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.
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