PFS Literary Diary ('04-'06)

As I have now written, Abby achieved her artistic apotheosis during the "el primo" Philadelphia Renaissance years ('04-'06). If I didn't come into my own completely as a literary artist at that time, what I was producing was better than bits and pieces. Doing readings at the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus, including, most notably, the This Charming Lab Stoning the Devil reading on March 27, 2004, I found a way of mixing prose and poetry together in a live context that was the beginning of Philly Free School, and our multi-media presentations at the Highwire Gallery later in '04 and '05. I was also beginning a low residency MFA at New England College, in Henniker, New Hampshire, where I met Chris McCabe, Mary Walker Graham, Melissa Severin, Becky Hilliker, Steve Halle, and others. One poem I was chipping away at was what was later to become the Apparition Poem about myself and Mary Harju in Montreal in '03. Mary, it might as well be said, was prone to tantrums (even more so than Abs), and the one she threw in Montreal was particularly horrifying— we were two artists alone in a foreign country, and the logistics of trying to get Mary to a hospital were daunting for me. Luckily, I managed to soothe her out of it. Abs and Mary were both volatile— one reason that the year they spent living together at 42nd and Baltimore (2003) after Mary moved out of 4325 was a patience-trying one. Mary Walker Graham's volatility manifested in work realized later.

If I have to offer, in retrospect, some proof that I knew there was a grandiosity and an epic quality to Aughts Philly, even as it was happening, it would probably be Feel, the Howl pastiche I spent two years ('05-'06) working on. Not having gained reliable, steady competence in inventing literary forms yet, I liked the Ginsberg form (post-Whitmanic) to plug into to tell the story of our lives. If the poem ends in despair and negation, rather than Ginsberg's radical (if shallow) affirmations, it is important to remember that the current ('14) recession was already very much a looming presence in the mid-Aughts; and, as high as we were, the darkness of the American economy's collapse and the Bush/Cheney regime did impinge on our fun sometimes. I debuted the first draft of Feel at Molly Russakoff's bookstore in the Italian Market in South Philly not long before I wrote Wittgenstein's Song, probably March or April '05, with all the main Philly Free School figures in attendance except Mary and Abs. If I recall correctly, that particular reading was rather informal, and hastily thrown together. It was a rainy, chilly night. I also don't mind saying that, again for my money and despite a borrowed literary form, I do think that Feel (and Feel plugged into ancillary channels, and further channels) beats the living hell out of Howl for human depth, thematic reach, formal gravitas, honesty consonance, and narrative interest. Too much of Howl is candy-corn and baby-mush— and the adolescent sense of mythology built into Ginsberg, Corso, and Kerouac grant an infantilizing blemish to their texts. Myself, Mary and Abs were adults in our work, always. It's another thing linking Abs to John Keats— she did her best, most visionary work while still in her twenties. And, no matter what you might hear, she was not an enfant terrible; she was half of one.

