Bloomsday Lock-Down

 Ampersand locked down into and, Undulant does a dance to celebrate its birthday. 

Disappear

Disappear, as published in Philadelphia in Hinge Online in 2001.

Disappear, as featured in Live in Brooklyn on PennSound. 

photo portrait of Adam Fieled by Kelly McCabe, State College, Pennsylvania, 1994

Pigs and Planes

Pigs and Planes, alongside Ode On Jazz, in Steve Halle's Seven Corners Poetry.

Pigs and Planes, as part of Live in Brooklyn, on PennSound. 

Beams preface ('13-'26)

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 immersed myself 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 Magazine was part of my wild ride then. I felt cocky, and puckish. The explosiveness of Poetry Incarnation ’05 aided and abetted this. It was a bludgeoning forward kind of time.

It was in character for me in 2005 to believe I could create a valuable poetic form out of thin air. In truth, the eponymous section of Beams I wrote at that time is not a substantial formal breakthrough that much; 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 lived in the East Village. 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 and slightly deranged 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. Becky Grace constitutes significant early recognition of Rebecca Hilliker. I lifted the title of the series from Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which I read at that time, and which was animated by a similar twistedness. Nick Gruberg, who bled literary twistedness, encouraged me in this respect.

One of my odd discoveries then was that a huge puritanical streak ran 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, and was not ignored.

Beams is as close as I’ve come to publishing something representatively post-modern— a book which prizes quirk, anomaly, and disjuncture over depth 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 both British Romanticism and Deconstructionism to accept or embrace (even if UK poet/editor Jeffrey Side connected Beams with Blake in his ’08 GR 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, head-splitting ways (multiple, multiplying significations), and without unduly obfuscating what the theme was.

Adam Fieled, 2013-2026

Clean: 1998-2026

 

Clean from Siren's Silence to Mipoesias to PennSound: twenty-eight years. 

Clean illustration: Angel of Burned Flesh by Brian Willette. 

Live In Brooklyn

Many thanks to the PennSound crew for uploading Live in Brooklyn:

Pigs and Planes
Disappear
Solipsist
Hell In
Becky Grace (for Becky Hilliker)
Clean

The night of that reading, as is seen here, Mary Evelyn Harju and Mary Walker Graham were both in attendance.

Becky Hilliker and Yeats (from Ephemera: Beginning the Work)

Connecting Ephemera with anything after Modernism (but before what I call Neo-Romanticism) is a strain. The chiasmus between Ephemera and the cinema moves the piece hesitantly, delicately towards post-modernity. But the deep-seated pathos, elegiac tone, and straightforward, linear narrativity of Ephemera (linear narrativity not precluding innovation on other formal and thematic levels) all chafe against the sardonic, ironic, corrosive, and yet ultimately heartless heart of post-modernity. Indeed, putting Ephemera on the hot-seat next to ordained post-modern products is a pointless exercise. With The Prelude and The Waste Land there is a point; by The Emperor of Ice Cream (as illustrative), there is none. Not to mention other American junk-heaps like Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance. Let’s skip, if we shall, to the Aughts in America, and the beginning of more action (live action) more germane. I have, in a manner of speaking, affixed to the many female artists of the Aughts (American stripe) to develop a new post-feministic mold or prototype they all happen to fit. There she stands before us, if you will: the Creatrix. As I have adumbrated the Creatrix-as-construct, and the entire formulation as a subset of Neo-Romanticism, the Creatrix feeds, as post-modernity did not (neither do multi-culturalism and academic feminism), on narratives of form and passion, delivered from stances of settled self-sufficiency. Grandstanding, proselytizing, or playing to a perceived crowd is thus eschewed.  Narratives connotate stories represented in a discernible way. Form and passion remain self-explanatory. An interesting narrative, as in Ephemera, is then accredited with a sense of innovation. Forms rendered interestingly, also innovation. Entropy into incomprehensibility, nothing. Formless forays into the obviously anti-aesthetic, also nothing.

So, about this live action I have been promising. The locale happens, interestingly, to be New England, and the name of the writer is Rebecca Hilliker. Let’s take a look at Catch, and discern if we might how conventional textual tactics can be made to serve innovative ends:

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

I arch my back
and 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
did you find this world,
blinded, terrified?
There are hands on you
and 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?

