A Dozen Leaking Buckets (2014)

For the years I've spent writing, among other things, The Great Recession (Under the Knife), it's been important to my literary practice to cultivate the ability to transcend the first person singular, the "I." The "I" is an important structural element which supported Apparition Poems, Cheltenham, and The Posit Trilogy. In 2014, I found a way and manner of keeping "I" alive, as I had with the PT in 2013, in a chapbook called A Dozen Leaking Buckets.

Poets on the GR Blog

When the invitation came to contribute to the Eileen Tabios Poets On The Great Recession blog in the fall of 2011, I was still in Center City. But the Aughts couldn't have been more over.

Drawing the Line

Some of the poems originally intended for GR/Under the Knife have bled into being used for the expanded edition of Cheltenham. This naturally follows from the fact that many of the characters I used when writing the GR vignettes were people I knew in Cheltenham, during the years of my childhood and adolescence. This 2013 Otoliths page demonstrates how ambiguous the line was and still is, in separating the writer's impulse to find genuine roots from the writer's impulse to explore a specific period of time.

The Great Recession Pt. 2: Under the Knife

Over the years, the never-quite-completed Great Recession manuscript developed a second title: Under the Knife. Some pages say GR, some UTK. Same still-developing book. And this 2013 page from Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona takes us to another recessional locale, and lets us wander around.

Four Quarters Magazine: The Great Recession

In 2012, I began work on a manuscript I wanted to call The Great Recession. The motivating idea was similar to American Tour; to devise a series of miniaturized dramatic monologues, which would lay bare what the state of the American psyche was circa 2012 and out, in the midst of all kinds of recessional down-turns. Some of the characters I was channeling were known to me, some I invented. This 2013 page, from India's Four Quarters Magazine, is as good a representation as any of how the manuscript looked. Even if it got stalled roughly halfway through, and hasn't found its way home quite yet.

Chimes #30

Through music, words emerged in my consciousness as another thing. There were musicians who used words and they showed me. I saw that combinations of words could be molten and that the fires they ignited could be contagious. They could be a door that one could break through into another reality: a place hyper-real, full of things that had the palpable reality of what is called real, but were nonetheless better than real: voices channeled from ether, expounding heroic worlds of oceanic expansive experience. This was another way of moving fingers artfully; more subtle and durable, yet so much harder to do because so stark: mere imitation would get you nowhere. I was on the bottom of another mountain that would take me where the creek ran effortlessly. Or, alternately, I was walking along the ocean-shore, where I heard: let’s swim to the moon…let’s climb through the tide…penetrate the evening that the city sleeps to hide. A wild congeries of energies coalesced in my brain— what it would be like to seduce N with my own words. To sing to her, or for her, and so ravish her consciousness that all boundaries between us melted, and we could be completely lost in each other like I wanted us to be. To swim with her together, to a place of unrestrained, unselfconsciousness abandon. It was all hidden in the depths of the music— how emotions could stir the human soul into wildness, abandon, ferocity. That I could be the agent for that— the connective tissue between a mass of people and the ability to access primeval chaos, and states of unity, of definition, within the chaos— I related personally to the songs and lyrics that moved me. You reach your hand to hold me but I can’t be your guide. To have that control in the chaos— to see the truth of who the human race were, and who N was, even in the grips of the most orgiastic dementia— I wanted that masterful control of people’s emotions. As I would later approve of The Hierophant as an interesting trump in the tarot deck, I sought to find a place in me which could channel hierophantic tasks. My exposure to these crucial songs dovetailed, also, with the most baroque period of telephone madness with N. We told each other our dreams; performed strange voodoo rituals involving the Bible, stuffed animals, things written, concealed, and revealed later; explored instances, shared and otherwise, of the uncanny. Like a true, soul-level brother and sister, we couldn’t stop shaking each other’s brains. The moon and the tides existed for us together. Music, I later understood, could be cheap, as a manipulator of people’s emotions; words were more durable. And, ultimately, even with all the songs in my head, it was a shared symbolic language which wedded me to N, an encyclopedia of personal references which only we shared. The chaos in the music hovered in the background, tantalizingly but with mixed or blended intentions.

Trans

Kari Edwards was a transsexual poet and a major East Coast presence who passed away in 2006. In the months leading up to Kari's death, she published my poem Day Song, eventually released in the 2007 Dusie chap Posit, on her Transdada blog. I was honored.

Staten Island Baby

Those who know my work are aware that it has a geographic center: Philly and the Philly 'burbs. Part of When You Bit... is set in Chicago, New England makes its presence felt with some frequency, and so does New York. My 2011 Argotist E-Book Mother Earth happens to be set on Staten Island, one of the boroughs of Manhattan. This March '11 page, from Arielle Guy's Turntable/Blue Light (which is also itself based in Manhattan), is the nicest, most durable companion page to the book.  

Stray App Blues

Stray poems around published books are interesting sometimes, too. These two Apparition Poems appeared in COR (Cricket Online Review), numbers 218 and 219, but weren't quite right, I felt, either for Apparition Poems or Cheltenham. Close. Whatever book they're precisely right for, maybe a Collected in the next ten years, we'll have to wait for. But having them in COR is already nice.

Mirror Games

One of the original placements, as of 2012, and before the July '12 release of the first edition of Cheltenham, for the Cheltenham Elegies, was a Los Angeles web-journal called Quarter After. The " mirror flash" from coast to coast was unique; the great Aughts triumvirate of cities for innovative poetry in the United States was Philly-NYC-Chicago, rather than NYC-Chicago-L.A. That arrangement, Philly-NYC-Chicago, has managed to hold pretty steady for innovative poetry right up through the present moment.

Cheltenham Expands!

Cheltenham expands into a bigger, bulkier version of itself (2023).