Also of interest as of the mid-Aughts; the rise of literature online as a major enterprise in the world was heady, both to watch and to participate in. Establishing P.F.S. Post (Philly Free School Post) in late 2005 as a web-zine to publish writers from around the world, and Stoning the Devil in early 2006 as a personal blog to collect both poems and lit-crit musings, were essential endeavors for me. I was also gorging myself on literary theory texts, including post-Structuralist texts, at the the time, so producing responsive criticism and elucidation was a natural extension of my reading. It was also natural for me to establish, at the time, that my participation in Amer-Indie lit and avant-gardism in general would be a mediated one. That internet publishing enabled me to perform feats of mobility like my appearance on Lars Palm's luzmag in January 2006, in which the poems were sent to Lars in Malmo, Sweden from the Boston 'burbs, where I was doing an M.F.A. residency, and the page went up while I was still in Henniker NH, were intensely about both intoxication and inspiration the right way for me and my compadres. Lars and I also collaborated at that time, and were not shy about adopting a straightforwardly po-mo approach, even as narrative hinges led us more towards what was then called post-avant poetry. Through meeting Chicago poet Steve Halle at NEC in the Boston 'burbs, I was both able to visit and read in Chicago several times in the Aughts, and to publish Chicago-style intensively. The Waxing Hot dialogue I did with Mr. Halle, which appeared in P.F.S. Post in 2006, was re-published in Tears in the Fence in the UK. And my first visit to Chicago, along with the publication from Chicago of the Ode On Jazz from the early Aughts, found me still in mid-Aughts '06. As did the fact that I conceived what became the '07 Blazevox e-book Beams in the mid-Aughts, and was already publishing from Beams in the mid-Aughts too, including the original, imagistic Apparition Poems series in Jacket Magazine. Among mid-Aughts publications, the poem Twisted Limbs, in Big Bridge, distinguished itself as a crash course in understanding that the Aughts could not only be a joy-ride. It was an established fact, as of the mid-Aughts, that the United States was on the brink of a major recession and the fall-out period which would inevitably follow from it; and the intoxication of doing the things many of us wanted to do in the world was tinged and impinged upon by shadows of what our future might hold. Fortuitous, nonetheless, to note that the American literary avant-garde responded with a huge lunge forward, publishing boom and all, and bridges crossed past Lang-Po. 

The Bats' Compound

Here's a funny story I've never told— the night, in late 2004, when Mike Land and I acted as "roadies" for The Bad News Bats, Abby's band with Liz McDermott. As an initial tangent, I find it interesting that Abby's years with the Bats ('04-'06) coincided with her great period of artistic fecundity. However rough-hewn and hard-edged the Bats' nexus was, Abs felt loved within it. That Liz ran the band with an iron fist didn't seem to disturb this. It's also worth noting that the Bats did get a standard write-up in one of the major Philly weeklies at the time; and that the lovely elfin Bats space cadet was also painting The Skaters and The Lost Twins then was lost on Mike and I and (I'm guessing) everyone else too. When Abs was painting her masterpieces, she was also playing her cards close to the vest; was, in astrological terms, moon in Capricorning. Had I seen what she was painting, Mike and I would've gone to great lengths to get her to show (as we had shown Mary Harju) at the Highwire Gallery in the now-razed Gilbert Building on Cherry Street, where we were doing our Free School shows. Indeed, the reason we were acting as roadies for the Bats on this particular autumn evening was that we were courting them— we wanted them to do a Highwire show with us in December. Liz was perhaps the greatest empress/tyrant in Philly rock history, so it wouldn't occur to her to just say yes— we had to demonstrate devotion first. So, there we were at the Bats' compound, a few blocks from where they were to play that night (at Tritone, 16th and South.) The first thing I noticed was that Abs was upset about something, and it had to do with Liz. Liz was storming around the house, doing assorted Liz-type, operational tasks; she decided, for example, that Mike and I needed to hear Bukka White. From her. The other two bats, Mary-Beth and Virginia, were lounging around, and were nice enough to share their weed with us.

Once we were properly stoned, and as Mike and I later discussed, we got lost in a labyrinth of insinuations going back and forth between the four Bats. They weren't trying to be insular, but they were naturally, organically insular at the time. When it finally got to be time for us to move the Bats' gear, Liz directed and monitored our movements. Luckily, Mike and I had a good amount of physical stamina, and it wasn't difficult to follow Liz's instructions, especially as the car-ride was short. Nick and Jeremy showed up before the Bats played, and I tried to make some introductions; but Liz was lost in her private maze of secret huddles, low-worded debriefings, and symbolic silences. Abs already knew all of us, and Mary Beth and Virginia, both good-natured loafers, were companionable. The Bats onstage were about equally quirky and ferocious in the mid-Aughts; Abs added layers of polish and sophistication to Liz's she-girl/banshee approach. Tritone was mid-level crowded for the show, and at least one other band played, who I don't remember. I do remember that the Abs/Liz "Glimmer Twins" vibe was intense— they were good at generating tornadoes of energy around them. I also generally noticed, in the last months of '04, and despite the awfulness of the year's election, that something was coming unhinged in Center City Philadelphia— some kind of Pandora's Box had been opened, and the spirit/genie of abandon and the Dionysian in general had been loosed. What redeemed all the casualties which were to come is that whatever glue was holding us together worked— whatever we were in, we were in together. The basic "geist" unearthed was a magnetic one, rather than the repulsive-up-close NY/L.A. vibe around so much advertised American art shenanigans. The worst thing you can say about Abs at this time is that she was radically compartmentalized— no one, in relation to the quality of her paintings, knew where they really fit in with her. But in this case, the art so justifies the life, who cares?