Like Ephemera, physiological tension or tautness makes the poem serve a visceral end of magnetism, fascination. It might also be said that magnetism and fascination in text are impossible without narrative to hook potentially engaged consciousness. This can be done with fulsome narrative, or what Roland Barthes refers to as bits of narrative; but the narrative sector must be filled in somehow. Why Catch creates an interesting chiasmus with Ephemera, is that in Ephemera, the sense of a tense, tautened physiology plays against a formal conceit: free-verse used to create aesthetic effects usually created by end-rhymes. In Catch, the tense, tautened physiology plays against an origin-seeking phenomenological fantasy, wherein the protagonist transubstantiates herself into animal form. A visual, rather than an aural, change. In Ephemera, an elegiac effect is created by two lovers parting ways, who stay discrete, do not meld. In Catch, a sense of disorientation or dementia is created (cinematic also, as in The Fly) by a lack of cognitive discretion. The protagonist has a sense of identification that brings the poem to an intense, incandescent, partially horrific crescendo. Ephemera remain genteel; Catch does not. The sense of live action that they share, shot by shot, succession by succession, connects both pieces to a textual continuum what brings texts to the brink of the sublime, when the sublime (as in Schopenhauer) is imposing, overwhelming, either gently so (Yeats) or luridly (Hilliker).

© Adam Fieled 2025

Sex and Shadows on Side blog

Developing a rubric around post-feminist poetics, Graham, Blair, Hilliker.

Feel (I saw) remix re-pub

Jamendo has re-pubbed a large cross-section of their site on archive. org. This includes Zenboy1955's Feel (I saw) remix, which reached #8 on Soundclick's Electronic Overall chart a few years back. The Feel (I saw) remix starts with the PennSound version of my long narrative poem Feel, written from mid-Aughts Philly, not published until X-Peri in 2018, by which time the dust had still not settled. All set up by the California site CC Mixter, which puts the vaunt in avant for serious music.

Live Forever in Lothlorien

Live Forever, double sonnet from Something Solid, in Lothlorien Poetry Journal. 

Live Forever is also available in mp3 form on PennSound. 

The City For Real

Taking for granted that the creative capacities of photography are exceeded by painting, what a camera can document does become interesting in relation to cities and urban landscapes. What you might find, in an exploration of this, is an explosion of accidents, or of the accidental, wherein compositional fields or planar spaces are generated out of the contingencies of a city's workaday life. The artist's eye would be able to spot, and then document, the visual explosiveness of or by which compositions coalesce and then disintegrate in seeming solidity and then out into evanescence. The bemused epiphany which must've struck Mary Evelyn Harju as she snapped this portrait of me in Manhattan's East Village in 2007 is about all these issues. The sense of compositional rightness here, discovered by accident at an opportune moment, meant that she was doing one of the things she liked to do best— work from a seemingly simple premise on multiple levels. The portrait critiques me (singular, as myself, unlike in her paintings), critiques what an urban landscape is, then critiques Manhattan and specifically the East Village, all out of a compositional discovery coalescing spontaneously in front of her. The drollery of the cell-phone pedestrian in sandals, passing down Avenue A behind me, and as smudged, in a painterly way, as I am crisp, takes the found game and ups it even more.  

Something Solid: Apologia 2022-2026

Something Solid, unlike Apparition Poems, is a book which knows its place. The God-forsaken quality of the poems strung in numbers is replaced by a sense of consolidation with the core values which render poetry useful for most literary landscapes— incidents and situations chosen for interrogation, involving the poet in memory, sensuality, and the formality of the traditional sonnet (and newfangled double sonnet, twenty-eight lines); a downward curve, as it were, into these topos, rather than an upward curve into serious philosophical discourse. What would make the book more than a curiosity (or, perhaps, anti-curiosity) to such discourse, is a Barthes-ian acknowledgement of a basic literary principle which philosophy finds distasteful, but which nonetheless has and will always dictate individual literary economies— we tend to read and re-read what we find pleasurable to read and re-read. The pleasure principle inhering in texts and textuality may dictate that Something Solid, despite its not being angled in a strictly original way, will be read and re-read with more pleasure and avidity than Apparition Poems, which most, including discursive types, may choose to respect from a distance. The version of poetic memory explored here has as its ensign an engagement with two periods in time, one place specific— the Nineties, and Aughts Philadelphia. Built into the book’s willfully conventional dynamic, is the imposition, on these periods, of an aura of romantic chaos, of the possibility of the poet’s consciousness, in medias res in the appointed zeitgeists, conflating internal with external vicissitudes, so that the book resonates as both completely personal and ripe for universalization. The poet stands within the text and its dramas, a self-conscious synecdoche.

