Wordsworth @ McDonald's (2005)

With the advent of the Information Superhighway, cell-phones, and other Digital Now-signifiers, we have an entered an era in which all reality is virtual. Poets who give serious thought to the why of their craft are faced with a dilemma: how to create poems in the Wordsworthian manner (i.e. real language of people) when technology has outmoded the Romantic model that still dictates so much serious poetry. Language poetry schematized a new model—oblique, skewered, post-modern. This model was a useful innovation that has, in roughly thirty years time, grown stale and somewhat irrelevant. Poets, and what’s left of their audience, still want the Wordsworthian model to hold. They want feeling to be relevant, and language to enact a mimesis of interior (real) processes. The problem is, that if we acknowledge a central virtual quality to modern life, real language may be an impossibility.

So, we can’t depend completely on Wordsworth anymore. For the creation of virtual poetry, it will be necessary for the poet to internalize things ordinarily seen as epitomizing crassness and “low” reality—like McDonald’s. As one sits in McDonald’s circa 2005, it becomes clear that agile minds are working to keep the corporate axles greased—minds from which it is possible to learn. Hanging in the window, a large picture advertising chicken strips; a young African-American male dangling one in front of parted lips, beaming; inscribed on the blank space above his head, a motto: “I’m lovin’ it”. This is obviously rhetorical, in that the “I” here is general and universalized. “I” is all of us, in the contented bliss of a chicken-strip meal. So, McDonald’s is subtle enough to posit an “I” that really means “you.” How many poets left in America can say the same? How many poets are so subtle, so engaged, so virtual that their “I’s” resonate as “yous”? Poets want a perpetual striking of Wordsworth’s bell; they still believe in “real language” (even Language poets inherently must believe before they deconstruct); their “I’s” stay isolate, separate, derelict. Let’s set up a small chart and enumerate exactly the binary being portrayed here:

Wordsworth (real language/ rmen): gender-specific, un-PC (language/men) static/abstract definitely serious-intentioned 

 McDonald’s (I’m lovin’ it): gender-neutral, PC (I) “I” In medias res moderately serious

Immediately it becomes apparent that the McDonald’s ad execs are, on some level, more linguistically sharp than us, the poets. Their motto is PC, active, and moderately serious, where Wordsworth is sexist, static, and excessively serious. What I’m calling for is a poetics equal parts Wordsworth and McDonald’s. Post-modernists would resolve this binary tension by making a mockery of it (especially the Wordsworth half), in an attempt to reinforce an ethos of “virtuality” or “nothing real.” Though reality has grown to be (arguably) virtual, I am looking for an earnest attempt to implement both sides of this binary, the Wordsworth and the McDonald’s, the “I” that’s “I” and the “I” that’s “you,” the static and the active, definite and moderate seriousness. This does not preclude irony and slant; rather, they become a tool to express underlying profundities. What’s needed to achieve balance is Negative Rhetopoeiac Capability. That is, a poem must attempt to straddle the Wordsworth/McDonald’s binary without irritably grasping after rhetorical reason, or making a mockery of either side. This ensures a poetics both actively virtual and substantially real.

Some of these Frank O’Hara bits are illustrative of successful work in this vein:

I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with
her face on it.

Leroi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases.

O’Hara’s conversational diction fulfills Wordsworth binary-end, even as his affirmative, ebullient voice veers into “I’m lovin’ it” territory (in medias res, active, performative). This is “serious ephemeral” poetry, using Pop Culture references as quotidian signifiers that nevertheless have substantial internal (“felt”) relevance. O’Hara, though he skirts post-modern (or “Pop”) territory, does not make a mockery of anything—he is kidding, but he isn’t, he is at McDonald’s reading Wordsworth, he is where we want to be, on the edge of a new Mannerism. 