Foreshortened Arrows

I'm grateful to have done work in philosophy, as well as literature. One thing I don't have the capacity to do, which I wish I did, is to discuss Abs and Mary discursively in a high maintenance aesthetics context. I probably have 50-60% of what I need to do the job thoroughly and with authority- but the big chunk of nuanced knowledge which only serious art critics and historians have, and which I do not, assures me that my attempts (and there have been some already) could veer dangerously close to wankery and disrespectful presumption. The little, compressed dialectical pieces I've placed into circulation about Abs were set in place just to get the proverbial ball rolling, and the ball is rolling, sideways/forewards; but, for now, one set of brief aesthetic surmises in Abs' direction is enough.

There are a few foreshortened arrows I wouldn't mind shooting into the air, in this more casual context. I created the Purification Chain as a "compressed matrix" expressing my value judgments about what constitutes both importance and durability in serious art; and the way I configure things, what I call "formal rigor" is ranked above, and adjacent to "invention," in dichotomous balance. Art that is formally rigorous tends to be grounded in history, and art-historical narratives of form and theme; aesthetic forms gain, rather than lose, rigor from intense, ecstatic/agonizing relationships with the forms of the art which precede it; competing histories, and historical narratives, build rigor into artistic forms; and worthy artistic forms embody, comfortably or uncomfortably, both dialectics and "anxieties of influence." Invention is ranked as a Secondary Mode on the Purification Chain, and by a spirit of pure inventiveness serious artists purify their engagements with the rigors of formal and thematic history, as well as add magnetism/interest to their creations.

What I do want to say about Abby Heller-Burnham is what I see- which has to do with formal elements haunted and "spooked" in her work by an intense immersion in Neo-Classicism, which, metaphorically, paints her into a corner from which she can only create her way out by sheer force of will and determination to develop a new aesthetic, and a fully/freshly contemporary one, out of the (French) Neo-Classicist impulse. Thus, feminism and queerness become modes of thematic rebellion for her, towards her invented aesthetic, and against the phallocentric voices which insist on booming through her forms, granting them rigor. Yet, just as formal rigor is "Primary" on the Purification Chain, this combat turning commerce Abs is engaged in may be the most enduring element of her art, with its singular ambiance of the spectral and of desolation, perhaps a byproduct of the loneliness of her fight, also a hinge to possible definitions of Neo-Romanticism.

Notes on the Philly Free School and Aughts Philadelphia

About P.F.S. and class— most of us were raised middle-class. The European classicism we espoused, as one component part of our collective aesthetic, does leave us open to accusations of bourgeois interest and prejudice. A hard-line Marxist would have to say that any form of aesthetic classicism is inherently bourgeois. But our demonstrable downward class mobility, inverts this— none of us inherited a serious amount of money, and we all lived hand to mouth in Philly in the Aughts. We were authentically Bohemian— not ashamed, and materially compelled to work retail jobs and occasionally starve. Our bourgeois (suburban, also, for Mary and I) roots were partially betrayed, and the whole catalogue of our carousing exploits had to happen in this context— the magic of Aughts Philly was that we earned our stripes gracefully and unselfconsciously. We were meant to be lapsed suburbanites, lapsed bourgeoisie. Adaptation to city life was no strain for us.  

