high art tasks as a kind of lone gunman in the world. This led to a sense of isolation which was difficult to conquer. The determination was there (and redemptive) enough, however, so that a body of work was in place by the time they showed up. During the four years I spent in State College ('94-'98), I gradually migrated from a disposition rather casual in regards to the more serious side of art to one more itself more serious. What I might be reading at any time in State College was miscellaneous— not yet ready for the Romantics and Milton, the life-rafts I found included the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine) and other texts in their tradition, not to mention the philosophy texts I was compelled to study in school. The Symbolist sense of the hallucinogenic or the phantasmagoric— that human life consists of a series of dream-like vignettes, looped together only by visionary consciousness— informs Answered Prayers and Willard Preachers, the collection of the best of what I wrote in Nineties State College. Here, we see the lone gunman sensibility shot through also with a youthful fascination with intoxicants which I had going then. 

On a life-level, my relationship with Jennifer Strawser, which occupied most on '96, was about two renegade kids being banditos in the world. It was us, we felt, and our total destruction of class and sexual boundaries in all directions, against everyone. Written from the perspective of a young poet maudit, who, moreover, had reasons to feel a deep sense of foreboding, Room 510 Atherton Hilton and The dawn broke over our bodies both make the case for a sensibility impressed with both an ambiance of enchantment and of damnation. Jennifer herself wasn't exactly creative, the way Mary, Abby, Jenny, and the rest were to be; but she was a punk, a rebel, and also a soul tormented by a lot of depth she didn't know what to do with. She was also a blonde goddess, and one of the bigger sirens in State College history; as was Emily Dunlop, the heroine of Perfect. Maria Gingerich, who adorns the cover of the book, was too, though a brunette. Then, the big breakthrough in the spring of '98, into Clean and Disappear, and the sense that I had passed my own personalized Comp Exams. I was capable, at that point, of representative writing that put me on the map to myself, at 22, as a man reborn. 

Lone gunman though I was, my years in State College were informed also by a compelling interest in theater. The reason was a collective on campus known as Outlaw Playwrights. Outlaw Playwrights, every Thursday night at 11:15 pm, in a black box theater in the main theater building near North Halls where I lived, presented a one-act play written by...whoever! Sometimes by theater majors, sometimes by theater graduate students, sometimes by lone gunmen (or girls) such as myself from anywhere in the State College populace. It took me a few years to become integrated enough with the Outlaws crowd to have them begin producing my one-acts. I spent those years experimenting with different approaches to writing for theater. The approach I settled on was an experimental one— to push at the boundaries of what theater writing could do or be, rather than settle for the representation of conventional dramatic situations. Dada Circus, produced in September '98 a few months before I permanently left State College, is not exactly French Symbolism put on the stage. Rather, it's a hodge-podge of different approaches, meant to convey a sense of comic absurdity, and also the shadow of the existential, of what it means to "act" in the world. Mortuary Puppies, produced in February '99, by which time I was living in Manhattan, is a linguistic free-for-all, which I invented out of thin air. What it explores is the dimensions and dimensional weirdness of pure language, and poetic language, fused with a dramatic imperative, but an unspecific one. It was an experiment, to see if poetry and abstraction could work onstage. From what I was told in '99, it was more or less a success. We'll see how the Symbolist version of me fares over a long period of time, too. 

The White Album: edition consolidation

Together at last: the au courant edition of The White Album and the 2009 edition.

Eris Temple: New & Selected

The new New & Selected: just something that's around.

Dominique

So many stories are wrapped up in this next poem, some hilarious, some harrowing. It all revolves around a single woman and her phenomenal ability to enthrall men. Her name was, and is, Dominique, and I've never met anyone like her. When I met her, I was a high school junior and she was a freshman. She was stunningly beautiful, with a seductive, feline grace that suggested both Lolita and Liv Tyler. This alone wouldn't qualify her to play such an interesting part in my life and the lives of those around me; there were a lot of beautiful girls at Cheltenham; but Dominique had something more. What do we call that ineffable IT, that compelling magnetism that certain people have? Is it merely beauty, or charisma, or youth? For me, Dominique's charm lay in all these things, and also in something extra- a certain mischievous glint in her eye, a certain toss of her head, that suggested a sort of supernatural ecstasy, as if she were walking around in a narcotic trance all the time (which, I was later to learn, she was). Dominique was, quite simply, the most compelling female I'd met up to that point. Oddly enough, I didn't fall hard for her at all. I was able to keep my distance because, to a certain extent, I saw a hollowness beneath the charisma, an unwillingness to dig beneath surfaces and live truly. Dominique for me was a sort of caricature of adolescent sexiness, and I loved her archly condescending smile, but it didn't pierce me to the bone.

My best friend at the time, however, was absolutely, unbelievably, and pitifully smitten. He hung on her every word as though she was Godhead incarnate, recorded every encounter in an especially prized notebook, and just basically made an idiot of himself whenever she was around. Then, Dominique started dating another one of my friends, simultaneously making me her "Man of the Month," and things started to get really messy. A fist fight for me outside math class; a death threat; notes for me in the mail inscribed with lipstick, reading "He finds a deep satisfaction in pain; for that pain comes from her"; and other such nonsense. Basically Chris, aka Mr. Smitten, never forgave me for going after Dominique when he was so desperately in love, while Adam, Mr. Better-Attack-Me-Outside-Math-Class, became contrite years later and started randomly showing up at my gigs, camera in hand.

Having given you this background, you'll probably understand why running into Dominique on a sultry night in the East Village was such a big deal for me. I was lonely as hell in New York, overwhelmed, numbing myself with huge quantities of pot and speed pills. Dominique, for all her cattiness, rose to the occasion and delivered a knock-out performance as supportive friend with benefits. Unsurprisingly, she supported her academic career at NYU by dealing drugs, and I thought it would be fair game to throw that in, seeing as it was honest. Formally, this piece is me trying my best to write like Keats, sort of the same thing William Carlos Williams was doing in his early twenties. For me, WCW's Keatsian poems aren't that good, probably because he didn't know Dominique. She's a Muse- a real, honest-to-God morsel of madness. Not that I've ever forgotten her implacable selfishness, remorseless narcissism and insufferable insularity; but it pays to remember what's best in her.

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Flaming Red Hair

The Last Drop lost its joie de vivre in 2009—
Dani enforced this, acting out a script
(tease/taunt/topple) written for her by
South Philly goons. Why I’m now bemused
by the gaucherie of Dani’s gestures— cheap,
black, low-cut dresses worn to reveal ample cleavage,
flaming red hair styled always in plummeting
cascades— is that in ’18, no one’s titillated
by anything, let alone Dani— negligee stores derelict.
The truth of the imbroglio is an embarrassed
grin, about a grueling summer day enlivened
by our un-teased, un-taunted encounter. I
must say I am tempted to lie. The bathroom
door shut on us. The Drop was hollowed out.

When we emerged, it was as lovers. Why I was
the chosen I don’t know. How I pined for her
on those nights the grim reality of the recession
still hadn’t sunk in— as though the revelation, again,
of her breasts could deliver me from shadows
which impinged, but (it seemed) possibly only temporarily.
Once, in her Pine Street apartment, she bothered
to walk around before me in a bath towel. Why was I
a gentleman? The twist in the tale was to stick the thing in,
& thus win. The teasing, taunting then brought, it
would seem, to moot. The taste, also, of honey, then
delivered as something gracious, past mere promise.
Permission granted, then denied, pushed past,
joie de vivre visited upon the bloody-minded redhead, forever.

P.S. Another twist in this tale.