First things first: the unavoidable, primordial question must arise: what is Neo-Romanticism? What Romanticism is tends to emphasize the personal, and the idea of the autonomous artist who does things, creates, for him or herself. Or, say creation ensues to fulfill a personal wish, or power drive. It is implicit in the personal nature of Romanticism that the personal is buttressed by a sense of passion or conviction, which is also personal: the individual finds themselves seized by a passionate conviction as to the validity of personal expression. This is usually pursuant to the revelation of a personal, individualized gift, a unique talent. To make a long, cumbersome story short: the Romantic artist is supposed to, as the saying goes, mean it. The backbone of personal conviction and personal sincerity equips the Romantic artist to “mean it” with as much passionate intensity as can seize an individual human being. So, again to compress a long, cumbersome story, “Neo” along with “Romanticism” simply means a new group of artists who express themselves out of passionate, individualized sincerity, and with personal, individually gifted equipment. This, against the backdrop of a post-modern aesthetic landscape that demeans the individual, and, to be quizzical, “doesn’t mean it.” Post-modernity frowns on the gifted individual, and on individual conviction. Neo-Ro takes for granted that post-modern irony, impersonality, effete half-assed-ness, and auto-destruction of the history of art has grown stale, over-circumscribed, and parochial. Perhaps a bunch of gifted individuals could put some sparkle back on America’s cultural surface. That’s the presupposition.
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
Sunday, October 12, 2025
P.F.S. : Visionary Deadness
As much as I was, and am, a participant in the Philadelphia Renaissance, there is something to me very inscrutable about it— probably because, as an organic conglomeration of socio-aesthetic energies (rather than a calculated, bought out bid to occupy cultural and commercial space), its movements (backwards, forwards, and sideways) are unpredictable, even loopy. Thus it was that by 2009, my attitude towards Philadelphia and Neo-Romanticism had undergone many modifications. Because I was moving up in the ranks as a heavily published and publishing avant-garde poet (my first print full-length text had come out through Otoliths in 2007), and was doing so with no particular support from the university whose fellowship was largely funding me (Temple), I was in a very ambiguous social position. The cohesive, Highwire mid-Aughts form of PFS had collapsed; Mary and I united again for '07 and then separated by '08; I had largely lost touch with Abs; my confrontations with Jenny Kanzler were inconclusive. The Philly avant-profs seemed undecided as to whether I should be recognized by them or not; by this time, I was not only publishing alongside them, but when a lengthy review of my second print book appeared in Jacket Magazine 37 that summer, it seemed to me that I had brokered a high enough position for myself that I would be fine, thank you, with or without their sanctimonious blessings. The popular series I had going on my blog Stoning the Devil at the time, regarding "post-avant" as a possible movement in poetry, confirmed this— I figured prominently in dozens of high-level theoretical online arguments, and my name was being used in conjunction with many older poets, from established generations.
Then, by August, my final hook-up happened with Abs. Worth noting that as of summer 2009, Abs was still lithe and gorgeous. Not to mention, a brief YouTube celebrity. In 2010, Abs looks deteriorated rapidly, though she remained lithe. Her lifestyle got the better of her. All this coincided with the beginning of my second fellowship year. I did not have to teach, and had already passed the dread comp exams, which did its sometimes wonted task of upping my IQ and (more importantly) steeling my nerves. As I prepared to move my writing into interstellar overdrive, it was difficult not to notice that the rich personal life I had enjoyed all through the Aughts had dissipated into a fragmentary state. Mary, against everyone's advice and wishes, had left Philadelphia to do an MFA in Manhattan; she had already earned a PAFA certificate; but we corresponded, and she left comments on my blog with some frequency. The absence of Mary, Abs, and the other P.F.S. characters left a vacuum in my life, now filled by a rigorous dedication to forging ahead on all fronts as a writer and theorist. What I wanted to do was to expand the Apparition Poems section of my Blazevox e-book Beams into a full-length manuscript; and to do this by broadening the parameters of what could be called an Apparition Poem. I already had some material written which fit this bill. I noticed the new poems getting richer, more assured, both formally and thematically, towards an attempt at the timelessness I loved in Keats' Odes and sonnets.
All through September and October, an eerie feeling hung in the air around me, and around Center City in general— a sense of something misplaced, and of energies moving, as Abby was, in strange subterranean directions. For two weeks in November, Philly enjoyed unusually warm weather— I could not write, and suffered a minor nervous breakdown, distinguished by strange, shamanistic visions of grisly murders and violence in general, alternating with a sense that Center City was suffering a major internal meltdown. The Aughts party was over. If blood had been spilled around me, I had not seen it— but, by late '09, I felt it, and her (Abby), intuitively. The recession had become a formidable claw.
I also made an interesting decision in the middle of my shamanistic voyage— rather than assume that my visions qualified me as crazy, I would take what was visionary about my experience and embrace it. This played itself out in tactile terms— at one point on the voyage, I called, in a state of panic, to be taken into custody, so to speak. I went out of my apartment, and when I came back, they, the mental health goons, were waiting outside the building in an ambulance. Following a decisive instinct, I snubbed them, and resolved to take care of the rest of my voyage myself, rather than be tamed by others for my immersion in the visionary. As it turns out, all I needed to do was sleep for a few days. When I had regained my strength, I was ready to write on a level I never had before. The shamanistic voyage, macabre, and solitary, as it was, had been worth it.