During the years we spent bar-hopping, money for drinks made for an empty fridge at home. If I wanted a midnight snack, it would have to be, often, bread and water. Not to mention that I met Abby and Mary, Mike Land and Nick Gruberg from working retail at the Rittenhouse Square Barnes and Noble in Center City.

Material perks came in and out of our lives— when Abby, Mary, and Jenny were attending PAFA in the early Aughts, each was allotted a personal studio. They could both work and crash there. I spent many nights with Mary in her studio, with its checkered linoleum floor and huge bay windows, on Cherry Street. She had a pull-out couch. After PAFA, the trio maintained co-op studio spaces, but never a completely self-run personal studio again. Mary favored co-ops on the edge of North Philadelphia, as is seen in The Fall. 

All of us had good luck with people throwing drinks and drugs at us. The communal vibe in Aughts Philadelphia was very intense; if you were on the inside, and had something worthwhile to offer sexually, socially, or artistically, everyone was encouraged to share their goods and services. This was especially important for Mary, who was not just a pot-head but a fully fledged pot addict. One truly surprising thing about Aughts Philly is that all the different sectors maintained their own classicist ethos— The Philadelphia Independent offered their classicist form of quirky urban hipster journalism; the Making Time DJs were as classicist as they could possibly be about what they played; and then us. Sharing your intoxicants expressed complicity with both this gestalt sensibility and the will to get trashed beyond it. Classicism, and willful individualism, on the razor's edge. 

Most of us, in Philadelphia in the Aughts, felt an acute sense of being "in" something. I did, but was circumspect about it, and about expressing this "in" from the inside, because I was only intermittently confident that anyone would ever notice us. Owing to a stable, secure body of artistic work having issued from Neo-Romanticism, I have more confidence now. This confidence is a compensation for the intense socio-cultural aridity and lethargy of the recessional Teens, as the Twenties take wing.

Abs and I were two of the less political Free School artists. I tended, for instance, to avoid the strong strain of political radicalism and activism which ran persistently through the American literary avant-grade. There were thus obvious levels on which I could not grandstand or flag wave. Politics, I still feel, tends to be too in the moment, of the moment; it exaggerates even further the now-mindedness of avant-garde literary practice. For myself, I felt that the variegated life I was leading made its own kind of statement in Aughts America, and I'm sure Abs would say the same, possibly with more emphatic force, owing to gender and "queer" issues, which have as much permanent relevance as anything else, and just as staunch feminist principles stand implicitly behind everything Mary and Jenny did, too. 

Myth and the Philadelphia Renaissance Pt. 2

The Philly Free School were a clan of younger artists for whom sexual magnetism was no issue- we had it, and used it. Because our sex appeal was and is backed up by many years of exteriorized sexual behavior, and the many soap operas attendant on this behavior, there is nothing about our lives which would not satisfy a public carnivorous for such exploits. PFS were no slouches about intoxicants, either- our dissipation skills were well-honed. Even a small amount of research into the bar and club circuit of Aughts Center City Philadelphia would reveal this to be the case. Thus, the mythological antecedents to the Philly Free School artists cannot be the most vaunted haute-culture stalwarts of the twentieth century (with the possible exception of Picasso), who led tame personal lives in comparison (particularly acute with myself in relation to the likes of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot)- our lifestyle would seem to be more normative for pop culture heroes like The Rolling Stones and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, PFS's pin-up potentialities are extreme- and that Neo-Romanticism also included a version of Philadelphia Babylon is not only true for us but obvious and beguiling right on the surface.

