Something Solid and Prose

 

Something Solid in prose reworked: Apologia and Metaphysics.

Theory and Practice

Mary Evelyn Harju: in theory, and fast; in practice, and slow. 

Mary Evelyn Harju in theory and practice, fast and slow.

Empress of Eternity

One more directly for the Empress of Eternity. Here's how it started in Otoliths 44. 

The Kinks

 

Always a harangue, to get anywhere near the avant-prof clan from twenty years ago with the idea that hetero sex might be interesting to write about. Queer sex got off the hook, for being trailblazing. But men and women, forget it. Better to spout the usual stylized gibberish. In any case, who you see here is Danielle (Dani) Diendorf. And the major, newly revised double sonnet about her is Flaming Red Hair. The tie-in to Stoli from earlier this year is simple: the kinks. 

The Schuylkill Moves

 

The Schuylkill moves cleanly, despite
all the murk, as the Expressway looms
on the other side of it. The trees, as
usual, are Heaven, rooted much too
deeply for us to fathom, stacked at
solid angles into a receptive Universe.
I am waiting, writing on the edge of
wars, chopping through the cesspool
of centuries old shit, stunned into an
awareness of you, Abby, and of our life’s binds.
When I imagine you, it’s with a sense
that we’re both standing at the river’s
edge (we are, of course), and as long as we see,
your way, the trees shade into the sky, the binds hold—

© Adam Fieled 2017-2026

The sonnet The Schuylkill Flows was originally published in Otoliths 44 in 2017.

The Wilderness Sequence

 The Wilderness Sequence gets a new Ocean Queen. 

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

In a game not unlike Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the newly revised Side-Armed can sit right next to Frequencies. I saw a version, incidentally, of Les Liaisons Dangereuses in London as a teenager. It was almost as risque as the movie. I would also choose to note that these two pieces incorporate dialogue in a theatrical way. Is this a technique I learned in Pittsburgh? Not quite. The Pittsburgh zinger, if there is one, is that a Pittsburgh '92 actress did show up for me in Manhattan in the mid-Aughts in a major way. There it is again: Les Liaisons Dangereuses. 

Letting in drafts II

More work on 4325 Baltimore Avenue. Remember: you are, as you read, supposed to know that Diana and Jenny Kanzler are the same person. And that Abby Heller-Burnham was ensconced with us a good part of the time, too. And Zooska, the cat. 

Starship Trooper

 

As many of us in this country have learned, American print publishing is often its own third-world shenanigans. It's about locking down, throwing out, ad infinitum. No emendations, no second editions. By world standards, baby publishing. Not suitable for the first tier of serious art, philosophy, and science. So that my redone version of Trooper, from Something Solid, a paean to Jeremy's explosiveness in the Nineties and the price he paid for it, can't be emended in Monday Journal from '21. The sense of the corrupt nature of American print publishing does mean that if you want to publish world-level material for real, you better be ready at any time to take matters into your own hands. I refuse to be locked down. To the extent that American art is now getting distinguished on a world level, it's about throwing the lock-down travesties and enterprises out. Of course, Jeremy said the same thing in 1995. 

Old Main becomes Silly Putty

As is disturbingly about time passing swiftly, it happens to be thirty years, to the day, since I broke up with Jennifer Strawser. Those who know the narrative understand, that a few fortnights passed, and then Jen was away from the PSU campus forever, Daily Collegian bylines be damned. Rewriting Silly Putty, for the Nineties section of Something Solid, I was able to ascertain that writing about Jennifer didn't have to be about hellfire and damnation. Their could be some lightness of touch, amidst all the class dismemberment and the rest. Over nine years, Silly Putty evolved from, and out of, Old Main, which came out in The Argotist Online in 2017. What you see in The Argotist was eventually employed as the second sonnet (double-sonnet structure) in Silly Putty. I have now excised it completely. Things disappear into each other, become other things. Such is poetry. As for Jennifer and I disappearing into each other, and becoming something else, I answer that with an affirmative. But the shape, form, and manner of what we each turned into, individually and as a composite entity, will always be difficult for me to grasp. Perhaps someone needs to teach me metaphysics all over again. I await the Practicum.  

Pittsburgh Heritage

It's come to my attention that people are wondering why I haven't written more about Pittsburgh. The heritage I have with Pittsburgh is this: I spent the summer of 1992 in Pittsburgh, as a sixteen-year-old kid. I was doing the Carnegie Mellon pre-college program for drama. I happened to be a year younger than everyone else there. What I learned that summer was simple: I was a reasonable actor, nothing special, but possibly an extraordinary writer. By the time I got to State College in 1994, I was a philosophy major. Then, a long break, even if I did meet a number of people who became my friends in State College from Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh burbs. In 2004, I was included in the classic, Pittsburgh-based initial issue of Cake Train, ed. Donna Weaver. Then, another break. The Beehive in Oakland was a hangout place for many of us in the summer of '92. I saw Blue Velvet there for the first time. Even as I can always boast that through having done Philadelphia, State College, and Pittsburgh, P.F.S. has the state of Pennsylvania covered, on some kind of el bizarro reconnaissance level. So, there it is. The perks of being a state-hogger. 

Letting in drafts

What follows is another piece for which the writing process extends over twenty years. The first draft of 4325 Baltimore Avenue was written in the Rittenhouse Square Barnes & Noble break-room in 2004. Had it around, read it up in Henniker a few times, and Jeffrey Ethan Lee published this early draft of the piece in 2005. After dusting it off in the Twenties for possible inclusion in Something Solid, I applied a maelstrom approach, of discipline (has to fit the double-sonnet format) and a limber approach to recreating connective tissue, including syntactic levels. So, here we have it on P.F.S. Post: buffed, polished, and radically tautened. To restate, 4325 Baltimore Avenue was an artist's co-op where Mary Evelyn Harju lived for a few years in the early Aughts. I was a frequent visitor, of course, and spent several months worth of nights there. Abby Heller-Burnham was a constant presence, too. This shot was taken of Mary on the third, top-floor of the row-home, in 2001. Mary doing a wonted fashionista routine.  

