Furnace

Out of the furnace of
my forty-year voyage,
I can tell tales of love,
weave yarns of lions,
tigers, bears, birds above—

but I, ethereal-minded,
prefer the bare blue sky,
stark, mad, cloud-binded,
philosophy the reason why—
this bird in my house, landed—

that God both is and isn't,
original sides a big "kind of,"
that God both did & didn't,
back again to flesh & love,
& what you should, shouldn't—

that's it, the final tale,
the kicker that I get it,
but how you win or fail,
what to grasp and sweat it,
is still a furnace, past tales—

A Poet In Center City (2024 edition)

The revised, 2024, P.F.S. edition of A Poet in Center City also features the 2013 Preface. 

Across the Tower

The voyage starts from darkness:
     corpses piled high, bloody
     walls, silencer pistols, muddy
waters mixed with soot, ash, garbage—

I feel a queasy sense in
     my guts (& bowels, to be real)
     of degradation, forced to kneel
& kiss the grinding wheel's spin—

The Tower's very spirit
     is ancient as severed heads,
     abandoned marriage beds,
a flatted-fifth tune: hear it,

be reminded that music
     must continue even here,
     must leak out, tunes of fear
& loathing, sing the collapsed Muse's

hymn to the compelling lurid,
     & if it seems too desperate,
     lightning striking your wedlock'd
heart, limp falling bodies, torrid

fires going up your behind,
     never you mind, this voyage,
     no matter how rank, annoying,
can only give you back a strengthened mind.

Where Feel is calling from...

I'd like to hope that I've established by now that the mid-Aughts in Philly were a wild and crazy time. The proverbial gloves came off, for many of us, and a Pandora's Box opened, letting loose all kinds of crazy energies. Those who watch me more or less know who the individuals were around me in the mid-Aughts. Yet, the decision to write an epic poem like Feel, which finally appeared in X-Peri and on PennSound in 2018, was an oddly practical one. I was working towards an M.F.A.; and for the length of a semester (spring 2005), I worked under Anne Waldman, a large Beat presence on the East Coast and in Colorado. I thought to amuse both myself and Anne by doing an Aughts palimpsest over Beat poet Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Anne wasn't as amused as I thought she'd be. The central flaw of the poem is that, as those who heard the poem in Philly noted at the time, not all the individuals represented in the poem were artists, let alone "the greatest artists of their generation." I excused this transgression with the fact that they were all, if not artists, renegades, mavericks, and misfits who bothered to blaze individual trails through the world, against the taint of homogeneity. Poetry buffs know: Ginsberg does even less to prove that his muses are "the greatest minds of their generation." Among other things I had going at the time, Feel more or less asked to be "back-pocketed" for a while, even as it later proved to be explosive in the Twenties. 

Poetry Incarnation '05

The story of Poetry Incarnation '05, the Philly Free School event held at the Khyber in Olde City Philadelphia on July 5, 2005, is a wry one. The primordial fact of the event was not evident to me and Mike Land until the event was underway: because the Khyber was on ground-level; anyone walking by on 2nd Street could look in and see what was going on; the chaotic, ecstatic frenzy of the Highwire P.F.S. shows couldn't happen. The labyrinthine entrance to the Highwire, and its placement several floors up from street-level in the Gilbert Building, made it ideal for loosening up the inhibitions of a willing audience. So that, we got hype for Poetry Incarnation '05 (I had done an interview with Deesha Dyer of Philly City Paper from the Boston 'burbs about ten days before the event), lots of paying customers showed up, but beneath the surface, Mike and I knew that the basic premise of the Philly Free School (we offer you new kinds, forms, manners of freedom, so that you see what you can handle) was not able to be fulfilled. Mary & Abby couldn't make it; Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum was conspicuously absent, too. The most memorable performance, for me, was Hannah Miller's drunken screed about what Philadelphia meant to her. There was also some unpleasantness from the PhillySound poets; they expected to be a headlining act, and wound up reading without any particular fanfare, just like everyone else. They later claimed, falsely, that I stole their money. 

