Sunday, June 15, 2025

Monday, May 26, 2025

Sunday, May 25, 2025

Monday, May 12, 2025

Rosie and Jeremy


I met Rosanna Lee ("Rosie") through Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum. Mr. Tenenbaum had his own New York operations going, and met Rosie on one of his NYC sojourns. They became very tight very fast. The night I met Rosie for the first time, in the fall of '06, was at a First Friday gallery opening in Olde City Philly, where Jeremy happened to be showing. He also did a photo montage slide show that night set to music: lots of Beautiful South. Included in the slide show were several tasteful nude shots of Rosie. Interesting way, and place, to meet someone. She was considerably closer to Jeremy, but I stayed in touch with Rosie, too. Besides having her twice on P.F.S. Post,  I read with her in '08 at the Fall Cafe in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. She was an elusive character, but another key player in the Aughts Philly-NYC dynamic. 

Rosanna Lee on P.F.S. Post


 Rosanna ("Rosie") Lee's apocalyptic masterpiece Shoot the Freak on P.F.S. Post.

Sunday, April 27, 2025

Listenlight Equation


 Another salvaged one, about the kind of actress Trish Webber could be

Saturday, April 26, 2025

Wednesday, April 23, 2025

Adjunct Extension


 Another perma-space for the Jeff Side Beams review, miscellaneously placed

Wednesday, April 9, 2025

From P.F.S. Post (2005-2023)

CATCH

The wind turns the water into an animal
& the boat rides the back of swells,
bucking wetly.
My legs absorb the push & pull,
thinking only of the fish,
sleek & dripping on the line,
neon green parachute ballooning
from its mouth.

I arch my back
& the rod dives.
The fish lifts, slimy as an egg,
spinning like a ballerina
on a silver thread,
its marble eye mute,
fixed on white.

How many times have you watched this world,
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
& pliers in your mouth,
metallic, blood-washed.
How many times have you waited
for the water
while everything lurches around you,
brilliant white, like the inside
of a hospital, like the underbelly
of a dream, gasping
to break the surface
toward that cold & sudden light?

© Becky Hilliker 2005

Saturday, April 5, 2025

From Poetry (2005)

PARTS OF A STORY

Or, it could go like this, since
you want to know names,
places, people, particulars:

it was the particular paradise
of ninety acres of orchard grass
and a few scattered woods;
barbed wire, Holsteins,
and the plush of spring
as you feel it, wet beneath you,
when you sit down in a field in May—

or in the pasture’s folds where the creek ran:
there were ores of a grey clay
she could sit and mine all morning;
rotting trees, whose meat flaked off
like the flesh of fish;
or in the barn where the straw-dust
harried and swirled.

It was in an inheritance,
since it was given as all earth is given,
as ready to receive the pledge
of a young girl as the cow-flops
and the dull thud of horses’ hooves.

We may start here in this field,
with her kneeling, with the colors wet and black
suddenly pouring up—
but eventually we will have to confront the father,
then the ravishment by air,
then, still later—
the ravishment by imagination.

© Mary Walker Graham 2005

Thursday, April 3, 2025

Livid: The Kanzler Saga: Apparition Poem #1181


Just as you couldn’t paint but to vandalize, I had
the instinct to vandalize you, my love. To rough
you up. Because for you there could be no love,
I would assist you in understanding repercussions
could follow from games you thought were fun.
How your green eyes had a problem— you stared
at things too long. That wide-eyed stare, made it
so that (for example) no one could take you seriously
as swish at a first night. Or on First Fridays, as you
tried to swish towards a homing sense you were going
where you wanted to, your simian male friend at your
side. As I said, I wanted to rough you up. You could
never paint to be crisp, only smudged, so that Abby laughed
at how hard you worked to convey retardation (and succeeded).

I could never decide if, behind the wide-eyed stare,
what was there had any genuine innocence. It seemed
to me, to be honest, there was none. Your sense
of complete calculatedness in every respect is why,
how I now kneel before you, my round browns mingling
with your round greens, brown & green smudging each
other to determine advantages, now that the first nights,
First Fridays are all part of a distant past, the time’s come
to choose whether to live or die. I’ve decided to salvage
us. That’s crisp in me. You were crisp about the bed
part of it, for a while, so that I force red into your mix—

Saturday, March 22, 2025

Adam Fieled: E-Books: Catalog

Posit (chapbook pdf): Dusie Press: 2007

Beams: Blazevox Books: 2007-2025

Rubber Soul: Ungovernable Press: 2008

The White Album: Ungovernable Press: 2009

Apparition Poems (print book pdf): Blazevox Books: 2010-2024

Disturb the Universe: The Collected Essays of Adam Fieled (2nd edition): Argotist E-Books: 2010-2024

Mother Earth (2nd edition): Argotist E-Books: 2011-2024

Cheltenham (print book pdf): Blazevox Books: 2012-2024

The Posit Trilogy (including Posit, 2nd ed.) (2nd edition): Argotist E-Books: 2017-2024

The White Album (2nd edition): Eratio Editions: 2018

The Great Recession (2nd edition): Argotist E-Books: 2019-2024

Also relevant:

Jeffrey Side: Collected Poetry Reviews (2nd edition): 2013-2024

Various: Critical Writing on Adam Fieled: 2014

Books on mp3:

Equations (1), Equations (2): PennSound: 2023


Thursday, March 6, 2025

Wednesday, February 26, 2025

Apparition Poems in Eratio


 Two Apparition Poems up in Eratio. Many thanks to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. 

Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Sunday, February 16, 2025

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Deep Wood's Woven Shade: Apparition Poem #1347


Because women who paint have two bodies,
the fragile blood/flesh vessel common, normed,
to all, & an aggregate of coalesced colors & forms,
extending residue useful to raise brains past models,
the winter day arose I plumbed the depths (for a random
reason) of my files, found a miracle, ten paintings,
all master class, by her, without understanding how
I’d mislaid them a decade before. But there, in that now,
I found her body again, the first stroked into
the second, & it was a revelation past anything but

the most violently revelatory intercourse possible
between two human beings. Honestly, not hostile
but real, our more literal expression had wobbled
on skittish rails towards the noncommittal or gossamer.
But as she left it for real, her physical body, in coalesced
colors & forms, the retrieval was all intercourse elevated
into matrimony usually thought too good for the human
race. It is, actually. Especially given the work’s twists
& turns towards revealing again all this dullness
we live in. Four bodies must suffice, to turn dullness to fullness.

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Genius Loci (Slight Return)


The term genius loci is one I heard first used by Steve Halle twenty years ago in Henniker. I found it intriguing. What it designates- the guiding spirit or principle of places (rather than people or things)- is something that has animated a big chunk of my life, from Logan Square to Chicago to Plymouth Meeting. There is then, of course, West Philadelphia, and the poem Genius Loci from the Aughts Philly section of Something Solid has been rewritten as it now stands on P.F.S. Post. Jenny Kanzler now stands in the foreground, where she has always more or less belonged. Have I been, previously, coy? Slightly. Aughts Philly could make anyone coy. Babes. 

Monday, January 6, 2025

Mojo Thing #2: William Butler Yeats

 

The title Deep Wood’s Woven Shade is lifted from the brief, early lyric poem Who Goes with Fergus? by William Butler Yeats. There’s a sense of parallelism between Mondrian and Yeats in relation to this collection— as with Mondrian, there is a limpid clarity to Yeats’ early lyric poems which could be said to work as an antidote to the convoluted semi-obscurity of this group of Apparition Poems. With Yeats, raw sonority also becomes an issue— the sense of pronounced pleasure, in Yeats’ early lyrics, in the incantatory magic of strongly employed, strongly supported lyricism. Refrains and repetitions, in early Yeats, take and transcendentalize that the poems are meant to induce pleasure— in language, imagery, and the symbolistic system around natural surroundings (Glen-Car, Innisfree) which animate the early Yeats’ group. This, before a sense of social responsibility led Yeats to adopt a relatively more representative bardic posture, and thus attempt his own bid at being what I have called “consummate.”

Saturday, January 4, 2025

Mojo Thing #1: Mondrian and Me


 
Twenty long years (almost), with the length of twenty long years, and I’ve continued to use images from the oeuvre of Dutch twentieth-century painter Piet Mondrian, on covers and in many key situations. The way I write, both formally and thematically, has little in common with Mondrian’s paintings— I employ abstraction, to make points and for other reasons, but much of my work is realistic, or at least grounded in realism. Mondrian, of course, is most famous for abstract work, which also sets him adrift from Abby, Jenny, and Mary. What gives? I gave some thought to this, as I picked yet another Mondrian for Deep Wood’s Woven Shade, and came to the conclusion that, led by my own subconscious, I use Mondrian’s abstract imagery to create a sense of balance or counterbalance, with or for the texts in question. The writing is dark, twisted, tangled, and often only achieves limpidity when focused on painful realities; the smooth, limpid clarity of the Mondrian abstractions allow some air, some sensory data against claustrophobia into the books as a gestalt whole. It’s a mojo thing, and a positing in place of another dialectic; my thesis to Mondrian’s antithesis. The readers of the text are left to synthesize the material, presented together. I would like to make the argument, furthermore, that the covers of Deep Wood’s Woven Shade and the rest, are meant to be active agents in reader’s assimilation of the books. They are not meant to be perceived as incidental in any way. In an important gambit, I have spent twenty years choosing Mondrian to oppose me, and to understand that dark, tangled writing could often use something, any destabilizing element, to offer an impression of textual well-roundedness, or to approach the consummate. That’s the synthesis I would most covet— a sense of being consummate. Over a long and short expanse of time, however, it will not be for me to evaluate whether that sense, of the consummate, subsists in these efforts or not.