Thus, the whys and hows of marketing the Philly Free School artists as potential cultural figureheads/icons- with renegade sex appeal on one side and European classicist chops on the other- are very contorted against the process being either easy or open to rapid, combustible progression. However, I would not be writing this if I did not believe we would win in the end, even on surface levels. This, simply because I do have faith that, once the press embargo has ended, a substance-starved American public will go for us in a major way. It is an interesting and very singular congeries of circumstances around a group of younger artists- numbers on the Internet indicate strong grass-roots support for us- while the media black-out against us, in favor of a cornball and very rote plebeian paradigm, demonstrates the American media's ferocious hatred both of complexities, and of anything extreme, threatening, thoughtful, or generally serious. I have no convincing way of imploring the American press corps to get off their flabby behinds and do anything- its just that the Internet itself has created its own egalitarian power-block against them, which is gaining momentum and brawn, towards a black-out of American public confidence in said press corps.

Many sectors around American culture are standing, it would seem, at a crossroads here- and part of the fate of public/cultural America hangs in the balance. I want to state with confidence that, willy-nilly, myths will be made of the Philly Free School and its exploits- our work is already securely set in place, and with enough authority, that crowds around it will continue to gather, and mythologies beyond my ken establish themselves. Conscious myth-making is what I am up to here- a risky venture, and one for which middling batting averages, even for the hyper-articulate, are often the norm. Yet, if I continue, against this limitation, it is because I believe that, despite our profligacy, we will be a positive cultural influence on the United States at large, and a solid long-term bet as well, solid body of work in tow.

****attached photo: Adam Fieled and Mary Evelyn Harju at Montreal Botanical Gardens '03****

Myth and the Philadelphia Renaissance Pt. 1

How mythologies proliferate and perpetuate themselves among the human race- the mechanics of mythology- is a fascinating issue, and involves knowledge of humanities disciplines (sociology/anthropology) which I do not have. Yet, I begin this essay on the side of a certain kind of knowledge- that for the duration of Philadelphia in the Aughts, many young artists were developing rapidly and in tandem. The formal-thematic concerns they shared were easy to notice- expressed sexuality, both queer and straight, as a manifestation of achieved personal freedom and expressive competence, and against the backdrop of a faltering national economy and socio-political landscape; a rekindled romance with the haute culture of the nineteenth century, particularly nineteenth century Europe, as a repository of worthy forms and psycho-cognitive, textual or imagistic vistas; a generalized rejection of post-modernity's rote, dry, unimaginative and bloody-minded cultural stranglehold from cash-built, internally corrupt fortresses of media, galleries, academic institutions, journals, and presses; and the city of Philadelphia itself as a muse and fetish, specifically owing to the city's manifest complexities, exquisite architecture, and the spirit of socio-sexual freedom and aesthetic daring which reigned as a zeitgeist for many years in the Aughts here, and which, once descended, animated affected lives with a perpetual sense of liberation, release, and intoxication.

This congeries of complexes and circumstances constitutes, for me, the backbone of what I call the Philadelphia Renaissance- but as, in the midst of text-creation, I interrogate myths, mythologies, and processes of myth-making, it occurs to me that for a genuine, cherished myth (or series of myths) to take root in Western consciousness around what happened in Philadelphia in the Aughts, some form of collective will need to develop for the aforementioned proliferations and perpetuations to occur- in other words, myths cannot be created completely in a vacuum. I have failed to enumerate what we were (and are) up against, which is formidable- a shadow-Philadelphia (and America) of faux-cultural sectors, set in place only to coerce awful, inferior, thoughtless and formless art into entrenched positions of demonstrable power and prestige; the "deep pockets" able, for subterranean reasons, to buy out these contrived, inauthentic positions, and which can and will be willing to block attempts to consolidate Neo-Romantic art. Our art, of course, was not created or placed into circulation from "deep pockets" but by young artists living on, and from, their wits, instincts, and impulses; and we must also face the collective will of local and national press, who dote on formulas, to bury the Philadelphia Renaissance, whose organic, sexualized, and aesthetically emancipated approach disrupts normative, formulaic practices and conventional American myth-making mechanics.