Where sensuality is taken in the text is to a locale configured to purify and transcendentalize its manifestation into an emergence of imaginative, dramatic reality. Bodies are not seen as real but hyperreal; the carnal acts as a portal into its own effacement, into the larger existence of Eros as an idea and ideal to mystify the objective, express the effacement also of objectivity into immediacy, drama, and the aesthetic establishing its own, rightful claim on aestheticized language, in as ideal form as the text will allow. Imagination in the text establishes its own body— possibilities glimpsed, starting from sense. Undulant, an early standout from the text, performs this task— layering sensual and imaginative data, the tactile over and under the imaginative, so as to solidify, both pleasure in the text for capable readers, immersion in time-zone or zeitgeist awareness, and formal innovation for what peregrinations can be compressed into fourteen lines. This ambitious task subsists past the manner of Keats and Wordsworth, in their respective sonnets, into a Neo-Romanticism of all these conflated elements, coalescing in simultaneity. Not philosophy, but not simple either. Frequencies begins from more sophisticated ground— the meta-aesthetic— one artist addressing another. Then, the poet’s imagination somersaults into an assaying of the imagination of the Other. That the meta-aesthetic manifests alongside a raw revelation of carnality makes Frequencies ring out or emanate, with a Manneristic, perhaps, sense of exaggeration, on double, triple, and quadruple levels.

The text’s extensive immersion in visual art, through the prominent placement in the text of Mary Evelyn Harju, Abby Heller-Burnham, and Jenny Kanzler, tilts the text towards a perpetual sense of ekphrasis, as an owned level. This level achieves a status of semi-dominance, developed along semi-dominant lines. The semi-dominance of a travelogue sensibility, from Philadelphia to New Hampshire to Montreal, is also developed in tandem. The grounded quality of the text, against Apparition Poems, answers perversion with exuberance, a haunted house with an eternal salon, down to a series of Creatrix muses who imbue the text, as has been said, with ekphrastic intention. This coloring or imbuing culminates in Starlight I and II, a miniaturized dialectic that takes (as Equations does not, exactly) the mysticism of romance and intoxication and confers judgement or an answer on the pursual of such, amid darker material. The objective is thus established as one aegis for the subjective to sit under, in a text which takes its stripes both from the cognitive and post-cognitive.

The sonnet, as a poetic form, is traditionally an enemy of philosophy. Brevity and compression of data are both adversarial to the development of discourse and discursive contexts. Why the sonnet here was chosen and set into dynamic motion was to undo preconceptions regarding what the sonnet’s possibilities are, in practice, if hinged to an imaginative premise. For the book, the poet invented a form— what he calls a double sonnet— one sonnet atop another, as a twenty-eight line poem, rather than a fourteen line poem. Precisely half the poems in Something Solid are double sonnets. The expectation horizon of twenty-eight lines is, or can be construed to be, radically dissimilar to the original mere fourteen. In twenty-eight lines, the little song, angled against intellectual expansiveness, takes on a new stripe as a vessel or vehicle more pliant, more nimble, more about widening parameters so that memory, sensuality, and drama, have a stage to perform, do their tricks on, both adequately lit and adequately built to support their weight. Yet, the precision of the form— twenty-eight lines— renders some compression necessary, so that the traditional sonnet geist of willing confinement, enforced brevity, and the phenomenological tension which ensues, for both poet and reader, still imposes that poetry remains poetry.

For Something Solid to transcend the merely tautological— poetry being poetry, long-established tropes within poetry digging in their respective heels to reestablish their subsistence— the combination of elements which inhere in the text must gather themselves together and travel, as if thrown with substantial velocity, to a unique gestalt locale. The locale, as a congeries of all its component parts, is crystallized, in miniaturized form, in Undulant and in more representatively newfangled form in Frequencies— the charm, sense of transgression or danger thwarted or neutralized, and frisson built into a life, unconventional amidst all the conventionality, consecrated against bourgeois pursuits. The poet is not domesticated. Rather, in his travels, the pursuit is for the richness of flight, and the phenomenology of flight, travel, as an end in itself. The poet, as an arrow flying through spaces at any moment enchanted or damned, is in love with the very principle of dynamism perpetuating itself. What gravitas is expressed, what objectivity is reached for, has to do with an understanding reached, through the composition of the book, what human life can offer to this form of consciousness, which craves a mien of the unsettled. Here’s how motion or dynamism is achieved, here’s how pieces may fall around it. The rogue poet is no one new, to be sure. This rogue poet is not attempting to be new. What he wants is a new kind of textual voyage, for himself, to mirror and ricochet against, and thus enhance, his fleshly voyages.