The genesis of Chicago

Chicago, now on P.F.S. Post with liner notes, is a random Andrew Lundwall (far left in the photo) masterpiece from the mid-to-late Aughts. The story of how the poem was composed is about a woozy morning, probably the morning of July 7, 2007 (the morning after this picture was taken), for Steve and I. It had been a very long, epic, as the saying goes, if also antic, night. Some of us kept our stomachs; others vomited. Steve and I stumbled around, doing whatever, woozily. Andrew, from his mattress set up in the corner of Steve's living room, was scribbling, and asked not to be disturbed. He was writing Chicago. After maybe ninety minutes, he handed me the draft and I transcribed it onto Stoning the Devil. The version of the city in the poem is a killer one, a monster one. Slight culture shock for Mr. L from the mellowness of Beloit. An easy and profitable match for Center City Philadelphia, also. As we all fell for the Lady in Black, as you see here. Worth noting that later that year, Andrew moved to Rockford, Illinois, with Melissa Lenee. I twice visited him there, with Steve, in 2008. 

Twenties Chicago Trinket

 

The biggest trinket I have from Chicago in the Twenties is the publication of the sonnet Portal-ways in William Allegrezza's Moss Trill. The page is an almost perfect one. The piece itself is a meditation on Abby Heller-Burnham, and her painterly journey through Aughts Philadelphia. Moss Trill here is beefed up by P.F.S. Post and PennSound. Chicago and Philadelphia together. Two big, real cities. Which, of course, is deceptively simple to say. In practice, Chicago and Philadelphia being big and real is about a version of America more wholesome than other city-visions or mind-scapes. The wholesomeness which inheres between Chicago and Philadelphia, about bigness and realness, cuts out the middle man about blood ties being established in wholesome ways. Not that Abs ever made it to Chi-Town: she did not. Abs own East Coast soiree, of New York to Philadelphia and back, was about waves of East Coast-ism buoying her up, and the chocolate-vanilla New York-Philadelphia dynamic animating everything she did. For Chicago to make meaningful space for a piece this raw, this determined to tell the absolute truth about a real, individual person, means a great deal to me. It also means the inter-city communication now is as wholesome as it was twenty years ago. Big, and real. If luck will cooperate, built to last, too. 

To Stacy Blair on P.F.S. Post

 

The love poem To Stacy Blair begins, of course, in Chicago, Illinois. Whatever else you might say about a piece supposed to be that intimate, I can only say that Stacy, who was a critical genius, remains the number one reader of my books, even now. There are top tier reviews I've received as substantial by other people; but nobody means it like Stacy does. And the many letters she wrote me did break my heart. After that, it's all best left to the imagination. Except to say that, in a way experiences can have of marking or not marking an individual, I was, indeed, marked by the time I spent in Chicago and the Midwest in the Aughts. The world I felt open up then was about boundlessness, and about dreams coming true. A poet who was truly on the road, was always who I wanted to be. When I walked around the Loop, or hung out in bars in Bucktown, it was not worth questioning anymore whether I was on the road. I was. Chicago and the Midwest will always mean the road to me. Maybe an uncommon association (nowhere near New York, where I also did plenty of road-time, or San Francisco, where I did not), but so what. And To Stacy Blair brings home to roost that most effectual time I spent on the road, with the most sense of hinges to the roads that are, or could be, the eternal ones. So, the poem linked here is one I began in the late Aughts and never finished. In 2026, it's now finished, ready to be aired. 

So its been: Chicago, a road-place for me, by which I was marked, among others, also of mine: New York, New England, Central Pennsylvania, Montreal. A quirky map, to be sure. And other places that might need to be rejuvenated at any moment: Pittsburgh, Florida, New Jersey. Back to Chicago, and the sense that through the latest two rewrites here presented in The Stacy Saga, I've done justice to everything Chicago meant to me in the Aughts. Also an acknowledgement, especially regarding Pittsburgh, that there must be more work to be done, because roads can develop out of old situations, and time creates strange loops whereby time past that wasn't, or didn't seem, relevant, imposes on time present to revivify, reinstate, even electrify it into awareness. So we can all live and die as Emperors of Eternity. Also noting that the summer of 2026 for me was about time loops. The Time Warp. And if the process of creating time loops does have Rocky Horror-ish dimensions (come up to the Lab, and see what's on the slab), it is amazing to me that time, which is really only matter eternally changing form (there is no time) really can be looped, and moments exist inside each other in uncanny ways. 

Different kinds of Frequencies

John Tranter takes a crack at mid-Aughts Henniker, gets tangled up in blue. 

And back to Frequencies.

Stewart Home (UK): Mini-Manifesto

 

I’ve had some really good times in the U.S., but I don’t want to go there anymore (or at least not until there is at the very least some regime change). I have loads of American friends and I’d love to go visit them, but right now I can’t. I know there is a huge difference between Americans and the U.S. government. Most Americans I know (whether from north, south, or central America) oppose the world wide terror operations of the Bush administration. We’re not just talking about invasions and occupations, but kidnappings, torture, detentions, and executions. The American government is the largest and easily the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, and one of only a few (the British government is another) with access to weapons of mass destruction. There aren’t many places in the world I wouldn’t visit, but the idea of going to the U.S.A. right now really frightens me. So seeing people organize against war and terror in the U.S. (that is, against the Bush government and its policies) is important to me: and I am seeing that on the web and elsewhere. So all I really wanted to say to those doing this is “keep on keeping on,” because the world needs a real movement against terror. Terrorism is always elitist and “Vanguardist.” Bush and Bin Laden need each other but we don’t need either of them or what they stand for. Only non-hierarchical mass movements can make this world a better place. We need to rediscover our humanity together. And in opposing terrorism we need to focus on the biggest and most dangerous terrorists: George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and their cronies.

