Opening Remarks (Adam Fieled): Poetry Incarnation '05

Addendum: Cheltenham Elegy #420

The craftier angle is to hear them: hover
in the doorway, in total darkness, hands
held behind your back. She takes a stand
against him in the shadows, as her lover
flails, barefoot on carpeting: jabs, another—

these two miserable adolescents, tokens
of the dirge that was this tepid Philly 'burb,
clown choruses pining for images, curbed
words replaced with scripts, minds unbroken
finally meeting ends in winter rain, soaking,

drenched with venom against the solid.
What to look for: register his life-force
energies against hers, for the first course
her rhetoric takes against him, her stolid
defiance, sharply defined, against knowledge

that she's veered over into eerie wilderness.
It's true, the abyss laughs around her, & him,
but she's slightly more bound up in it, thinned,
bruised beneath surfaces to embrace the abyss,
all he needs is a caress given really, a kiss—

he won't get it. What he'll get is the meaning
of the surface she's chosen: bone, dust, webs.
Yet they stand exalted as they taste the dregs—
someone's watching elsewhere, & scheming.
Transmutation must happen, past dreaming—

that spirit, against the animal, is real in them.
The doorway is hinged to show you two souls—
unvarnished, electric, whether riddled with holes
or not, & love of a kind is being made, & gems.
The craftiest angle is not you, if you will, but them—

Highwire Gallery: Calendars: January/April 2005

Post to Buffalo Poetics List: Poetry Incarnation '05

Hannah Miller on Poetry Incarnation '05

Highwire Gallery: Calendars: October/November 2004

Graphic Art: Fliers: Outlaw Playwrights: 1998/1999

Lurch Back...

To lurch back from the Aughts to the Nineties: Poetry Incarnation '05 and the Highwire Gallery Philly Free School shows, as dramatic public displays of sangfroid around cultural and other forms of chaos, were presaged by the work I did with the Outlaw Playwrights in State College in the Nineties. These three one-acts are what I deem most worthy of preservation from that experience. By the by: Mortuary Puppies was produced by the Outlaws in State College on 2-11-99, while I was living in Manhattan. I had left the script for the Outlaws to use right before I left State College in late November '98. I didn't find out about the production until the late summer of '99, when I moved into Logan Square. What the Aughts were to be loomed large by then.

Two Painters, Space

The Sweet Pears pdf collection consolidates paintings from Mary Harju and Jenny Kanzler. 

Poetry Incarnation '05 on P.F.S. Post

In the days following Poetry Incarnation '05, I posted to P.F.S. Post (Philly Free School Post) about the reading. The big revelation here is something I'd forgotten: the entire audience, and all the poets, managed to hang on and remain at the Khyber for the entire five-hour duration of the event. Or just about. Even as I have to face the contradiction, many years later, of never having put together another reading quite as expansive. P.F.S. Presents (Philly Free School Presents) was a smaller endeavor in Chicago and NYC.

Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Luggage

 

The luggage carried by refugees from wealthy
families was laid beside the bed we occupied, to
do our dance. I saw it, in the middle of the action—
black leather, names embossed in gold— tried
not to notice that it was sentient. It was telling you,
for the duration of our tryst, all the ways this was
a betrayal, to sleep with someone of inferior caste
status, with horrible consequences. When a severed
head popped briefly out of a suitcase, it reminded
you, red-tongued, the debt you owed could never
be paid back, the grisliness you visited upon your
clan could never be rectified. All the severed head
looked to me like was roses with thorny stems, tied
in a knot— you saw the real deal. Amidst the grotesquerie,

what we appeared to be making— love— was somewhere
in the mix, threading our limbs together, without, this
time, ostentation, & with the wistful recognition that
repetition was unlikely. Where was the love in you, Mary?
I was to learn, later, that there are no flesh portfolios.
The love from which you can live off interest is about
everything accrued which binds two souls together,
everything invested mutually. For all the horrible visions
we had as our flesh joined, I still go walking (as the song
goes) after midnight, looking for that strain in you I
saw so briefly— human, tender, emotional, devoted.
Amidst so much grotesquerie, at the moment of my
deepest penetration into all of you, body & soul, I noticed
the breaking dawn was tolerant, the luggage gone.

Set List: Poetry Incarnation '05

So, there it was, folks, Poetry Incarnation '05: thirty readers (the actual set list, past this one, contained a few additions and subtractions), seventy paying attendees for $5 at the door, a hot night in July, and a first demarcative line in the sand drawn separating the Aughts in Philly from other times and other places. Others would follow. 

The Fall: No Fall

As per other notable conservation moves: two versions of Mary Harju's The Fall: the initial, Aughts, September 2008 version, with Mary's own commentary; and the 2016 ekphrasis version, with my poem to accompany the painting. And an extra Fall into the bargain.

Great Works: (poetry) page

                      The po-pages which stick around can become companions for interested parties.

Updated Cheltenham Elegies

                                           A new, updated Cheltenham Elegies sequence. 

Cheltenham Elegy #420 in The Seattle Star

         Cheltenham Elegy #420, revised from the 2012 Blazevox edition, in The Seattle Star. And on mp3. 

The Argotist Online: Poetry (page)

Proof positive: if the right efforts are made, the right po-pages can stick around the right way. And keep sticking.