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.
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