P.F.S.: Mid-Aughts Mayhem

Summer '04 to summer '05 was the heaviest year to be on the street in Aughts Philadelphia. There was an explosive energy around everything— and my emotions oscillated, personally, between euphoria and dejection from night to night. It wasn't just the Philly Free School Highwire shows; because the Making Time DJ nights had a large national and international following, and all the DJs worked at the Last Drop, just to be in the Last Drop at that time was to be in a realm so supercharged that we might as well have been doing lines off the tables. Adam Sparkles, who shared my name and birthday, ran the Last Drop with an iron fist. If he was laconic with P.F.S., it is because at that time he considered us competitors; even as the place, owing to its location, couldn't not be useful for us. 

Yet, for many of us, the euphoria of success was counter-weighed by the dejection of living a life more excessive than I (or Jeremy or Abby, especially) had planned in our comparatively "salad" early Aughts days. Abs and I picked a weird moment to consummate our relationship, but there it was. The low point of the year for me was confessing to Mary Harju, who was no dummy and knew the score. Mary and I had been separated for over a year, but still. The one Philly Free School show Mary deigned to attend at the Highwire (at which we showed her Dionysus), she brought her sister Laurie, who was as blonde and pixie-faced as Mary but sharper about making her way materially in the world. She was essentially conservative, and had a way of making us feel like heathens for being artists. Mary's "husband" that night wore a tie-dye, and was truculent. Ruth, the third sister Harju (or Hariu, as they sometimes spelled it), was more handsome than pixie-faced, brunette, and wavered somewhere between Mary and Laurie. So, oddly, my most promiscuous time passed without much real contact with Mary at all. She'd be back in '07 and '08. Hannah Miller was in, explosive, and then gone, as was Mary Walker Graham in New Hampshire. Jenny Kanzler had yet to emerge, but was watching with some curiosity from the side. Chicago, through Steve Halle, began to form as another Manifest Destiny locale, on the horizon. NYC beckoned, as usual, from right next door. 

Unsurprisingly, Mike Land was (or appeared to be) in heaven. Everywhere we went together, including the Highwire, and New York (where Mike's sister Anna lived in the East Village) we were treated like celebrities, because the Free School shows were big news— even the Philadelphia City Paper was in on them. It also didn't escape my notice that for these months, we were living the way the Beatles and the Stones (or Floyd)(or Steely Dan, our musical dope of choice at the time) were supposed to have lived. If Mike Land was a surprise and a superlative running buddy at a time like this, it is because he was good with euphoric moods, but also with dejected ones— he had a precociously developed appreciation of the human condition, and an empathy with pain and human suffering, which meant that (as, again, I was surprised by) he was no fair weather friend at all. I came to the conclusion— beneath the hustle and the good looks, Mike Land was a very old soul. Jeremy was crabbed and deficient this way (having sustained bruises we all knew about) and not someone to lean on; Abs and/or Ms. H, maybe. In the right mood, they could be stand-up friends. It also never ceases to amaze me that it is here, with all this tumult going on, that Abby fulfilled her destiny and painted her masterpieces.

attached photo of the inside of the Highwire Gallery, main space (Highwire 1) ........................................................................................................................................

As I have discussed at length elsewhere, 2005 was a hectic, tumultuous time for me. On a bunch of different circuits (including the Philly bar scene and the art scene, which in the Aughts were first cousins), the Philly Free School was a fire set loose. My writing life wasn’t (couldn’t be) terribly disciplined at the time— though I had written Wittgenstein’s Song in April at the Last Drop, and debuted it in New England. My spring M.F.A. semester was nonetheless a personal milestone; through Anne Waldman, I became steeped in nouveau poetry and the avant-garde; and my piece (written for Anne) Wordsworth @ McDonald’s came out in Jacket #28 in April, too. Being younger than thirty and in Jacket, which was the epitome of hip at the time, was part of my wild ride then. I was feeling cocky, and puckish. Obvious lines began to run, not only to Sydney but to London, from Philly. 