© Stewart Home 2006

Adventures in Weightlifting

 

Brian Freedman read Adventures in Weightlifting as part of the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus on March 27, 2004.

Logic plays a role that is best described as supporting in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy; and when hormones are thrown into the mix, there’s just no telling what sort of strange things might happen. This most unfortune fact of teenage life now manifested itself in an ugly, and ultimately uncomfortable way. I awoke the day of the concert with a jolt. My eyes snapped open to glimpse a world grown suddenly urgent in light of the dream I had just suffered through. In it, Ali and I were sitting at the concert with Sylvester Stallone, who had somehow gotten hold of her third ticket. And despite the truly studly outfit I was wearing, she spent the entire showing hanging onto his left biceps, staring into his hangdog eyes, and asking if they could take a shower together. In the background, the New Kids played only one song, and not even one they wrote— Berlin’s "Take My Breath Away," a tune made famous in one of the biggest hits of the Eighties (Top Gun).

It all made sense, of course. The scene in that movie that all the women in the entire world— or, actually, solar system— were talking about, was the one in which Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis made slow-motion love, on her perfectly disheveled sheets, as that song drones on in the background. And in that scene, there is a lingering shot of Tom’s arms, as he lowers himself on top of Ms. M, with a grace and slowness that would’ve been worthy of an East German Olympic gymnast. I now realize that this was a manifestation of issues I had with myself, with my own 105 pound frame; but at the time, at that first event-date time, I knew only one thing— I had to get bigger, bulked up, by the time that evening rolled around.

After I got out of bed, I ate, and worked out, and ate some more, and worked out some more, and repeated the process far too many times to count— against everything I knew, against everything my father had taught me about weightlifting. The post-dream desperation had clouded my vision so much, as had actually caused me to believe that I could bulk up to Stallone-like, or at least Cruise-like, proportions, in a matter of seven hours. The reality, though, was much more embarrassing. “Bri,” my Mom called up at about three in the afternoon, “are you in the bathroom again?” “Yeah,” I shouted weakly, breathlessly, “I’ll be down in a minute.” I was dying, I thought. Had I known the word cholera, I’m sure it would’ve crossed my mind. My stomach was tied into enough knots to make an Eagle-scout proud. My muscles were fatigued to the point of near-paralysis. And in two hours, I had a date!

Great planning— I had spent the entire morning and early afternoon cramming as much protein-rich food down my gullet as possible, hoping that at least some of it would find it’s way to my unacceptably small biceps and pecs. But there was no such luck in the offing that day, and those cans of tuna had found there way through my system and right into the toilet. Combine that with three full-blown work-outs, and my body was staging what felt like a coup d’etat against itself. Three flushes later, I somehow made my way to my room, got hold of the date outfit I had used on the previous year’s excursion to the movies with a girl named Alannah (stone-washed jeans, button-down Bugle Boys shirt, black penny-loafers), and limped my way down the stairs, bow-legged.

“Don’t say a word,” I said to my father as I walked past him in the living room. He was shaking his head and snorting silently. He didn’t have to say anything— I knew what was implied. He was right. “Have fun,” he said in a mocking sing-song. As I walked towards the kitchen, the sound of a horn echoed from the driveway.

© Brian Freedman 2004

Stone the Devil

The Twenties for me started exactly when they were supposed to: January 2020. It so happens that that month, Speck released the acid-jazz track Stone the Devil. The piece features a fragment from Stoning the Devil, which came out on Synch Chaos yesterday. All the musical issues behind acid-jazz are built into Stone the Devil, as is the sense that this is a creepy version of acid-jazz, and also one with resonance towards cities, the urban, Center City and West Philadelphia for example, or Los Angeles, where Speck is partly from. Not that I can forget the night in January 2020 when I had the song in my head as I crossed the bridge from West Conshohocken back into Conshohocken, onto Fayette Street. And Stone the Devil, with other tracks from the CC Mixter crew, have seen some reasonable chart action around the Net, and enfranchisement onto the Acid Dropping EP. The early Twenties for me were partly about this issue: here's what to do if they use you in music. To the extent that I've flexed what muscle I have in the direction of the CC Mixter tracks, I've also, as someone mostly self-taught who plays and writes rock music, learned how much I don't know. And the eerie glow of Stone the Devil rings down the ages, from This Charming Lab into the Twenties, about sophistication and sophisticated marriages of literature and music, and about the possibility of new, attendant worlds opening up all the time. 

Dominique and Stoning the Devil

Dominique and Stoning the Devil, which debuted at This Charming Lab at KWH in 2004, on Synchronized Chaos. Many thanks to Cristina Deptula.

Ode On Jazz

 

Ode On Jazz sashays onto WXPN on Live at the Writers House 46

Ode On Jazz gets frisky next to Dominique at This Charming Lab

Ode On Jazz takes to the Midwest and the graininess of Myopic

And grooves back into its typographically clean home-place on P.F.S. Post

George Bowering and the Romantics

On my study wall I have a bunch of pictures, including, to my right, two big portraits of poets. There is Charles Olson and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I know, that is odd. Before the summer of 1863 I resisted the Romantics, except for Blake, because everyone I knew was reading Blake, and not just because Allen Ginsberg had mentioned him. Ezra Pound was not happy about the Romantics, nor the “sludge” that followed them, before the light of day provided by Hulme, etc. So of course I read Pound and the people Pound said we should read. My friends and I were reading Donna y Prega, or whatever and so on; but in the summer of 1963, during the big poetry bash in Vancouver, Allen Ginsberg, just back from Asia, recited Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, and later Adonais, and I was swept along. I had expected to follow Olson all over for those three or four weeks, but was surprised to find myself enjoying being in the orbit of Ginsberg. Then I went to Calgary and taught for three years, and then I went to London, Ontario, to be a graduate student, and took a course of the Romantics, and paid most attention to Shelley. And so the years went by, and most of the Romantics fanciers I knew were hot for Coleridge, but I persisted in reading Shelley, even reading ten Shelley biographies. Eventually I went to Italy and checked out houses Shelley had lived in, went to the Protestant graveyard in Rome, saw Keats’ grave and took a leaf to give to my Keats friend in Vancouver, saw the “grave” of Shelley, etc. Yes, I do allude to Keats, especially in my fourteen-page poem Do Sink, that explodes Keats’s “cease to be” sonnet. I have also written a miniaturized translation of Shelley’s Adonais, something called He Is Not.

from a 2005 interview with George Bowering on Art Recess 2

Hot Date Miscellany

 

Hot Date Miscellany was read by Brian Freedman at the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus, on March 27, 2004.