Proven: Two Artists In Montreal

 A portion of Something Solid tracking Mary and I away from home. 

Henniker Heat

Henniker, New Hampshire is located eighty miles outside of Boston. This Something Solid sequence recounts Henniker and its inhabitants, transient and otherwise, in the mid-Aughts. From the Miscellaneous Sonnets section of the book. 

Picture to a name...

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

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia): "Mary Harju on the Rue St. Denis"

 

                                             © Adam Fieled 2003-2026

The Disfiguring Gaze

Not to be a wag, but stands to reason it's an appropriate time to point out that Mary Evelyn Harju's 2006 portrait of me, done in her co-op studio space, 915 Spring Garden, North Philadelphia, does the nifty trick of fusing my face, as painted by her, with Abby Heller-Burnham's. Is the personal situation behind this contretemps a soap-operatic one? It is. Without being unduly personal, it is enough to say that Mary did not appreciate what happened between Abby and I while she was stuck, outside the Center City scene, in East Falls, with a reprobate far shadier, and nastier, than John and I. The East Falls, mid-Aughts period was not a culturally rich one for Mary. When she rejoined the scene, it was with an eye towards looking at who had done what while she was gone and taking the piss. Rather than Davidean (Michelangelo, Renaissance, not Jacques-Louis David)  elegance, I'm comically warped and gauche looking here. No pin-up at all. Instead, from her, what might be called a disfiguring gaze. The disfiguring gaze amounts, from the painter's perspective, to a radical power trip, a revenge fantasy fulfilled. The Other's energy is tamed and muted, if not decimated. The resentment at having missed all the mid-Aughts fun nonetheless plagued Mary H for the rest of her life. But made, disfiguration-wise (not decimation-wise), for one of the more intriguing fuck you-s in American art history.

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

Having ascertained what the pertinent cultural evidence is, the conclusion is inescapable— I was Mary Evelyn Harju’s muse. Or: she used me, my physical apparatus, as a site to start from in exploring the issues she found the most interesting. A muse-site. The sense of intimacy with me thusly implies a preference Mary had for warmth or nearness. A purgation of the objective in favor of a warped, sexually charged, polyglot subjectivity. The exploration of the subjective as a labyrinth would’ve been valued by Miss H as a way of building depth (self-contained, self-perpetuated depth) into her visions. Humanism, the Renaissance manifested again, against the arid frigidity of the post-modern art which dominated East Coast gallery spaces during the Aughts.

How I react to being a muse, or, to not belabor the intimacy involved in this instance, a Muse— no sense of drollery, but a sense of bemusement nonetheless, that I relate to my own physique, rather than my brain, as having accomplished something culturally meaningful in the world. Mary and I, indeed, were physical people together, physically involved. The recognition, which includes bemusement, is that Mary Evelyn Harju regarded me as a body first, a brain (a perhaps distant) second. As a nascent writer in the Aughts, with my own set of socio-aesthetic concerns (starting from Symbolism and English Romanticism, but encompassing philosophy, literary theory, including Deconstructionism, as foundational materials in a self-made matrix), it is amusing that Mary needed naught but my body to be delivered into an expressive realm where she had leave to say what she wanted to, to the world and the times she lived in.

The radical sense of physicality was vertical for Mary here. The Muse Mary Evelyn Harju was looking for, to exalt, mystify, or disfigure, was centered, as the Italians had been, on physical dimensionality. On another level, my emotions cannot not be engaged by the realization of my servitude as Mary’s Muse. It is with a combination of pleasure and pain that I begin to understand the sojourn in her towards flesh-spirit, soul-body unity, through art and sexual intercourse, back and forth. Pain, because staying grounded in physical reality cost Mary the better ride she could’ve had, had she been more attuned to intellect, dissevered from physical presence, and presiding over physical presence as well.

To be the enfranchised Muse as raw meat does put me in a false position— I myself am dissevered, as aesthetic Object, from the kinds of cognitions that see and manifest bright vistas on all sides beyond just Bodies, or my own body, and sexual intercourse. Becoming a major Muse based on raw physical presence is thus only semi-empowerment. Nonetheless, for what Mary Evelyn Harju’s particular sensibility was, which could only take the Bible and the Renaissance together and channel them into revelations of carnality (which could also be seen to ricochet back and reveal the feminine or Woman), I served, at a younger age, as fulsomely as anyone could. Even as the recognition of what was in my brain, my own cognitive capacities, had to be consigned to the shadows, or to the chiaroscuro of half-existence.