Thursday, October 9, 2025
Golden Dawn
When The Painter, from Something Solid, went up on PennSound June 2022 (and also settled on Synchronized Chaos in May 2024), it carried an insignia that some might consider curious. My interest in the occult dates back to my adolescence; my interest in Aleister Crowley, and his Book of the Law, began in the early Aughts. In the poem, Book of the Law acts as a totem or talisman, connecting me to my higher Self, and the possible manifestation of my True Will (potentialities the book adumbrates). At the time of the inception of my relationship with Mary H, this was a difficult and messy procedure. Book of the Law, Satanic reputation aside, helped. For a time, my occult preoccupation became formalized in the mid-Aughts: I joined the Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn. I'd already asked for, and received, access to their files earlier. Mary H witnessed me doing Bringing Down the Light, and other Golden Dawn rituals, many times, including blessings and incantations to her. The point of the E Sequence from Something Solid, which includes The Painter, is that, through a manifestation of collective True Will (doing our Will), many of us in Aughts Philadelphia were able to achieve a sense of oneness with the cosmos, or universe. On a profound level, we were there, in Philly, to manifest divine energies and co-mingle in divine ways. The reward we were giving for following through Higher Law was a shielded, deep-set sense of being at home both in our own skins and in our own lives. Worth noting that The Studio, here in AOP and on PennSound, mines similar territory to come to similar conclusions, as does Starlight.
Wednesday, October 8, 2025
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Wednesday, October 1, 2025
Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Monday, September 29, 2025
Thursday, September 25, 2025
Key point: triad time
This Mary Evelyn Harju portrait of me was painted in late 2006, into 2007. I have now used it as the cover image for PICC. Worth noting: the way I take it, it's not exactly completely an affectionate portrait. The drab coloration, misshapen quality of my head and my hair, were deliberate on Mary's part. As, also, is the sense that my face, as it is painted here, is a little off. If you look closely at it, it is easy to discern that what you are seeing is my face, melded with Abby Heller-Burnham's face. Mary seems to be expressing a certain amount of righteous indignation that Abby and I, by then, had consummated an affair too. Even after I broke up with Mary at the end of '03, I was supposed to know that Abby was off-limits. And, as is generally known, Mary and I did reunite for a big chunk of 2007. So my sense of reuniting with Mary was not thrown off. But important that Mary seemed to see Abby and I together as demonic, or at least menacing. All the elements of the painting which could seem peculiar are no accident.
Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Engagements
The manner in which Mary played the role of the painter, suggested a determination she had both to engage, and to participate in, the history of painting.
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Numbers, Calling Cards
Monday, September 15, 2025
Friday, September 12, 2025
Thursday, September 11, 2025
Tuesday, September 9, 2025
Monday, September 8, 2025
Friday, September 5, 2025
Starlight in West Philadelphia
So: the Mary years, 2001-2003 and then 2007, sandwich Henniker, 2005. They were spent shuttling back and forth between Logan Square and West Philadelphia.
Henniker
California tumbles into the sea: that'll be the day I go back to Henniker. Tried to warn you, about Gerry and Ann-Marie...except, not. As an extremely interesting locale in the mid-Aughts, alive with the right kind of ferment & mischief (possible seat of revolutions), Henniker, New Hampshire was exemplary.
Thursday, September 4, 2025
Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Monday, September 1, 2025
Sunday, August 31, 2025
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Monday, August 25, 2025
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Monday, August 18, 2025
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
On Love: Dipping back into '03
Friday, August 1, 2025
Thursday, July 24, 2025
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
2005: P.F.S. Post
P.F.S. Post (Philly Free School Post) debuted online as itself on October 10, 2005. These two December 2005 sonnets, from Chris McCabe, exemplify some of the best of what the site has to offer.
Monday, July 21, 2025
Started in '05
Begun in 2005, completed in 2011, The Ballad of Robert Johnson came out in The Seattle Star in 2018.
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
Monday, July 14, 2025
Tuesday, July 8, 2025
Monday, July 7, 2025
Wednesday, July 2, 2025
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
Monday, June 30, 2025
Beams: Beams: Infinite Regress
Modigiliani-marvelous
you collapsed perspectives
"vessel" in torso-line, reflected
back, over your shoulder
you leapt from the frame
colors in you remained canvas
foregrounded dimensions
................................................................................................................................
Saturday, June 28, 2025
Twisted Limbs: 2025
Apocalypse out there. Here, endless wheels,
sparks; pockets of restrained & segmented light. Lovely ways you defy me. Best moments,
always, you on top, when the world ends a little
bit. Warmth between lovers can never be
unnatural. Nor can hostage-taking, or a healthy
regard for oblivion. It's all that's left in common
between us & them: twisted limbs. Our mouths
move like theirs: flips, bites. Our movements
prefigure the same ends: consummated peace,
mediated silence, "deliberate hebetude." We're
w/ them as a necessary antithesis. They can't
see us. They never could. It's left to us to make
a balance, if we can. We'll need nothing less than luck.
© Adam Fieled 2006-2025
Earlier versions of this piece appeared in Big Bridge and Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks
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