Dating, among the middle-school set, was a complicated affair. It revolved more around telephone conversations than anything else. Making out was a good several years in the future, unless you happened to find yourself at one of those absent-parent parties. But once in a while, a date would be planned, and that’s when things got interesting. As for Allie and I, our first and only date proved to be a collision of worlds— the real one, with me as its ostensible center, and the fantasy one, whose five suns around which everything revolved, were the perfect and unattainable Donny and Danny and Joey and Jonathan and Jordan.

The New Kids On The Block were scheduled to perform a three-night series of concerts at an outdoor arena in the city, and though all the tens of thousands of tickets had sold out within twenty minutes of their release a few months before, Allie’s mother had somehow managed to procure three of them for the third concert. This was no surprise, since standard operating procedure was that one parent would accompany the happy couple on any date that involved an activity more demanding or complicated (or even, in suburban terms, more dangerous) than going to the movies and Friendly’s for a scoop or three of ice cream.

But that, as I found out less than a week before the concert, was never the plan. Allie and I were on the phone one warm spring evening. Or, as I should say, Allie was listening and I was showing off while talking to her behind the door of my closed bedroom, the thin crack of space dividing the bottom of the door and the top of the high-piled blueberry-colored carpet, covered by three pillows to prevent the sound from escaping, and the family from knowing I was on the line yet again with my girlfriend. The last thing I needed was another one of my father’s famous mock-up conversations, on the old banana-phone he so loved.

Anyway, we were talking about the latest six-grade gossip— the fact that Candice Cooper might just like girls that way. I knew she didn’t. I’d started the rumor myself, after she began spreading the word a few months earlier, after our one slow-song at the six-grade dance, that I breathed heavily when I danced, and that she felt something weird against her leg as we rocked back and forth, to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn”—

The films of Sylvester Stallone

 

The Films of Sylvester Stallone was read by Brian Freedman at the This Charming Lab reading at Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus, on March 27, 2004.

The movies of Sylvester Stallone have always been pretty formulaic, and there are certain things you can count on in each of them. A beautiful woman who secretly lusts after Sly; a bad guy whose comeuppance is guaranteed to be both brutal and graphic; and a scene in which our stocky Italian hero is both shirtless and oiled up, and either training for a big fight, or making crazy monkey-love with the woman who had been lusting after him since the beginning of the movie. The examples of each are limitless, once we get past the artistic integrity of the first Rocky movie. And even in that one, Adrian, the quintessential swan in schlump-y pet-shop-worker’s clothing, secretly has it for Rock-ster from the get-go.

So, really the seeds were planted way back in 1976. But once they were given that special Hollywood water and sunlight, there was no stopping their double-time germination. A perfect example of this is Rocky IV— a film which features nearly all the Sly-film requisites— from the death of Apollo Creed at the hands of the indestructible Russian tramp Ivan Drago, to its extended gay-porn-like training sequence in the wilds of Northern Russia, to the steamy look of desire from Brigitte Nielsen (who here plays Drago’s voluble wife), who shoots in Rocky’s direction every chance she gets, as if she were saying, merely with her eyes, that if it weren’t for this damned Cold War, she’d jump him right then and there, and have ice-melting Commie sex with him in a second.

The point, really, is this— much like those poor people who live beneath high-tension wires, or the brave souls who were employed by the company that was contracted to clean the Chernobyl reactor site, regular exposure to the films of Sylvester Stallone can be hazardous to one’s health. Especially if that person to whom we’re referring is a thirteen-year-old, whose Saturday night diet consists of nothing but. I, of course, was no exception, and Sly eventually got to me, too. What, I began asking myself, made so different from the characters that got laid on my TV screen every Saturday night? It wasn’t as if Stallone was ever that great looking. And he even spoke like a punch-drunk bar-brawler from somewhere in Jersey.

The answer, then, was clear— muscles. He had them— he got laid. I had none, and I got none. The solution was simple— I needed weights and a training program. And after a few months of hard work and aggressive calorie-consumption, I too would be fucking Brigitte Nielsen in a boxing ring.

Fragment (Prose Haiku)

 

Fragment (Prose Haiku) was read by Adam Fieled as part of the This Charming Lab reading held at the Kelly Writers House on the U of Penn campus on March 27, 2004.

Line— seventeen syllable, five-seven-five formula, standardized by Basho, Li Po, and other Buddhist dudes. Among the more interesting places I managed to churn out reams o’ satori, are the Met in New York, a Greyhound bus to D.C., and in a Baltimore parking lot. I wound up calling the manuscript American Lunch Haikus, as a sort of homage to Frank O'Hara and his Lunch Poems. I wanted to emphasize the ordinariness of the poems, and the fact that many of them were written on the job. In fact, for that month, I actually found myself enjoying work; having an outlet to vent the frustration of ennui. Lost in my little Basho world, I figured it would go on forever— that I could create a collection of eternal haiku, that would set the literary world on fire. It never ceases to amaze me how, in the grips of creative frenzy, we lose our grip on reality, and imagine all sorts of bizarre things about ourselves and our work. I've actually made a mental note not to let this happen anymore, but it happens regardless. Choosing which haikus to present is also a problem, especially with a fifty page manuscript. In this case, I decided to pick haikus basically at random, and try my luck. This glosses with the principles of non-rigidity and non-attachment that the I-Ching teaches, though it doesn't specifically delve into the principles of haiku selection. Because I've never read these before, I don't know if they'll coalesce into a coherent whole, or if, strung together, they'll just sound diffuse. I figure the risk is worth taking, and even if I fall flat on my ass, I'll have done justice to my "messianic Self," for whatever that's worth. Can you write a Sutra in seventeen syllables? It can’t hurt to try.

