Thursday, September 4, 2025

The preponderance of 2005?


And back to this again, from 2025. 2005 was huge with Ms. H-B, and also Ms. W-G

Monday, September 1, 2025

Thursday, August 21, 2025

Twisted Limbs


 A formal presentation of the 2025 version of Twisted Limbs from the mid-Aughts. 

Monday, August 18, 2025

Apparition Poems in Ink Pantry


Two 2013-2014 Apparition Poems in Ink Pantry. Many thanks to Deborah Edgeley.

Red Life


A decision many of us made in Aughts Philadelphia (and Montreal). 

And a decision consonant with who Mary H already was


Wednesday, August 6, 2025

On Love: Dipping back into '03


The Ode on Love was written in 2003. This version includes 2025 revisions. Peace. 

Ode On Love, in 2025 form, on mp3

Friday, August 1, 2025

Anthem


 An anthem which spans 2004-2006, about the Aughts, in Philly & elsewhere. 

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

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Philosophizing 2005-style


 On the theoretical underpinnings of what the Philly Free School did in 2005.

Monday, July 7, 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

................................................................................................................................

Beams rides again on Blazevox

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

Equations: Thesis: Heather Mullen


 On the voodoo set loose from Santa Cruz

Friday, June 27, 2025

Monday, June 23, 2025

Beams: Beams: Ex


 

mimesis of no-détente

(m)oral play of difference
I follow breath to be

as a blue painted vase
El Greco-sepia room

crossed corrugated lips

regrets of rinsed locusts
you “just knew” this

would happen, as you

“just knew” it’d happen
when you painted me

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


Monday, March 17, 2025

from Early Poems: "Technician of Tough Love"

for Alexandra Grilikhes 1932-2003

Puzzling your way back from nothingness
you must be; if the Void is an abyss,
to conquer it in life is impossible.
There is a blessing in ritual,
but it is all from one pull.

Your private treasures I never knew;
beyond the Indian drums (of which you had
a collection), was there something,
some book, some record, you prized
above all others?

You were a technician of tough love,
collected hearts; had a passion
for Chinese herbs boiled down
to the root, to retrieve essential,
healing strength;

ministered weary angels
needing succor, familiar w/ your tongue,
your breath, the beating of your heart.
Saintly, to feed some soul's need
for flesh, nectar, sanctuary,
oblivion;

now it’s death's mystery
from which you can't escape—
maybe. I profess & confess
utter bewilderment.

Remember lunches
at Essene, 4th Street, the crutch
of good caffeinated coffee, conversation,
a few hours rest; was eternity
there, watching you, your Muse,
waiting silently to bear Her naked flanks
to your disciplined pleasure?
Who would know but Her
how you, a restless spirit, learned?

© Adam Fieled 2003-2025

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.