Jenny Kanzler (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA): "Untitled #1"

                                                         © Jenny Kanzler 2011

On being painted as David III

 

Acutely worked into both the surface and the depths of The Fall is a semi-obvious contradiction— to the eye of the painter, I can be both Adam Fieled and Michelangelo’s David. The work of art is a conduit to a color-form reality in which a frozen moment allows this apotheosis into doubleness. Yet hewn into The Fall is the troubled and troubling narrative of a relationship gone wrong. This narrative itself is skewered and doubled by Biblical intimations. Mary Evelyn Harju was, in fact, raised on the Bible. So I, as a figure in the painting, split into a triumvirate: Biblical Adam, Adam Fieled, and David. If you look closely into the depths of The Fall as a work of art, the emotional heart and soul of the painting is not the Biblical or Renaissance resonances. The felt core of what is being expressed is about the vicissitudes of my relationship with Mary. The creation of levels in the painting is important— as high art is supposed to do, it classicizes and historicizes what in itself is unimaginative, overly familiar material. Yet beyond the sense of levels to be engaged, the most central and centralized level is a genuine human relationship— a marriage—gone asunder. Mary and I were never legally married. We didn’t need to be. We were married in blood and in art. The terrible conflict in Mary— what is forcing her to stumble in the painting— is a complex congeries of material and psychological realities which made it that, in the Aughts, Mary could paint only intermittently. Ferocity and delicacy were oddly mixed in her.

Remember: Mary and Abby were plugged into the mid-range at PAFA. As usual, an academic context was not prepared to handle to emergence of something profoundly new. But the criss-cross of influences built into The Fall— Bible-Renaissance-Aughts Philadelphia— are a soul’s potential journey into a world never felt or experienced before. Inappropriate, I feel, to speak too much of what I went through with Mary then. I’ve done that abundantly elsewhere. Back to the main, where David fits in is its own criss-cross, for Mary, into the issue of perpetual temptation, and potential damnation. David tangibly manifests for her, as a male ideal, her own potential sense of physical, consummated deliverance. David, for her, is about lust. Mary was not a delicate woman about fulfilling her lust. She was libido-empowered by a Manifest Destiny attitude attendant on the realization of Renaissance ideals, and notions of the body. The Humanistic, at its extreme of expressiveness. Courageous, also, given her background. The Fall, is, in fact, a courageous work of art. Classicizing and historicizing the personal, and indeed, as boldly personal as any feminist could wish or hope for. The David level, about lust, melds back into being Adam Fieled, and us being co-joined as partners. Returns, in a loop, to the beginning, and to the singular. Other eyes will see how it moves in other ways. But the points of origin, I prophesy, will remain roughly the same, where The Fall is concerned. They are, or will be seen to have been, sturdy ones.

On being painted as David II

 

A few more things to say about The Fall. Axiomatic things. Like, for instance, that Mary Evelyn Harju’s representation of me as David is just that, and precisely that. The similarity is there, and unmistakable. Mary’s fascination with the Renaissance is already well-documented. As is her sense of erotic fascination with ideal male nudes. Also notable that who I am in The Fall, as someone being represented, is someone true to life. I really am 5’9, slightly over 5’9, actually, with a pronounced tendency to lankiness. I’m not secretly 5’6, and chunky. Or 5’8 and a half. Those who might see me will not be surprised. These tokens of complete aesthetic legitimacy have to be established, in a country where carnival-rules have made show biz standards the norm. The Fall has a number of ways of being for real that are striking ones. No show biz.