All in all, Poetry Incarnation '05 was worth doing; it established us, P.F.S., as a public commodity in Philly. Yet Poetry Incarnation '05 was nonetheless not as much fun as the Highwire shows. Many years later, it is also noticeable that there was no single highlight to the entire Philly Free School experience of the mid-Aughts. The highlight was the sustained 2004/2005 peak of what the Highwire Gallery bothered to be in Center City Philadelphia; and how Mike and I managed to ride these waves towards a series of events that made the pursuit of real freedom the issue it should be among the human race.

Living Together

Of the approximately eight months I spent in West Philly in the Aughts, approximately four of them were spent here, in a flat at 42nd and Baltimore which Mary and Abby moved into in January 2003, post 4325. Which means, in the economy of things, that I did spend four months living with Abby in the Aughts. Chez Mary & Abs was not maintained chaotically; it was kept relatively tidy; but Abby liked to throw parties, and Mary & I would have to help her clean up. Mary's windows faced 42nd Street, and she would sketch in her room, but serious painting had to be done elsewhere. Abs more or less had the same situation. Mary's room was also the big hang-out space for the three of us in the flat, where we could lounge, get high, watch movies, or do other meanwhiles.

More Formality Issues

The desire to lay down a gauntlet, in 2019, in English-language poetry, about formality and its importance, is a complex one. So much ground has been lost around formality in poetry over the last century that it is difficult even to know when, how, or why to start the process. If I deem it efficacious to be blunt, it is for the simple reason that millions of blunt weapons have been employed, in the United States, for the purpose of killing off the highest forms of artistic formality (in poetry and elsewhere), so that I am simply matching the energies and task-forces arrayed against me. So, to be blunt: poetry that does not employ heightened language, and which does not seek to incorporate musical effects, is worthless enough in the world to be considered both parasitic, and a form of anti-poetry. Furthermore, the ability to incorporate musical effects on a high level into poetry can only partially be learned: those who perform this task at the highest level are generally what could be called gifted, or talented (unique and irreplaceable), individuals. What this implies is, as is anathema to the parasitic forms and cabals who enforce them, which American and English-language poetry has accrued to itself in the past hundred years, and is also a mastering of the obvious: poetry requires talent, giftedness, something innately built into individuals. The idea that, in poetry, there is no talent, there are no individuals over anyone else, is a satanic denial of all that poetry can accomplish when it is handled by the right individuals; and the sense of formality in poetry, ability to artfully incorporate heightened language, is what distinguishes the men from the boys, the women from the girls, the gifted from the impostors (whose elision of poetic music can be construed as an attempt to sanitize poetry, for the greater good of entities, such as corporate ones, who are afraid of artistic formality at its apogee).

In an era less debauched, these things would not necessarily need to be said. But, as I have said before in other places, century XX was a radically inane time for serious art in general. Century XX poetry in the English language, even the corpus which is supposed to be of note, is mostly formless garbage. When poetry loses its connection to music, heightened language, and the sublime which inheres in musicality, it also loses its connection to individuality (uniqueness), and the giftedness (irreplaceable quality) of individuals. The anti-poets are there, with the ulterior motive of attempting to destroy poetry from the inside out; and, for many decades, there has been no one there to stop them. The formal tasks I have chosen to perform are arduous ones, including the odal task inherited from Keats; and the task of expressing how far English-language poetry has fallen over the last few centuries is arduous, too.

from Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Incarnadine

First Friday, Olde City, autumn: I watched Abby
seduce a curator in the Artists House Gallery, clawed
my way past buskers & vendors, up again to Logan
Square; up 21st Street, over to the Franklin Institute,
out onto the Parkway, where a slight tilt will show
you the Art Museum; back over & around, & wandered
into my flat. The soft October warmth told me what
I needed to hear, for a hot minute: eternity, ecstasy,
elevation, riding waves on an ocean of buildings.
A general recession of waves was latent, built into us,
destined to pinch some of us to death, but in the end,
it didn't matter— Abby's striped, clinging gown that
night, leaning towards maroon & plain red, marked my
brain as permanently made incarnadine, for her & us—