What Needs No Myth in Eratio

Salvaged from the PennSound Personal Mythologies II mp3 file (2003), What Needs No Myth, homage and counterpoint to Yeats and The Second Coming, makes its way to Eratio. Many thanks to Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino. Chopped from Personal Mythologies II, me reading What Needs No Myth in 2003. 

What Needs No Myth

 

What Needs No Myth was read by Adam Fieled at Personal Mythologies II at KWH on September 20, 2003.

after William Butler Yeats

The actuality of summer leaves wavering—
water gushing from springs— wind redolent
with sap— will never be enough to fill great
chasms of self-consciousness, emptiness of

death-fearing despair. If we could only learn
to watch waves of the sea— what needs no
myth never stops coming. No Sphinx waits in
the desert— nothing slouches towards Bethlehem—

no preternatural reality waits to replace what
never was. Ghosts predominate— slouch, blood-
dimmed tide built into them. Meanwhile, actual
falcons manifest the miracle of flight— harbingers

of the endless— winging the air, persevering.
It is a matter of mathematics, of where the numbers
end. Or space, our real home— inscrutably expansive,
unbelievable. There is no judgment in space.

Asteroids come out of the void— full-bodied, hurtling,
bent on something. Stars live and die, to no
appreciable avail comprehensible to us. There is
enough wonder in the Universe to befuddle

a thousand sages. Jesus on the cross is simple
by comparison. Each reductive model bends
the Collective Unconscious further towards
breakage. Sodden with suffering, the great

unassimilated incorrigibly search beneath
the stratosphere. Who understands that
breaking the circle is a precondition to well-
roundedness? Having achieved existence,

even Buddha sat by the bo tree a little
eternity, rounding myths into pebbles, pebbles
into myths—

Revealing Mystic Truths

 

Revealing Mystic Truths concludes Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

One primary accusation that gets leveled at modern poetry is that it exists in a sort of solipsistic vacuum, a little bubble. Poets write for each other, for the most part; there is no real audience. Sadly, it’s the truth. This was affirmed to me by a little Google experiment (if you’ve never tried the Google game, I highly recommend it; hours of ego-belittling fun); it seems that one song by The Who has more Google hits than John Ashbery, the big, bad, post-modern Daddio of American letters. One could derive two possible inductive conclusions from this— serious poetry is a sophisticated, demanding art, too demanding for the average money-grubbing, or Britney-worshipping, or Britney-grubbing, or money-worshipping American philistine. Or, serious poetry has degenerated into such an academic farce of linguistic hi-jinx that nobody gives a fuck, and rightly so. Regrettably, I would lean toward the latter conclusion.

It follows that I don’t take much inspiration from contemporary poetry. The post-modern ideal loses its potency on the page, for me at least. Where post-modernism finds its apotheosis is in conceptual art— installations, videos, some paintings. Bruce Nauman is perhaps the single greatest exponent of post-modernism that America has produced. For one thing, he’s simple. He’ll film himself painting his balls, or walking around the perimeter of a square, or imitating a fountain with his mouth. Psycho-minimalism, Frank Stella calls it. What it evokes is, perhaps not coincidentally, a stoner’s world— skewed, tweaked, a little bit uncomfortable. There’s something Beat about it, a bit of Zen, a bit of Beckett. It definitely has all the charm of novelty for an East Coast audience, who tend to expect bold, definite gestures, rather than vague, indefinite ones.

I wanted to write a poem that would capture all these elements in text. In this case, it seemed appropriate to leave discipline, and conventional notions of craft behind, ending up with Kerouac’s “first thought, best thought” dictum being manifest. This is an unedited poem, straight from the belly of the beast, which, if the beast is called Poesy, may be a rather unpleasant thought. In fact, I have grave doubts about this piece, and if you’ve never seen Nauman’s work, it may make no sense to you at all. However, Brian likes it, and to the extent that I let him play Mikey, on the old Life commercials, it’s a good enough reason for me to share it with you. Just as postscript, I must admit that through dubious means I attained Bruce Nauman’s address in the New Mexico desert, and sent him a copy of this poem. I have yet to hear back. It’s just called To Bruce Nauman:

The Mister who goes beyond recognition
of clichés of iron-bound self-hood
regenerating new notions that clank
mad paint onto our being, beating at
the doors of universities like Genet a thief
but a marijuana consciousness of absurdity
epitomizing West Coast anti-notions walking around
the perimeters of art definitions in a ten-gallon hat,
with mescal on tap, and breeding horses to boot, boots jangling
among the mind’s fatal mood clowns, with
hard-ons to be bent over, so wicked into
the art-world that will not recover
from earnest strangeness made concrete,
creating new forms like something else,
a convention of Jehovahs Witnesses,
better yet the troupe of players that caught
the conscience of Claudius doing Beckett,
Nauman playing Pozzo, Picasso’s ashes set
onstage in place of Vladimir and Estragon,
while Lucky gets to be Jasper Johns or
something, concluding that to make up is
to fall down, to fall down is to take form,
to take form is to become a fountain,
and some fountains are worth making—