The other thing I wanted to discuss is more interesting. The Fall was modeled for and painted in a co-op studio in the Spring Garden section of North Philadelphia (915 Spring Garden) in 2007-2008. On a narrative level, the painting suggests Mary and I in the garden of Eden, and locates a portion of its narrative in the Bible. Mary coming out of a Christian Right family is significant, as is the outre Aughts-Philly peccadillo of her Renaissance obsession and eroticism. The sense of Philadelphia as an Eden, or as Edenic, is an intriguing one. If there is one facet of Philadelphia as a city which establishes that it can manifest as an Eden, or as Edenic, it is the sublime nature of Philadelphia’s architecture. What a city is, primordially, is a collection of buildings. Because Philadelphia, from City Hall on out, was constructed, at its best, of buildings meant to endure over decades and centuries, and to fulfill rigorous aesthetic criteria, it creates a physiology, in Philadelphia, of levitation, transcendentalism over the mundane, and of an atmosphere in which history moves forward, lives and breathes. Because Philadelphia is built, at its best, of living, breathing history, it offers a sense of shelter and amnesty to those who wish to pursue living, breathing history itself. Thus, it could be an Eden, or Edenic, for those of us in the Aughts, who wished to create to do something other than degrade, or reenact show biz. Philadelphia, in short, is built past swinishness. It’s a real city, by world standards. The Fall could not have been painted, I would tend to say, anywhere else, nor could David manifest as David, or Mary and I as Mary and I. Even the inbuilt sense of doubleness in The Fall falls into place with the idea of history which subsists as history, but also lives and breathes. Is, thus, double. And tolerates the phenomenology of doubleness.

Daily Madonna

 Mary Walker Graham, inside out and upside down, on P.F.S. Post. 

Art of Writing interview in TAS

 Many thanks to Malcolm Curtis for publishing this interview segment in TAS.

Philly Free School: catalog page

Otoliths 16

Otoliths 16 (WebCite)

Philadelphia City Paper

Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. 

Golden Notebook (Hannah Miller)

Sharkforum

PAFA (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

Highwire Gallery (Calendar 2004/2005)

Me-Tronome (Larry Sawyer)

Switchback Books

Lamoureux 

Myopic Books

Kate the Great's Book Emporium

Molly's Bookstore

PhillySound

Bowery Poetry Club (August 13)

Lame House Press

King.org

Cavalcade of Poets & Independent Artists (e-mail group)

Buffalo Poetics List

Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. (2)

Late Late Capital Bootleg Sessions

Golden Notebook (Hannah Miller)(2)

Late Late Capital Bootleg Sessions (2)

Flickr: Timothy Yu

p-ramblings

p-ramblings (2)

Rhode Island Notebook (Gabriel Gudding)

Moss Trill

Samizdat Blog

Fluid/Exchange

Flickr: Amy King, P.F.S.

moria poetry

Seven Corners (7C)

Vitkauskas

moria poetry (2)

Examiner.com

Electronic Poetry Center

moria poetry (3)

X-Peri

Venturi, Scott, and Brown Assoc. (3)

P.F.S. Post

P.F.S. Post (2)

P.F.S. Post (3)

Goss 183

Buffalo Poetics List

YouTube (Minecraft)

YouTube (2)

YouTube (Falki Hoz)

Amazon Music (Hoz: Hipsters)

SoundCloud (The Esthetic Apostle)

Spotify (Hoz: Hipsters)

i-tunes (Hoz: Hipsters)

Mipoesias (Ocho #11)

Almost Invisible (Strand)

Watertown (Willis)

The & Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing

Innovative Audiences Wiki

Third/Sister Lovers: The Fieled Sequence (Bandcamp)

Sara Smile (SoundCloud)

Chicago School of Poetics (CSOP)

Cordite Poetry Review, Plunder and Salvage

Outlaw Playwrights (PSU)(1)

Outlaw Playwrights (PSU)(2)

Shazam (Hoz: Hipsters)

CC Mixter

Sex and Shadows (Graham, Blair, Hilliker)

Undulant

915 Spring Garden

CC Mixter (2)

Becky Grace (for Becky Hilliker)

Live In Brooklyn

Goodbye Blue Monday

This portrait of me was taken by New York poet Amy King in 2009, at the venue Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I am reading from When You Bit..., the month is August. Also on the bill: Nada Gordon, David Wollach. Like my tat?

Introducing Dawn Gailey

My friend Dawn Gailey, originally from Phoenixville, took several portraits of me at the Last Drop at 13th and Pine Streets in Center City in the fall of 2008. The bottom one here captures me looking quite like a rebel without a cause. More to say on the Drop, as we called it, in the months to come, as a crucial hang-out space in the Aughts, and site for day-to-day mischief. The basis, also, for Letters to Dead Masters.

Portraiture

This is Mary Evelyn Harju's masterful portrait of me on Avenue A in the East Village, also in 2007. Turns out, for several months in the spring of 1999, I had lived on Avenue A in Alphabet City, as the neighborhood is called. At that time, nothing had really coalesced around me and books. By 2007, I was a much more consolidated presence. The way Mary set up the pictorial composition here is amazing, and had to have been done on the fly. For a visual artist who took heat for being too plodding, too methodical, it proves that Mary could be inspired in an impulsive way, too. The wackiness of Mary's balance of elements often meant that when she had a camera rather than paints, she could indulge herself in impulsive moves, against the idea of too much conscious craft. In this case, all the elements came together in such a way that she managed to set up a compositional structure as satisfying as the ones in her best paintings. She was happy to let elements fall in place as they may.   