It was in character for me in 2005 to believe I could create a valuable, viable poetic form out of thin air. In truth, the eponymous section of Beams I wrote at that time is not a substantial formal breakthrough; what I call the Beam form isn’t that unique or striking. The poems have more strength in their thematic gist than in their formal inventiveness— lots of twisted, warped sexuality, precursor to the When You Bit… sonnets and the Madame Psychosis poems, written a year later. It wasn’t a stretch for me to be warped about sexuality in mid-Aughts Philadelphia. Or New York, where Mike Land’s sister Anna, in the East Village, had been more than accommodating. The Madame Psychosis poems of ’06 were formally and thematically more self-conscious; partly because I was trying to be painterly (in the manner of de Kooning and his Women), partly because the formal imperative was to compress (in the manner of Keats), partly because I’d been perverted by a period of promiscuity, and knew it. Many of the best Madame Psychosis poems were written in New England; debbie jaffe was written in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. I lifted the title of the series from Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which I read at that time.

One of my more odd discoveries then was that a huge puritanical streak ran, unabashedly, through avant-garde poetry in America. One female editor, in particular, castigated my pervishness in a memorable way, by laying down a gauntlet—if she was going to publish me, it had to be something more abstract or impressionistic, and not so sexualized. I wrote the original Apparition Poems (which later mutated in a more expansive direction) for her—some of them wound up coming out, also, in Jacket #31, and in a Lake Forest College Press anthology. As Beams was being written, my life tightened and became more focused- I finished my M.F.A., started as a University Fellow at Temple, and the Free School ceased to function as a cohesive entity. The Virtual Pinball poems, co-written with Swedish poet Lars Palm, were a kind of last hurrah for the profligate Free School period—written in an arbitrary, haphazard manner, often from whatever I happened to be listening to on the radio. By October ’06, I had compiled the Beams manuscript of the four series and sent it to Blazevox. It came out as a Blazevox e-book a year later.

Beams is as close as I’ve come to publishing something representatively post-modern— a book which prizes quirk, anomaly, and disjuncture over depth, form, and intellect. If I had to move past it instantly, it is because I found the strictures of post-modern verse too limiting. There’s too much human reality which can’t be expressed with quirk and anomaly; and too much ephemerality in the post-modern approach for a disciple of British Romanticism to accept or embrace (even if UK poet Jeffrey Side connected Beams with Blake in an ’08 review of the book). If Beams has a claim to some enduring importance, it is because I dared to tackle a serious theme (human sexuality) in a few novel, skewered ways, and without unduly obfuscating what the theme was. The title series, also, goes past sex, into the pure surreal. 

P.F.S.: Jerome McGann

How scholar Jerome McGann defines romanticism in his tome The Romantic Ideology— an unthinking, unquestioning belief in a certain circumscribed ideology/set of ideological assumptions, aesthetic and otherwise— does apply, in a more limited sense, to the Philly Free School and most of the other key players in the Aughts Philadelphia Renaissance. Yet, as I noticed while studying at Temple in the late Aughts, there is a double-bind and a contradiction built into McGann’s famous, and famously ambiguous, formulation— the entire gist of ideology (and ideologies) is that different groups and sub-groups expend cognitive effort to develop and establish ideologies, so that no worked-over ideology does not have cognitive effort built into it; in other words, developed ideologies presuppose thoughts and questions. What McGann seems to be suggesting about English Romanticism (first and second generation included) is this: once the ideological parameters around their artistic endeavors were set, no more earnest cognition was devoted to anything but ideological consolidation— the Romantic Ideology was taken to be axiomatic enough that ideological interrogations and revisions were deemed unnecessary. The Romantics were self-expressive, self-reflective, and self-determinative; they saw and toiled to manifest the explosive potentialities of the subjective. To be reductive (and cute), they put the “I” in ideology, and sought the indirect route to objective truths through subjective ones. They were consummate individuals.