See him square the circle in white shirt
as the day rages blankly outside, too tired
of its ephemeral heart to even conclude
immediately, squares of seasons apt to linger,
then emptiness, as though this funny project
were a mandala of Buddha, to prove that life
is not a circle, but rather sharp definite
edges, with many clusters of shoddy wood between
loaves of stale craving-bread, one shoulder
raised higher than other, bare feet slow
but mad as Nijinsky, make it a ritual
to feed soul’s need not for religion itself
but for the feeling of religion, the joy of
being bounded, picture itself presented as
square, tiny in a little book I ordered
two years ago in a fit of delirium, now
I’ve propped it up like a collapsible urn of
ashes of dead heroes, only the captain
sits with horses watching the wheels of
temporal anti-tenderness spin, conventional
concepts raised up then razed, as in r-a-z-e-d,
does he still have the black pants I wonder?
Maybe he’s just a ghost or an astral spirit,
somebody’s Ariel—

Simple, strategic, rolling around on the floor,
looking into the camera’s un-droll eye with
hyper-droll drollness, essence of droll but
somehow twisted beyond mere Dada ha-ha
into indeterminate snickers of profound weirdness
that will eventually beget a sullen fame,
spreading but not reaching cactus-y wilderness
where in summertime the living, I guess, is easy,
at least more so than playing with your balls,
not that the minimal has no weight but
that such weight leaves no room for developments
of a righteously figurative nature unless
one has sophisticated intellectual equipment
which, of course, he does—

The Tapestry of American History '03

 

The Tapestry of American History '03 was used as an introduction by Adam Fieled to Personal Mythologies II at Kelly Writers House, on September 20, 2003.

Two young writers, with similar roots and a similar itinerary— Philly ‘burbs to State College to NYC to Center City Philadelphia— letting loose, talking turkey, letting turkey, talking loose. We will open up vistas for you that have, as of yet, remained unexplored. We will prove that Dave Eggers does not hold a monopoly on Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Genius; that Jhumpa Lahiri is not the only uncannily masterful Interpreter of Maladies; that Zadie Smith is not the only wunderkind with White Teeth. In short, we are staking a claim for ourselves as potential literary lions, and definitely established literary cubs. We are asking you to join us on a magical mystery tour through the perilous interior, the delicately structured psyche, the exquisite nooks and crannies of the artistic temperament.

We know that Mahmoud Abbas has stepped down; that President Bush is asking Congress for eighty-seven billion dollars to complete a misguided debacle of an imperialist conquest; that more than half the country is aware of the current administration’s idiocy, yet remains convinced that Bush will be unbeatable next year; that Tony Blair has inordinately big ears, as does President Bush; that Donald Rumsfeld is best post-modern poet since Robert Creeley; that Condeleeza Rice brings a bag lunch to the White House every day, containing pb & j with the crusts cut off, a Little Debbie snack, and a Juicy Juice. Amidst the awful offal of an empire in decline, what place for an artist?

We’re the ones that blow the horns; the ones that snicker venomously into typewriters; the ones that see portents in a garbage truck, and an Imagistic firmament of the boardwalk in Wildwood. We’re in Montreal, strutting down the Rue Saint Denis, rehearsing fragments of Baudelaire poems with which to astonish the natives. We are teaching a classful of students on 9-11, running from a building, experiencing transcendent horror, hugging strangers, being impressed by metaphysical scallywags. We are not here to be noticed, but to notice ourselves. We are not here to change things, we are here to watch things change. We won’t cure anything, or we might, but we won’t know it. In short, we are here to create the tapestry of American history, 2003, because, like it or not, we are Americans.

With that, let us begin at a moseying pace towards our Olympian destination. Brian Freedman holds a BA from Penn State and an MA from NYU. His writing has appeared in Wine Spectator, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and in the vaults of heaven. He has just completed his first novel, Shock Art.

Halloween and the First Personal Singular

 

Halloween and the First Personal Singular was used to introduce A Feast of Halloweens at Personal Mythologies II at KWH, on September 20, 2003.

A funny thing has been happening to me lately whenever I attempt to compose a poem. Maybe it’s age; maybe it’s maturity; maybe it’s the pervasive influence of post-modernism and its paradigmatic exponents— Ashbery, Creeley, and the rest. Whatever the cause, I suddenly feel very shaky whenever I find myself using “I” in a poem. In younger and more innocent days, I would bandy the first person singular about with unbounded relish, as though my subjective impressions, emotional vicissitudes, and personal experiential reactions were the stuff of Muse-worthy poesy, and, you know, sometimes I was right. Maybe one in ten times. I could afford to shoot my poetic arrows recklessly because I wasn’t really an adult yet, with adult concerns, responsibilities, and hang-ups. Now all that’s changed, I see the broader realities, and “I” seems like something that must be transcended.

The catch is that I still like to write autobiographical poems. The truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction, and I’ve certainly been through my fair share of mishigas. So, to write a personal impersonal poem, or a poem that effectively balances this polarity, has become of paramount importance. The key, I guess, is to channel one’s experiences through an objectivist lens, making inductive leaps along the way, to lend universality and perspective. So, the poem is narrated from the second or third person, and the self becomes just another character in a larger mosaic of circumstances, images, actions. This is much easier said than done. It is a temptation to slip in an “I” here and there in the same degree that it’s a temptation to fit one more little scoop of Coffee Heath Bar Crunch into your bowl. Truth be told, used sparingly, “I” lends authenticity and a certain warmth to a poem, a sense of “there-ness” that nothing else would give. So I like to think of “I” as the Ben and Jerry’s of poetic creation— it is gratifying, but needs a sense of restraint to allow it grace.

This is an occasional poem, for an occasion that never transpired. An online journal called Hinge published a poem of mine this summer. They also issued a call for poems about Halloween, for their fall issue. Gotta do it, I thought, and came up with this piece. Then I realized that the majority of journal demur from printing the same poet in consecutive issues. Undaunted I sent this piece to a fledgling journal called Cake Train, and it was accepted immediately. Once in a while, navigating the straits of the Bay of Poesy, you get a miracle. That’s what happened here. Twenty-four lines, one “I,” and it’s all about me. Am I getting grown up or what?