Mariposa-worthy

You can see here, in the attached pic, that Mary, by the time we were back again as a couple in 2007, wasn't making an attempt to incinerate anyone anymore. She was OK being plain Jane. There we were, at Stain Bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for a Mipoesias reading. The collision of Mary Evelyn Harju with Mary Walker Graham, as is also seen here, was notable. Ms. Graham was in New York for some kind of publishing conference. Briana Winter being there, from the Nineties Sidewalk Cafe anti-folk crowd, is amazing, too. After the reading, I took the train with the two Marys back to Manhattan, and we stopped for a bite to eat at a random East Village diner. The two Marys were cordial with each other, but Mary Evelyn's then-new restrained style meant that no sparks needed to fly. Were we completely sedate? That's not really fair, either. As people might have guessed, coke was out, for Mary Evelyn then; but all her earthiness and Mariposa-worthy vegan purity did not preclude the continuation of Mary's cannabis habit. We smoked together semi-constantly, even though I was also working as an academic at the time, and pursuing books along a careerist track that took us to New York and elsewhere in 2007 many times.   

East Falls Mary

So, it's now been established: Mary spent the mid-Aughts living in East Falls. East Falls is an obscure neighborhood, within the city limits of Philadelphia, but far from the action of Center City. It happens not to be far from where Jeremy was stationed in Manayunk. Two Septa stops. Her story about herself then is that she was being a technical writer. Good pay, she said, but no insurance benefits. Abby and I didn't know whether to buy it. Mary had no training to be a technical writer at all. Was she trying to one-up us? In any case, worth noting that in the second half of 2006, when Mary moved back to West Philadelphia and became part of the Center City scene again, she was more restrained, less flamboyant then she had been. Mary as a mind-blowing tornado, prepared to grandstand if necessary, was replaced by Mary chastened and sobered. She declared herself a vegan and worked part-time at the Mariposa co-op, not far from where she lived. Provocative attire was replaced with practical. Wherever grandstanding Mary had gone, she'd been replaced with a convert to the religion of fastening one's self, joining one's self to the Earth. 

On being painted as David

 

The solvency of Mary Evelyn Harju's The Fall, from 2008, is about form and formal rigor. It would be easy, just from this piece, to call her a formalist. In Philly, this is a dread categorization— Manhattan has always accused Philadelphia of bland, tepid formalism— but if the Harju piece is charged into being more, placement within proximity to other Aughts Philadelphia products, writing and photographs (a benevolent matrix structure here), transcendentalizes the piece into being something more. The similarity of how I am painted here to Michelangelo's David, the ideal male nude in art, highlights both Mary's twin obsessions, the body and the Renaissance, and the sense of a relationship narrative laid down, also similar to what I do in Equations. The phenomenology, for me, of being painted as David, is about an era in which raw physicality, the primordial physical, was both valued and fetishized. I participated, as has been established— threw myself into the Aughts matrix, with all the freshness and naivete of a young adult, not yet seasoned by continual intercourse with the material or cultural world. My version of David is thus one of original innocence. Adam, if you will, before the Fall. The narrative of the painting is specifically about innocence transformed into experience. Eden, or the Edenic. The piece freezes before I make my choice— to bite from the apple or not— and thus destabilizes that the outcome must be a predictable one. On another level, this is my ascendent moment as a pin-up— full frontal nudity establishes that— and, as a classicized version of a pin-up, the painting is meant to be as seductive and provocative as representations of raw flesh can be. The image here is not chaste. 

To Know Mary

To know Mary is ride into the tactile and the carnal. 

To Know Abby

 To know Abby is to get back to where you once belonged. 

