App for my 38th B-Day

#717

On why it has to be that writing
comfortable garbage is the inevitable
byproduct of living comfortably, with
each fresh hell I wonder why the hooks
towards artful utterance are set this
way, & why I must become such an oyster
just to confer into a leaking bucket,
insecurely hung from abraded cables,
a blue droplet not even of blood but
of nectar, or wine, or whiskey—

The End of Our Troils

What Mary, Abby, and I had going for a while was a form/manner of troilism; a fully consummated love triangle. What happened between the three of us was rather riotish, but the entire series of scenes was buoyed up by a good deal of love and affection we had for each other. Leading lives unsullied by social inhibitions, we were free to become emotionally and sexually entangled. Staged twentieth century cultural romances look stilted in comparison because, in retrospect, they were obviously just that (staged), and put in motion only to initiate and perpetuate appearances. Historians who will track the movements of P.F.S. are not going to have to steer around a matrix of obvious, embarrassing discrepancies— both the eye-witness and documentation levels exist right there on the surface. And since Mary's portraits are both titillating and substantial works of art, P.F.S. has a way of fulfilling the sense of well-rounded and consummate artistry, on every level, which was our implicit, Creatrix/Creator ideal.

Century Defining Image Pt. 2

If Abby Heller-Burnham's The Skaters shares some thematic ground with her Lost Twins, it has to do at least partly with inheritance- with what the twentieth century bequeathed to the twenty-first. The allegory presented by The Skaters is centered on urban decay, specifically the urban decay of fin de siecle Philadelphia, and how a higher artistic sense of the visionary can be both transformative and redemptive. Part of a serious artist's potential brilliance is the fashioning of beauty (especially new modes of formal/thematic beauty) out of unpromising or abased materials- The Skaters achieves this by creating a hauntingly desolate ambiance, which also comments on the nature of the spectral or spectrality, extending its allegory to include levels and layers of signification around the ineluctable quality of the "meta" in the higher arts to begin with. And she does this, literally and metaphorically, without leaving North Philadelphia.

The superior achievement of Abs against the tiny, crabbed hermeticism of post-modern visual art is this- her circles of signification include theirs' (i.e. she "walks the square" like Bruce Nauman and is as conceptually sound as Nauman or the Neo-Expressionists), but also expands to include narratives of form and formal mastery to create superbly well-rounded ("whole," organic) constructs which chafe against the confines of post-modernism's motivating ethos- easy, anti-humanistic, yearned-for and achieved, nihilistic aesthetic obsolescence. Abby Heller-Burnham's best paintings, despite their shared ambiance of desolation and eerie time-suspension, are essentially affirmative, and humanistic, both in their formal/thematic dynamism and in their labyrinthine complexities- and The Skaters affirms that a worthy eye ("I") can always fashion something out of nothing (ex nihilo), in any context or socio-aesthetic time-zone.

Century Defining Image

One of the levels which can be read into Abby Heller-Burnham's The Lost Twins is a sense of menace and/or foreboding around the pursuit of major high art consonance. If the twins are lost, its because high art appears, in this context, to be frozen into place, ossified into rigid formality, and shrouded in large, long shadows. As of later in the twenty-first century now begun, this may be what art-oriented audiences remember about Abs and I- an age which compelled us to live and create under impinging shadows of hatred, indifference, and supreme mistrust; an age, in fact, so virulently corrupt in relation to the higher arts that many had given them up for dead or drastically, permanently impaired.

The closed circle of twentieth century art significations was, I suspect, set in place to maim/discredit attempts at major high art consonance; yet Abs has the guts here to place those shadows right where they belong- at the center of a composition so tricky, labyrinthine, and thematically rich that it is worth a century's perusal. As a potent symbol of transition between drastically different centuries, Lost Twins is par excellence enough to be, and remain, as definitive an art-moment as this century will produce. Abs was a pretty heavy Scorpion when she wanted to be.

Cheltenham page in Otoliths 23

These Cheltenham poems were released in Otoliths in 2011.

The Posit Trilogy: Deposit: Waiting for Dawn Ananda at the Bean Cafe

Waiting for Dawn Ananda at the Bean Cafe

To have to play a hand

(shall I ever get a hand in?)

poker gives you five fingers—

yet I catch in the South St. air

ten fingers or a spider's eight legs,

immobilized behind a dense space—

From The Posit Trilogy in Otoliths 32

A page in the new Otoliths: poems from The Posit Trilogy. Thanks to ed. Mark Young.

You can purchase Otoliths 32 here.