Poets and Prophecy

Poets and Prophecy was read as an introduction the poem What Needs No Myth at the Personal Mythologies II reading at Kelly Writers House, September 20, 2003.  

It’s been a long time— probably since Allen Ginsberg unveiled Howl— San Francisco, 1955— since America has produced a convincingly authentic prophet-poet; although you could make an argument for Dylan as one. I do, but the academic establishment does not. Yet. And, ladies and gentlemen, guess who writes the history books. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, poetry at its best is a prophetic art, capable of making its best voices, in Shelley’s words, “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” William Butler Yeats wrote The Second Coming twenty years before the ascent of Adolf Hitler, the rough beast to end all rough beasts. T.S. Eliot wrote his celebrated Waste Land as a requiem for post-World War I Europe, and wound up anticipating calamities beyond anything he could’ve imagined.

Poets today seem content making smaller statements. They tend to call what is actually a lack of imagination, “maturity.” Witness the effusion of poems weaving dainty nostalgia into tapestries of tepid imagery, and over-polished technical proficiency. How often can one pick up The New Yorker, or The Paris Review, and find one’s self not only moved, but ravished? One sees, in the modern poet, a lack of confidence congruent with a lack of imagination. Modesty is now the balm for all aesthetic ills, the panacea to keep the docile, lamb-like scribe out of the looney bin and on the tenure track. The problem, is that all great art has an element of madness in it, of the Dionysian. Technical proficiency alone won’t do. You have to have something to say, something ineluctable, transcendent, maybe even, dare we say it, prophetic.

I don’t want to create a great build-up for what’s just another one of my poems. I apologize, in fact, for getting a little bit carried away here. Whether or not the poem I’m about to read does carry a little bit of that old prophetic fire, that was my, perhaps overambitious, intention. Only things, as they are wont to do, got a bit twisted, and the poem I wrote wound up expressing the futility of all human prophecy. It is, in fact, a direct refutation of Yeats’ Second Coming, which I espoused not thirty lines ago. If this seems a bit confused, hear me out. The basic crux of this diatribe, which I am only now getting around to, is that poets need to start thinking big again. They need to rage, to tremble, to bleed, and to do it on a large scale. Don’t let a Ploughshares-touting professor mislead you. Big statements are a big deal. If they often lead to big failures, then that’s just a chance we’ll have to take. With that I’ll shut up and read the poem, and hope I can do so without you conspiring to lynch me.

To March

To March is the concluding piece read at This Charming Lab at Kelly Writers House, on March 27, 2004.  

It’s funny, how we can find ourselves playing into stereotypes and still persevere in cliched behavior. I don’t call myself a poet anymore, I rather think of myself as someone who sometimes writes poems. But I do sit in coffeehouses and write, like every two-bit, sub-beatnik, Ginsberg and Bukowski worshipping amateur you’ve ever seen. I often feel self-conscious about doing this, but I force myself to anyway, because if I didn’t, it would mean I care far too much about what the other schmucks in the coffeehouse think. Since the coolest thing in the world is not to give a fuck, somehow in the equation, as calculated by me, I wind up ahead by being resolutely uncool. Besides, there’s always a chance I’ll meet a poetry-imbibing female with a Shelley fixation, or something. Not likely, you say? It so happens I picked up a girl on a train to Manayunk, took her home and scored, all on account of a tee-shirt I was wearing that read, I am as wayward as Shelley.

Now, let’s go back to the poem you’re about to hear and let me explicate, to whatever extent I can. This to me is the ultimate coffeehouse poem, in the sense that it was conceived, written, revised, and completed at the Last Drop Coffeehouse on one day. There’s a certain stillness you get in March, when you’re in the plateau that glides just over winter and just below spring. When I think back to what it was like writing this, I remember that stillness, that I was alone, that it was a cloudy day, semi-sodden, that I was reading Middlemarch at the time, and that it all seemed to blend together in a sort of unforgettable fashion. A timeless moment. But that doesn’t mean the poem’s any good, and in fact the moments that feel timeless while we live them often turn out to be useless, while moments that seem useless are the ones that live on. Whatever. You’ll have to decide for yourselves. You own my work as much as I do, you may not even want it, and God knows I don’t a lot of the time either.

So, look for timelessness, trash, and that weird March mood of suspension, of hanging, of god-damned green-wearing Saint Patrick’s Day and spring training. The poem is called To March:

Tremulous time— rain-laden flowers

threatening to burst forth— sodden
branches quiver. Exhalations still
visible, people linger in watery streets,
hydroplaning tires glisten.

Blue patches line the sky—
droplets engorge terraces— cups
of coffee, especially poignant for
winter-weary souls in still cafes.

Nature at the end begins to forge
invisible buds— suppressed grass
dreams succulence. Clouds shroud
puddles. Lengthening days.

A correspondence exists in me
for this— hovering on fertility’s edges,
writing to find the entire note,
the perfect kiss, moments of grace after
longing, fighting. Every cloud echoes
my reaching. Wanderlust for forgotten forms,

skies abandoned by vapors fixed
to the earth. My mind is hung with sun
flowers springing, lands uncreated,
dim, unpupil’d eyes, needing deeper

roots for a sturdier birth. A trumpet call—
thought processions— friends, loves.
Hands molding, fretfully, with nascent
skill, permanent tapestries. Mud below,

shadows above. Planted seeds poised—
movement, chasms filled. Words
on a wing, where are they? Could I be
writing them now, this normal day, over

cigarettes, George Eliot, coffee, sadness?
Before the bud erupts, it issues a sigh for
the effort, like of priests or of lovers—
crafting the genuine, born out of gladness.

