New Argotist Online E-Book: The Great Recession

The new Adam Fieled Argotist Online e-book is The Great Recession. 

Many thanks to Jeffrey Side.

"The Great Recession focuses on several specific issues in poetry: the first, and most salient, is an attempt to rid the text of first person singular influences, and deliver a series of vignettes or miniaturized dramatic monologues, narrated by characters attempting to cope with the harsh, desolate landscape, the abrasions and depreciations, of the last decade to pass in the United States. This era the U. S. press often calls The Great Recession. The text should thus demonstrate a kind of cleanliness, apart from the ego concerns and obsessions of the poet at hand. The second issue is ancillary to the first: once characters are established within poems, how to make them interesting, and how to make the incidents and situations they are forced to confront emotionally and intellectually resonant on a wide basis. The third is what kind of language specifically this textual ambition calls for."

from Otoliths 25

This random page from Otoliths 25 (2012) features a poem from a series I began and never completed in any reasonable way. Still not sure what to do with it. 

Hybrid Page: On Barcelona

Literature online: authors devote web-pages in journals to sections of books. Standard operating procedure. What makes this 2012 page, from Halvard Johnson's On Barcelona, unique, is that it's a hybrid, featuring several poems from The Great Recession and a few from Apparition Poems as well.

Adam Fieled (Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania): "Harrisburg"

I’d always noticed the pronounced, large squareness
of her forehead, giving her a thoughtful (philosophical?) look. Then,
the cascade of black waves, thicker than average neck,
medium build. Tall— strapping, even. She paced in
front of me, my cheap luggage, as blistering sunlight singed the Harrisburg
bus terminal, without acknowledging me directly. I
knew for a fact— she was not an undergraduate at PSU.
She could only have been here, in Central Pa, tracking me.
The years of my childhood and adolescence in Cheltenham,
she’d been an indifferent presence. I had, as I well knew,
been a reprobate to her and her kith and kin, but for
abstruse reasons. As of this summer day, I continued
not to care. Except to say, that the School District
and its minions should have known better, belabored zero into sub-zero—

“as if, Adam; as if I had any idea how to handle
you, or us, or what Cheltenham had turned into
by then. You: always special, always different,
always such a fierce disruption against our lives.
Remember— I never liked you much anyway.
There’s no room for special people where I
come from. What’s special is the order of
who gets placed where when, and why. So, as I
followed you out that stupid door, it’s with
no special anything. Philosophy? Where I
come from, it’s this: where you come from is
who you are, whether you like it or not. You
were lower than us, lower, and still are, you little shit—
and that luggage you had was pretty cheap, wasn’t it?”

© Adam Fieled 2017-2026