Here’s another split between myself and most of Aughts Philly— if, as a collective, we have a patron saint among the English Romantics, it must, for a number of key reasons, be John Keats. One reason his Odes have aged so beautifully is that, despite (like his cronies) putting the “I” in ideology and developing his subjectivities in characteristic Romantic fashion (torch filched from Wordsworth/Coleridge by imaginative cunning), Keats presents himself and his visions in a prescient (anticipating not only Neo-Romanticism but countless strains of century XX culture before us) mode of noir or deep noir; the darkness and monotony of Regency London, in the midst of an impinging and strictly-speaking unnatural Industrial Revolution and factory-culture, and the place of a classical-minded (enlightened elitist/classicist) poet generating friction-sparks by struggling against it. My own early Aughts odal period borrowed Keats' sense of formality but moved in a direction more straightforwardly celebratory and (arguably) orgiastic.  Among the Odes, Nightingale and Grecian Urn create a gestalt-world not unlike The Lost Twins and The Skaters— all is shadowy, spectral, and obsessed with an evanescent past; and all manifest meanings are multiple, and create cognitive multiplications for their audience. The implicit split, for me personally, from Aughts Philly had come to fruition in Apparition Poems, and has to do with William Wordsworth, and an odd aesthetic attachment I had/have to him, even in the turbid depths of noir; a kind of compact I refused to break. Wordsworth’s aesthetic, much more so than Keats’, includes vistas suggestive of moral interests— that high art need not evade morality and moral issues, but take cognizance of them as an act of defiant, individualistic courage and courageous, passionate humanism.

I both do and do not mean to imply that Aughts Philly was characterized by immorality, or immoral impulses or amoral ones. It was not particularly questioned, in our collective ideology, that all of us were on a vision quest for personal socio-aesthetic and socio-sexual fulfillment, and did not very much mind applying a little elbow grease to ride roughshod over people and situations which stood in our way. The conflict of wills among us could be terrible— yet one thing we had going for us, also, was a streak of Romantic Sincerity, which guaranteed that, despite all the circumstantial twists and turns of our lives, we were (many of us) able to cut through the bullshit and commiserate with each other on profound levels. We embraced emotions, and passions, and lived in them without the thought of too much objectivity— in other words, we were authentically young. Whether McGann could align us successfully with the English Romantics is an interesting question— but the key weakness in McGann’s formulation, from the beginning, is that he never seems to stop and think how his Romantic Ideology paradigm applies to any artist or art-group worth their salt— for genuine artists, unsettling ideological assumptions is less important than remaining emotionally, sexually, socially, and creatively fluid and fluent, ideology and ideologies be damned.

Revolver: Take arms against a sea of troubles...

The murk and sludge of 2008 engendered a wide variety of responses. When I could get high in 2008, it was on the wings of a writing bender which wound up seeing me into the Teens. In the triumvirate of e-chap/e-book publications in ’08 and ’09, Revolver distinguishes itself by a vested sense of sobriety. Revolver is not me burying myself in alcohol, nor is it me wallowing in the urban menace atmosphere of filth and scum. Revolver is where I respond to the sleaze and scum by fighting back. Wide awake, the protagonist here takes in the world around him, and sees what unholy, bitterly corrupted lights he can shoot out. Beneath the sobriety and the fury, Revolver also reads as a last will and testament of and for my relationship with Mary Evelyn Harju. I’m watching her moves, and watching mine, and trying to discern why the impasse between us must be, or seem, permanent. Blood on the Tracks time. There’s always a rift where the physical and spiritual play a violent, spiteful game of tug-of-war. The criticisms and recriminations which inform Love You To, lead to molten melt-down of She Said She Said and then the complete and totalized entropy of For No One. As the final salvo of the e-chap, Tomorrow Never Knows consummates a willful imposition of the physical on the spiritual and vice versa, into a sense of life being conceived in a dissolution of individual consciousness. This is where the lovers cease to exist, and commune in something like a Universal consciousness or Mind. Where sex means something. Where Mary and I are concerned, the final fuck (half-metaphorically meant) is the most profound. The revolver carried by the protagonist annihilates itself, as it self-exhausts, and the ecstasy does not exclude sobriety, faithfulness, or discipline. What actually happened between Ms. H and I in the second half of ’07 is tangled. Some of our raw material got transmuted, some rendered with (again) an adequate faithfulness. Released as a Scantily Clad Press e-chap in ’08, Revolver’s solution for recessional entropy is a commitment to cultivating presence, reality, individuality. These are seen to be worth fighting for. Entity, unthinking consciousness, is not to be trusted, as a weakening agent. All shot through with a patina of raw, divorced pain. One way home.