O’Hara’s oeuvre as a whole is useful, because O’Hara has a key “Wordsworth McDonald’s” quality that most serious poets lack—charm. His poems, in their moderately serious/actively engaging tenor, are charming. Why wouldn’t Wordsworth at McDonald’s be charming? Can you imagine the Bard of Tintern Abbey reckoning a “Solitary Milkshake,” finding himself overwhelmed by a spontaneously felt Big Mac? O’Hara’s charm comes from unexpected juxtapositions, charged with feeling. He is, in this sense, a good Wordsworthian—but he lives in the present moment, always. Dualism is manifested as whim. Modern signifiers are internalized, processed, felt. So, McDonald’s has led us from Wordsworth to Frank O’Hara, who was virtual before virtual became real. He instinctively navigated a Mannerist-space that has yet to be pursued by a substantial number of serious poets (who perhaps mistrust his merely moderate seriousness). Yet, poets who lean and cling to Wordsworthian “reality” can often be heard complaining about lack of interest. Poets who want to achieve something real in this day and age really have no choice but to get Mannerist. Mannerism is differentiated from Pop (and the post-modern ethos that followed in its’ wake) in this way—Pop is a Campbell’s Soup can, Mannerism is a Campbell’s Soup can held by Michelangelo’s David. Mannerism includes Formal Rigor, depth, gravitas (Wordsworth virtues) along with spontaneous, active, Pop-based signifiers and imagery (McDonald’s). A willful jumble of high and low. 

Claiming an essential virtuality to modern life needs some justification. What I mean to say is that image/ technology-saturation has become so rampant in Western society that even those of us who’d like to lead pure, uncluttered, Wordsworth-style existences have cell-phones, use the Internet, watch TV and movies, etc. Cell-phone communication seems particularly distressing, substituting expedience for intimacy (transpiring as it does while we are “multi-tasking”), breaking down boundaries (anyone with our number can reach us anytime, so long as we keep our phones on), often poisoning our relationship to the Now by taking us out of the present moment. So, imagine—one is at a dinner party, adjourned to the living room to watch (if we are lucky) something by Cocteau or Godard. Our cell-phone rings; we are expecting an important (perhaps career-related) call; we answer. We are living in three realms—dinner party, Cocteau, cell-phone—at once. These situations have become familiar and common to most of us. They happen all the time, and they (for me at least) have added up to a feeling of alienation from the essential presence of the Now. This is especially pertinent for city-dwellers. The unreality/virtual component goes way up, it’s difficult to feel solid with a flux not only in the outside world but in one’s hand-bag and one’s computer. When I speak of an encroachingly preponderant virtual world, that is what I mean. Disengagement from singularly focused consciousness. 

Poets must address this situation precisely. When Wordsworth, in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, spoke of “gross stimulants” contaminating mass aesthetic judgment, could he even have fathomed our current level of emotional dispossession and image-centered “savage torpor”? I’m all for a poetry that confronts this head-on by using some of it! The architect Robert Venturi says, “Viva Mannerism that richly acknowledges ambiguity and inconsistency in a complex and contradictory time.” Maybe we could go so far as to call O’Hara a “Mannerist”—his exaggerated reactions and humor, his implicit ethos of “mess is more.” McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” also has the essential Mannerist hyperbolizing spirit. Wordsworth, the sober, steady philosophe, was obviously no Mannerist—but why not keep some of his level-headed piety regarding art’s pleasure-giving, insight-shedding mission, his emotion-cherishing mind?

To me, it is a question of letting in. Don’t write off McDonald’s for its’ Mannerist modernity or Wordsworth for his Romantic self-absorption—rather, let them both in equally, so that what we produce is contemporary and durable, Mannerist and tradition-preserving, face-to-face intimate and cell-phone expedient. O’Hara was, as far as I can tell, adequately a master at absorbing modernity-signifiers in such a way that he represented them without condescension, and with a loving eye. This has obvious ties to Warhol, Pop-art in general, Rauschenberg’s Combine-paintings, etc. Mannerism, however, has grounding in tradition that Pop lacks. Pop did away with the past in embracing glossy surfaces; Mannerism wants the glossy surface and the earthy depth. It is an impossibly ambitious stratagem for a new urban poetics—but why not?

Wordsworth @ McDonald's originally appeared in Jacket 28

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