Mutants II (Electric Boogaloo)

About pursuing cultural Philly in the Aughts as a raison d'etre, I made a decision in about 2012 that I haven't looked back from. Some things clarified themselves for me, so that the path chosen was, I felt, the enlightened one. Accusations of hubris or delusional grandeur aside, I was unable to resist this thought— this group, multi-disciplinary, who I call the Philly Free School, are mavericks. If we are mavericks, it's because we're the first group of American artists to climb up to the artistic perch of classicist Europe. Until us, no one in America really has or did that particular task. This is especially true of me and Abby. Thus, any engagement with any media enterprise which would refuse to acknowledge this maverick achievement would have to be a useless one. But, let's get real, shall we? The American media deplore classicist Europe. The syllogism has, thusly, to end in a temporary media blackout. Perhaps a Cold War, too. So that, Mary here can out-charisma Deborah Harry all she wants. The sense the media likes to emphasize, of reach— has to be blood-sacrificed, on the altar of essential, individualized integrity maintained. Do we need Anton LaVey to do the sacrifice? Probably. But I am setting this group up to go the distance. That's the conceit. One way or another.

Mutants!

There is something else to say about taking Mary and Abby, and making them pin-ups. What I am about to say pertains particularly to Abby, as a nascent heir apparent to Ingres and David, the French Neo-Classicists. To take said heir apparent to Ingres and David, and enfranchise her as a babe, as you see here, makes her and I both freaks and mutants. Taking the twig-like mold around Neo-Classical level painting and snapping it, is a good way to earn a hale-and-hearty, completely stunned silence from all and sundry. Thus, soaring numbers on these sights, sometimes staggering numbers, but no buzz. Bizarre. And, as time goes by, we're only going to get more outlandish, more bizarre. The catalogue of pin-up shots and the catalogue of paintings will be forced to do a dance like the Lambada, the Forbidden Dance. No one on Gods green earth will know what to make of us at all, I predict, half-kidding. No molds, no formulas, no codes. No one behind us pushing us out as stooges, either. But worth noting that in this first wave of recognition, wherein the sites are manned with rubber-neckers from all necks of the woods at all times, I was able to spot something in us new enough, and bizarre enough, that the mutant streak we embody or boast, may be seen from many perspectives to be the dominant one. And that that's fine. 

Anonymous (West Philadelphia, USA): "Portrait: Abby Heller-Burnham"

                                         © Anonymous, Adam Fieled 2006-2026

Steaminess in the Cathedral

How societies frame high art, when it happens for real, has never really changed much. Without undue cynicism, it's easy to see how the sanitization process works. High art tends to be smeared with the same patina of associations— something sanctimonious, fraught with pseudo-religious over and undertones, Sunday School-ish, "eat your veggies," something to be endured. Something uncool. This is all a price to be paid for the ability high art has to conquer long durations of time. No to mention the accrual of enormous sums of invested money to works of high art, making it game to say it, and they, earn their keep in the world. Yet, no fun. And the fraudulence around popular art and popular culture products takes "eat your veggies" and begets "eat your gristle." Aughts Philadelphia has something else in mind, which sounds simple but isn't. Mary, Abby, and the rest work in an unprecedented way, and on an unprecedented level in America, as classicists who can also be elite as pin-ups. There is no reason Abby and Mary should not be pin-ups. They were steamy, racy, and very sexualized. Why not? Well, society may say, because that doesn't fit the cathedral mold. Doesn't allow for proper sanitization. I am asking people to appreciate and accept an ambitious agenda from us. I am proselytizing that what came out of Philadelphia in the Aughts should be allowed both rights, both privileges. Pin-ups in the cathedral. Let us throw away the molds, throw away the formulas, and enfranchise this body of work to do what it wants to do in the world. Both. Thus, we create for ourselves parameters in which we can have and maintain the dignity and integrity we deserve. Peace.

Adam Fieled (Logan Square, Philadelphia, USA): "Mary Evelyn Harju on Saint Catherine Street"

                                              © Adam Fieled 2003-2026

Adam Fieled, Anonymous: "Mary Evelyn Harju at 4325 Baltimore Avenue II"

                                      © Anonymous, Adam Fieled 2001-2026

Head Shot

 On Abby and I in New York in the Nineties. 

Adam Fieled, Anonymous: "Mary Evelyn Harju, 4325 Baltimore Avenue, West Philadelphia, 2001"

                               © Anonymous, Adam Fieled 2001-2024

Something Solid

 Something Solid, as manuscript-in-progress, has now achieved some solidity.

Something Solid: Aughts Philly: Star Child in Scud

 Star Child, another razzmatazz from The Spurgin Chronicles in SS, in Scud. 

Archive-It.org: Art Recess 2

 Done in Dresden, this archived page puts Karen Volkman at the head of the class. 

A template typhoon...

 ...hit The Seattle Star the right way. Check out The Ballad of Robert Johnson.