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.
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