Abby Heller-Burnham by J. Tenenbaum

 

To Bruce Nauman

What I had to say about Bruce Nauman on Live at the Writers House. 

Is what I had to say about Bruce Nauman in Great Works (UK)

 A third (sister lovers) assaying of Bruce Nauman at Personal Mythologies II.  

And generating typographical neon from Bruce Nauman on P.F.S. Post. 

Adam by Mary: McGill U 2003

 

Mary Evelyn Harju:West Philly

 

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

                                              © Abby Heller-Burnham 2002

Another anniversary

Rumors abound that a big chunk of the show was taped. We shall see.

Flier by Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, Manayunk, Philadelphia.  

Summer of Live

The extended version of Live in Brooklyn is my Live at Leeds. Here 'tis: for book nerds like me, this is my cure for the summertime blues. 

State of Grace (Frequencies extended)

State of Grace, Miscellaneous Sonnets section of Something Solid, on P.F.S. Post.

State of Grace is also available as an individual mp3 file on PennSound.

Kiss On My List

 

Frequencies in Ink Pantry

Summer lovin: had me a blast, folks. Frequencies in Ink Pantry. 

Frequencies, from the bowels of Carriage Hill, on mp3. 

Red Life

 One last brushstroke applied to Live in Brooklyn. 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound

 

Alexandra Grilikhes and Pound commemorates the life and passing of Alexandra Grilikhes, who had performed at the first Personal Mythologies. The series was named by her.

If you noticed, and it certainly would be permissible if you did not, the title of today’s performance is Personal Mythologies II. Two, because we did the same thing last year at roughly this time (not me and Brian, mind you, but me and two other poets). One of the poets, Alexandra Grilikhes, was giving what turned out to be her last ever performance. She died in February, age seventy, and ending a life of great achievement in the arts. She was an editor, novelist, poet, promoter, and feminist. I was deeply moved by her death, which seemed so untimely, coming on the heels of her first novel’s successful release. Wouldn’t you know, my immediate response to her death was an extravagant outpouring of poetic energy. I wrote a fifteen-page mini-epic called Death Meditations, then abandoned it when I felt I couldn’t go on. The grief, and the desperate longing to create something good, were getting to me.

Tracing the evolution of this poem, I am reminded of an episode in the early poetic life of Ezra Pound. Ez was wandering through a Metro station in London, presumably waiting for his train, which may’ve been late, or simply unwilling to stop for Ezra Pound. In any case, Ez began examining the faces drifting and circulating around him, and these faces brought him to a moment of epiphany. Returning home, he pounded out (no pun intended) an elaborate thirty-page catalog of Imagist impressions. He let it sit for six months, and decided to scrap the whole thing except for two lines: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd/ petals on a wet, black bough.” This little haiku, In the Station of the Metro, has become famous, and is, for my money, Ezra’s best poem.

As you can probably guess, my Alexandra poem went through a similar metamorphosis. Coming back to it, I scrapped everything inessential, until the fifteen-page piece had yielded a single page of usable material. Hours were spent pruning, paring, crafting, until I finally felt I had done the deceased poet justice. Or, failing that, that I had tried my best to do so. The poem lacks imagery, metaphor, and other savory elements. It is what might be called a vegetarian poem— lean, mean, good for the digestion, but unlikely to titillate the senses. I recognize this, but it is, after all, a poem about mortality. What does death leave us with? It is my attempt to reach Alexandra, wherever she is. It is very hard for me to believe that a year ago, she was standing at this very podium, delivering a performance that unified the threads of her considerable body of work into an artful whole. Without turning this into a would-be séance, I would like to say that this poem is an attempt to evoke her presence, if only in the hearts and minds of those of us who knew her.

Hamlet and the Last Drop

Hamlet and the Last Drop was read and taped on September 20, 2003, at the KWH Personal Mythologies II reading.

It is a disappointment to the maturing poet, and probably no less so to the maturing garbageman, that life is mostly prosaic. We do the same things every day— think roughly the same thoughts, eat roughly the same foods (with the occasional pesto or curry thrown in, no doubt), watch roughly the same movies, wish for the same impossibilities, rue the same inevitabilities, consolidate whatever resources we have, and denigrate the ones we don’t. Why do we do this? One lesson of Hamlet seems to be that we don’t have to— that we can dig deeper, walk the razor’s edge, become an active participant in metaphysical debate. The risk is that, in the process, we will lose touch with everyday reality, and veer off into madness. Poetry has this distinct advantage over quotidian life— poets can, in the creation of their poems, see things as they are not with impunity. We don’t have to tell the truth, because we can imagine things better than the truth. Look around you— that weird-looking guy in the third row may be a Minister of Angelic Spirits, an embodiment of Dionysus, or even an official in the Eisenhower Administration. That asshole driver you passed, doing forty-five on the Expressway, was Nosferatu, the parasite that shined Richard Nixon’s shoes and recommended the Watergate Hotel as a friendly rest-stop, and the sleazebag who interviewed O.J. Simpson for Playboy, combined. And so on.

I spend a lot of time hanging out at Thirteenth and Pine, sometimes writing or reading, but mostly watching people. So it follows naturally that I’d want to, in my own modest way, immortalize it. On two diagonal corners, Thirteenth and Pine contains the Last Drop Coffeehouse, which really deserves its own poem, teeming as it is with the young, lusty, luscious, and generally alliterative, and Dirty Frank’s, which would merit a Dante-sized epic, detailing the Inferno-like rings around which spin the old drunkards, new drunkards, and in-between drunkards. I was sitting at the Last Drop, thinking about all these issues, and I really started to identify with the Hamlet archetype. Is this all there is? For how many years will I be sitting at Thirteenth and Pine, waiting for an elusive enlightenment? Am I destined to follow my father’s ghost into the abyss? Luckily, I had a pen with me. That stopped the corrosive gnaw. It was suddenly just another night. Almost.