Cheltenham Elegy 420 on mp3

 Cheltenham Elegy 420 on mp3. And another route.

Curiosities

 Curiosities, a full-length, as dated September 30, 2024. 

Adam Fieled: Thanksgiving 2020: Plymouth Meeting, Pa.

 

Two Odes in X-Peri

 Two new Odes up in X-Peri. Many thanks to Daniel Y. Harris.

X-Peri in its entirety. On the Schuylkill on mp3. 

Book Cover: The Posit Trilogy (Adam Fieled): Compositie: Piet Mondrian: 1916

 

The Great Recession...in 2020

In shifting winds, I still stand proudly behind my rendering of the 2000-Teens in the United States, starting from Plymouth-Whitemarsh. 

Vlad Pogorelov: P.F.S. Post: "No. 105"

This: an illustration used in the first edition of Vlad's Derelict. Now: "No. 105" from Derelict on P.F.S. Post.

Linchpin

It's precisely ten years since Jacket Magazine ended. Does it seem like a long time? Rather. Yet, as a linchpin holding together the Aughts in poetry, Jacket was nonpareil. Binding together entire continents, North America, Europe, Australia, making avant-garde (and sometimes mainstream) poetry an international community, and serving as a center for the entire enterprise of poetry, Jacket was not just "big," it was a phenomenon. The phenomenon started from editors John Tranter & Pam Brown, and made it so that no one could accuse Internet Age poetry of provincialism, or of being regressive.

For someone on my way up in the Aughts, Jacket meant a new start, something fresh, away from old hat Amer-Lit publications like Poetry, APR, and Prairie Schooner, all of which did manifest sure signs of provincialism, regressive clannishness, and fetid insipidity. Among other things, I had two sets of poems in Jacket, one in issue 31 and one in 40 (the final issue), and both allowed me to feel my oats as a poet and writer wanting to lay down several ambitious gauntlets at once.

It's my hope that no one will forget the phenomenal popularity of Jacket in the Aughts. What will be done with Jacket, forty issues and maybe ten thousand pages worth of material, who knows. It's all already in Trove, the National Library of Australia site. For me, it's about wondering what's in there, what the secret gems were which may emerge over a long period of time. The task of weeding through the Jacket morass is a historical one, and involves "world" history, not merely American or European. Ten years later, we could use another Jacket now; a shot in the arm to enliven sleepy times. Will we get it?  

Mary Harju: Saint Catherine Street: Montreal, Quebec: 2003

Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum on P.F.S. Post

Well, folks, Jesus W. Christ (!): Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum finally arrives on P.F.S. Post. And again.

A Philly Free School Anthology

Beyond just P.F.S. Post, an anthology of material covering all aspects of what the Philly Free School has been, is, and will be, from 2004 to the present day, on out. 

Through the party in a dark, dreary mansion

Through the party in a dark, dreary mansion,
    I chased her up the slick wooden stairs—
goblins repulsing our pouting & passion,
    ghouls in a hurry to stifle our dares—
blue, spare bedroom in a spasm of anguish,
    her clothes came off like rain-fattened mud—
both in a hurry, before we both languish,
    Cheltenham sucking the life from our blood—

how can I say this is where I've settled,
    trying to capture the pain of my youth—
fever & fear & despair in a kettle,
    diamonds on parasites, burying truth—
poetry lives past the sky's limpid ceiling,
    frequencies caught for a moment, & hung—
Cheltenham lived in a dungeon of feeling,
    which I've made eternal, as Stacy's quick tongue—

Otoliths 57 in Trove (NLA)

The entire issue of Otoliths 57 (May 2020) embedded in Trove (National Library of Australia).

In the studio off of North Broad

You don't connect it:
our lovemaking with
identity questions, any
more than my fingers
pointing at the moon
are, in fact, a kind of
moon, that can enter
your physical entity &
give you a new (albeit
brief) identity. I weave
in & out of you, in &
out of me, you don't
get time to say I'm this
or that, because how
can I be, being entity?

Mary Evelyn Harju: Portrait: 4 Poets (P.F.S. Presents, South Philadelphia, 5-12-07)

                                                        Adam Fieled

                                                      Frank Sherlock

                                                    William Allegrezza

                                                           Eric Baus

A P.F.S. Post Anthology

A new way of looking at P.F.S. Post: an Anthology collection of what's on the site, year by year:

P.F.S. Post: 2005

P.F.S. Post: 2006

P.F.S. Post: 2007

P.F.S. Post: 2008

P.F.S. Post: 2009

P.F.S. Post: 2016-present

making sure we're backed up and moving forward on all fronts. 