The most enduring kind of high art, whenever and wherever it erupts, is always disruptive, because a genuine, tearing edge of innovation is in it, alongside an engagement with aesthetic histories. Both of these features are perceived by plebeian minds as strange and threatening- and the best pieces of Neo-Romantic art are no exception; are, in fact, representative of this phenomenon; and our very creation myth is a semi-unprecedented one. I consider my own attempts to disseminate Neo-Romantic art, and the myths which inform it, as a kind of humanities experiment over a long period of time. My formulated supposition is not a particularly modest one- that we were, and will likely remain, sui generis in the history of American (and Western) art, and that what we created deserves wide attention and comment, if not imitation (not-overt or overt, benign or malign, wholesome or craven).

Deep Noir Pt. 2

As to the issue of why, in 2014, a "noir" aesthetic, inclusive of formal-thematic depth, would be of wide interest once placed into circulation- the reason is fairly simple. On many levels and in many variegated contexts, few sensibilities other than "noir" could be generally and widely representative in America, against the facile breeziness of post-modernity. The Recession has created a climate, both within and without aesthetics, of entrenched circumstantial darkness and shadowy langour. Untold, unreported catastrophes may have wiped out entire sectors of the population- yet the media chirps away as though nothing has changed. American pop culture is in an advanced state of erosion and deterioration- there are no new rock stars anymore, and new American cinema not only isn't selling but is divested, for the populace, of the perceived glamour which used to enable it to sell. The secret passageways which used to make America interconnect have largely been severed; even as the Internet has created new labyrinths and passageways which often amount to a subversive conspiracy against the normative. The truly noir facet of the Internet is that it allows the American public to understand how and why its been duped; and what's left of a thinking American populace is cognizant of these things. The Apparition Poems were written to hold down a cultural fort radically on the side of haute culture and high art, scribed by a single author from within the bounds of the United States. For those watching closely, and who know how the American literary landscape has largely been configured over long and short periods of time, this congeries of circumstances is a rebellion and an innovation. That the Apparition Poems are not only indigenously American (if standing, aesthetically, on the shoulders of historical Europe) but indigenously Philadelphian is another innovation- the creation of literary Philadelphia, in the twenty-first century, has to do with the noir elements already built into Philly as a mythological construct.

Philadelphia, much more so than New York (which offers, to my eyes, nothing labyrinthine beneath a bold, brusque surface) is perpetually ravaged by contradictions and conflicting internal imperatives- the Main Line surface/patina is all about the prestige of old money; South Philly prizes blue-collar, ethnic simplicity, but falsely and disingenuously (against the complex and baroque machinations of the South Philly mob); the mob also runs at least partly other suburbs supposed to be middle-class, and standardized to American suburban norms, which they are not; and the "noir" sense, at the end of things, is that Philadelphia is a shadow-plagued city, and what you see is certainly not what you get here. The representatively Philadelphian surface/depth tensions, including our relationship to Philadelphia's sublime architecture, are what make the city fertile ground for high art, rooted in formidably intellectual narratives, slanted towards the stylized chiaroscuro of noir symbolization and signification. Every thoughtful Philadelphian has their own Philadelphia narrative. Philadelphia, in fact, may be taken as the secret (as well as original) capitol of America, and much of America's internal darkness is exteriorized/embodied with precision in our labyrinths here. From a certain angle, for Philadelphia to produce representative American high art is no stretch at all- higher art requires higher faithfulness to complex human truth. Because complexities are difficult, both to perceive and to assimilate, they are, or can be, dark. If my version of noir borrows stylistically from the likes of Raymond Chandler, the substance of the art is uniquely set within its own thematic manner/mode of confused, perplexing darkness. Yet attempts to unearth deep truth, when performed skillfully, are always cathartic, as pitiful and terrible as the deep (noir) truth can be, and in this, this art finds its strength and metier.