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                                          The Fall: Mary Evelyn Harju: 2008

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More on the death of love: Apparition Poem #1497 in denver syntax 20, Apparition Poem #1558 in Cricket Online Review 6.

Rubber Soul: Vino Veritas

 

Vino veritas, translates from the Latin, roughly, as this: truth-in-alcohol. The phenomenon by which we tell more of the truth when drunk. Is vino veritas something real? I wouldn’t venture a definitive guess. Different people react different ways to different stimulants and/or depressants. I would only say that, in my life as a writer, I’ve only dived (delved) into these murky waters once, i.e. written an entire piece (in this case, a chapbook length manuscript) while alcohol shit-faced. Rubber Soul was written and published in 2008. I have made a point of pointing out, in other places, that I was not playing the game straight for much of that particular, recession-trundling year. I wasn’t compulsively shit-faced either; I had (for instance) to function at Temple, both as adjunct prof and graduate student, and I did. But it was a saucy time, of old games turning up loose ends, and, where the recession was concerned, micro and macro levels converging in my life, and the lives of those I cared for. Even as I found, of course, that I couldn’t take care of them anymore. So: I was drunk enough of the time to take my stab, for instance, at the Jack Kerouac of Big Sur. The narrative voice emerges, as in Big Sur, fuzzy, hazy, staggering, stumbling. Drunken. Also channeling my old family relation Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild said of Morrison, When he was being the shit-faced kamikaze drunk, it was odds-on against getting him to do a vocal. You might look into it. Paraphrase for a writer churning out a brief book: I looked into it.

The narrative Rubber Soul voice is, in fact, too fuzzy, too hazy, to attempt anything classic. Keats keeps getting leaned on, Manhattan juts in absurdly, as does a bizarre overlay of occult/New Age/Golden Dawn baggage. Amidst all the glass shards, who I am as a long-suffering male protagonist in Girl is clearly, and precociously, taking on the task of relating/mythologizing the years on the front-lines with Mary Evelyn. Eight years, to be precise. The Word finds me sounding not like Kerouac or Morrison but like Charles Bukowski. He becomes another absurd overlay, amidst the fuzziness and the Crowley bric-a-brac. The overall tone of Rubber Soul, I would say, is not morose like Big Sur but frenzied, chaotic, hysterical. Much of it’s supposed to be funny, too, the kind of funniness The White Album sacrifices at the altar of still-cherished classicism. Rubber Soul can be taken as a romp all the way through. Ungovernable Press, btw, which published The White Album (1st ed.) and Rubber Soul in ’09 and ’08, respectively, is based in Sweden, and emanates from editor Lars Palm at the center. Part of the ’08 fracas was about weird worlds colliding online. Philadelphia to Malmo? Why not. And me and many others did have a sense of largesse, then, about how many books and chapbooks we could publish. A nifty compensation, as it were, for all the drunken nights. And a clue as to why some of us have been able to survive all the melees.