Curiosities, Returns: Wittgenstein's Song on P.F.S. Post

From Returns, Curiosities: Wittgenstein's Song on P.F.S. Post.

Wittgenstein's Song is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound.

Vlad Pogorelov on P.F.S. Post

Vlad Pogorelov's At the Train Station, originally published in the 1998 chapbook Derelict from Repossessed Head Press, re-published in P.F.S. Post. 

Germantown Pike: A Mini-Collage

I.

“Why Plymouth Meeting at night still haunts me— when you look down Germantown Pike from a car at, say, 2 am on a Sunday morning, if it was merely desolation to see, there’d be nothing to say. Why something must be said is that Germantown Pike and the environs (Plymouth Meeting Mall, Fed Ex, Starbucks) all exude such a sense of foreboding, menace, and compressed anti-matter or anti-material nothingness, from having been built in a jagged, ill-shaped, ill-placed fashion, that the consciousness of the individual is sucked into a vacuum from seeing them that it cannot (in my case, at least) ever really recover from. It is man’s inhumanity to man hewn into architecture; and crisp, poignant to understand that Plymouth Meeting by daylight looks innocuous or even impressive. Daytime world and nighttime world in Plymouth Meeting are diametrically opposed.”

II.

                                                            Big

                                                         square

                                                        buildings,

                                                           hulks,

                                                           hover

                                                           above

                                                       the individual,

                                                            who, if

                                                          abandoned,

                                                          will wander

                                                            all night,

                                                              freeze

                                                             to death

                                                            in cement—

                                                              crucified,

                                                             also, by

                                                              concrete—

                                                               warped

                                                              landscape,

                                                        Germantown Pike,

                                                             sheer drops,

                                                                overpass,

                                                               pass away—

III.

Pat offered to give me a ride,

as air was being sucked from

my lungs, oppressive wafts from

parking lots layered over other

parking lots layered under other

parking lots, hewn above concrete

fields, more concrete fields, hewn

in rain-slicked black on a November

night, splattered like black paint

with silver dabs for icy moonlight—

Pat could barely drive her car, we

were trapped in the maze of the first

parking lot for fifteen minutes, Pat

encouraged herself past all the criss-

cross lanes, zany yellow-striped

other lanes, even more zany sense

that cars were converging at odd

angles to us (they could destroy

us, I thought, they’re demon

vehicles sprung mechanically from Hades)—

Pat slipped inconspicuously onto

Germantown Pike, which stuck out

its tongue to lick us, turn us white

as sheets, where all was concrete

& sodomy beneath concrete above us,

yet we escaped, over to Chemical Road,

it was only half as sinister, Pat

almost crashed, but found herself

surviving, as did I, as Germantown

Pike laughed, saying Not next time, babes—

New Poems in Otoliths (57)

Two new ballads in Otoliths 57. Many thanks to Mark Young.

Here is Otoliths 57 in its entirety. And in print.

P.S. Listen to Wayfaring Angel on mp3. 

De Profundis: A Ballad

The crowd is called in, to witness the kill;
   drunk & disheveled, bitter and chilled;
he follows them in by an effort of will.

The tiles are cleaned, to be spattered with blood;
   trickles or gushes, geysers or floods;
a yellow-ish light drowns the faces, like mud—

he likes who he is, in this outlaw brigade;
   not a charmed prince in the price that he's paid;
he'll have to remainder this bargain he's made—

so stands at the edge, & yells with the crowd;
   overly hostile, overly loud;
the victim lies prostrate beneath a white shroud.

It soon gets uncovered, revealing a man
   he thought was another, not from his clan;
but seeing his likeness is more than he'll stand.

And yet he still lingers, as needles are drawn;
   screaming and preening, a circuit turned on;
he wishes he lay there himself, nearly gone—

yellow the light, and more yellow his soul;
    stripped of pretensions, stripped of controls;
he runs for the exit like rats for a hole.

The man was my father, the shrouded quite near.
    Hounded by anguish, hounded by fear,
what lingered or perished was never made clear—

Aughts Philly Affirmation

One of the most striking affirmations I've seen that Aughts Philly really was a special time/place. 

Stain Bar on Google Drive

Me reading at Stain Bar, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on March 30, 2007, for Mipo, Mary, Mary, & others.

P.S. Live in Brooklyn is now a Top 10 hit on Soundclick.