Trish: A Romance

 

Ironic, in a piece about luxury, sensuality, and ease, that it’s taken me so long, until 2024, to finish Trish: A Romance. The portion of the Aughts Philly dream which has remained crystalline over twenty to twenty five years— emancipation from limiting belief systems or creeds, freedom to live expressively, and, most importantly, manifestations of extreme, libertine-worthy excess— are not difficult to define or express. The difficulty in the Trish: A Romance textual journey, which began in 2009, is to render luxury, sensuality, and ease, while remaining faithful to complexities built into myself, Trish (Mary) and Tobi (Abby) as characters. Not all libertine models are complicated people; we were. Also worth noting about 2009; the last real chunk of time I spent with Abby Heller-Burnham, in the 23rd and Arch apartment (Westminster Arch), involved Trish: A Romance. I wanted to tape Abby talking about Mary, narrating their friendship, to see if I could use it. Thus, one section of the book (I thought) could be Abby-on-Mary. Didn’t work. When the tape began to roll, Abby wanted to talk about herself and her travails, which were gruesome in late-summer ’09. Abby was not a happy camper then, and all the ease, the bliss of the six, seven, eight years before were gone. As I said, I was never to interact with her in a prolonged way again.

Yet, Trish: A Romance remains, a testament to a period of time with many miracles built into it. Like the travelogue writings of Christopher Isherwood, the text dwells on a surfeit of characters who don’t just dream but live wild adventures and romances. The bizarre formality of the piece— seven sets of six sonnet-length stanzas— was invented so that the action could be conveyed in a vessel (as Mary would say) lean and mean enough to make the ride a brisk one. The miracle isn’t just in fornication and carousing— it’s the fact that said fornication and carousing was done in a spirit not just of affection but of love. At the end of the day, these are characters who love each other. This, notwithstanding the concluding revelation of the protagonist— that Trish has remained at lease partially unknowable to him. The point is, the characters in Trish: A Romance are not scallywags. They have, and notice, their own emotions. Even as accusations of self-indulgence are not necessarily misplaced. People will take Trish: A Romance not just to Christopher Isherwood but to Brett Easton-Ellis; that much sex, drugs, youthfulness, and rambunctious indulgence does form a sense of symmetry with Less Than Zero. I would only choose to say that in Trish, a sense of emotional/spiritual engagement, rather than dispossession, takes all the Philly-L.A. energy and harnesses it into a form more human, more likeable than the Easton-Ellis book. Remember: the three protagonists are all artists, creative types. La Boheme? No. Something unique, that’s just what it is. See for yourself.

The White Album

 

Memories of the summer of 2008, when I wrote The White Album: lots of them, all about chaos, disorder, built-up scum. The move I made that July was within Logan Square, from 21st and Race to 23rd and Arch. The old flat had been a horny revelation: endless fun, endless soporific reverie. The new flat was comparatively pedestrian: low ceilings, not much direct sunlight, let alone bay windows, or a loft-like sense of space. All this, because rents in Center City Philly were going sky-high. The visit to Chicago in June had been interesting, borderline brilliant: but I was running out of the money needed to do such things. Was, in fact, accruing a significant amount of debt. Temple was a source of continual frustration. There were the Comp Exams to worry about, and trying to teach and do everything else I was doing at once. I had started an affair in May, and it had ended in May. I numbed myself out to deal with the disappointment I hadn’t expected. The new Mary H failed to arrive. I was alone. The temptation to wander over to between 20th and 19th and Chestnut and procure another bottle of whiskey was always there. And often indulged. Mary herself had become obdurate, unreachable. There was no going back. Jenny Kanzler arrived with a vision of reality straight out of the late Roman Empire, or the Rocky Horror mansion. A good painter, but a spook. Nothing soporific there. And Abby was wandering at large somewhere out there, shooting up God knows what by that time. Entropy: that’s what all this was about. When, a year later, and still scum-ified in another scummy summer, I affixed the Robert Ryman to the first edition of TWA, it was to express the sense that the magic of several years back had inverted, for all of us, into something primitive, faltering, sloppy. Ryman takes Abby, Mary, and Jenny, and turns them on their heads. That’s what The White Album is supposed to be; the Aughts Philadelphia dream of the early Aughts turned on its head. But sleaze and grease can be glamorous too. Right?