Notes: Cheltenham Elegies and WYB Sonnets

In examining prosodic structures in my body of work, it is noticeable that discrepancies present themselves in how prosody in general is approached. One interesting dichotomy subsists between the When You Bit...sonnets and the Cheltenham Elegies. Where melopoeia is concerned, the WYB sonnets are lavish leaning towards overripe: they cluster end-rhymes with internal rhymes, assonances, and the rest to heighten the carnival frisson of overwhelming romance, sexuality, intrigue, and transgression (the Something Solid sonnet series, from 2017 and out, takes the sonnet to a space more about memory, recollected in semi-tranquility, with music more variable, as well, with Undulant standing out as an ensign piece):

I ache: dull, sharp,
in a heap of paper.
All paper: picture,
bright, bold, dark.
I have nailed you
to a piece: black.
I darken touched
things: I’m used.
I write you, you,
you, as if kissed
by a fresh body,
rose-petal bliss.
I drowse: numb
as cocaine gums.

The nods to Shelley (“I pant, I tremble, I expire…”) and to Romanticism and the lyric “I” in general are right on the surface, and the telos is the consummation of total aesthetic richness. It is a sense of wanting something, and getting it. The consolidation of end-rhymes with internal rhymes heightens this process. This is 2007 (the book was published in ’08, but much of it was written in the autumn of ’07). Four years later, and with the added encumbrance of a deepening national (and global) recession, I was ready to write the Cheltenham Elegies, and the note of lacrimae rerum, which inverts and re-directs the odal ecstasy of the early Aughts, and the beleaguered mid-Aughts poise of Twisted Limbs, was placed into them by impersonal circumstances becoming personalized. The melopoeiac dimension of the Cheltenham Elegies, next to the When You Bit sonnets, is hollowed out, emptied, reflecting a state of impoverishment; internal rhymes must suffice to color the poems, while end-rhymes are left out to preclude the rosy sense of ravishment in the earlier poems:

And out of this nexus, O sacred
scribe, came absolutely no one.
I don’t know what you expected
to find here. This warm, safe,
comforting suburb has a smother
button by which souls are unraveled.
Who would know better than you?
Even if you’re only in the back of
your mind asphyxiating. He looked
out the window— cars dashed by
on Limekiln Pike. What is it, he said,
are you dead or do you think you’re Shakespeare?

Different audiences over a long period of time will find mete to embrace different kinds of prosody. For myself, I would tend to value the hollowed out starkness of the Elegies, their implicit vow against the traditional ripeness of end-rhymes, against the twisted, torqued half-lyricism of the sonnets (if I call them half-lyrical, it is because they are welded to a narrative structure which is book-length and involves other characters, rather than the traditional lyric, which sticks to a first person perspective.)

Municipal Building: Fayette Street: Conshohocken

Notes: More on When You Bit...

The formality of the When You Bit... sonnets hinges on an original admixture of formal elements. Rather than usual pentameter line structures, here I tend to favor five beats per line, or what I call halved pentameter. What chopping standard pentameter lines in half will do to a sonnet would seem to be an open question; but certainly the formal nod is to brevity, concision, and the impulse to compress poetic data:

(a) Three sets of teeth: who
(b) can check for cavities?
(a) A three-way circuit: who
(b) will start the striptease?
(c) Three lovers in three ways:
(d) how merrily the dance
(e) begins. We spin, we spin,
(f) we forget our instincts,
(b) anima, the part of teeth
(h) that cuts. We are sluts.
(d) There is an “I” here that
(h) stands for all of us, but
(b) its eyes are shut. Sleep
(b) lulls it to rest, not think. Or speak.

Besides the feature of halved pentameter here, there is also a system of internal rhymes inset to enrich the end-rhyme scheme, which is (again) unconventional. Thus, (for instance), “three” and “teeth” in line 1 work with “cavities” in line 2; just as “three” twice in line 5 reinforce the end-rhymes of lines 2 and 4, “cavities,” “striptease.” Keats called this kind of melopoeiac reinforcement loading lines with ore; and he complained to Shelley in a famous missive how scant Shelley’s reinforcement techniques were. Surely, if the regular number of beats per line is halved, it stands to poetic reason that what is left must be as loaded with prosodic ore as possible, and I attempted to accomplish that here. It is also a feature of this particular sonnet (Three Sets of Teeth, which opens the initial third of the book called Sister Lovers) that the first quatrain (four line stanza) is written in the Shakespearean manner— Shakespearean sonnets tend to begin with a/b/a/b. Shakespearean rhyme-schemes in sonnets are dramatic to the point of being overripe; Shakespeare liking to imagine his sonnets being orated from onstage, perhaps. The sturm und drang facet of Shakespearean sonnets is not answered by the Petrarchan mold employed by Keats (and, of course, Petrarch), which is subtler, more intricate, more about interstitial craft then dynamic fervor and bloody passion. That, through the first quatrain, this sonnet emerges as “semi-Shakespearean” is something I would like to posit. In being semi-Shakespearean, I attempt to open the book in as dramatic a fashion as I possibly can; even as the last, “clustered” ten lines, in all their irregularity, move the sonnet into uncharted formal territory, towards a kind of wilderness zone which mirrors the narrative-thematic wilderness zone the protagonist of the book inhabits in his ménage with his two Chicago Muses in the first twenty sonnets of the book. This formal wilderness zone is reprised, in a more impersonal fashion, in Mother Earth, and also in  Undulant, from Something Solid, and Perfect, Feast or Famine, The Studio, Genius Loci, and White Candle, which introduce the issue of what a double sonnet is and can be, formally and thematically.

Notes: When You Bit...: Clustering

Since Fortune tends to favor the bold, I am going to make a bold assertion: until Neo-Romanticism, including post-avant, there is no serious prosody in American poetry. Frost and Dickinson write Hallmark-level jingles; Whitman’s use of anaphora is cheap and barbaric the wrong way round; and even semi-Americans Pound and Eliot do not build the kind of melopoeia into their poetic constructs to vie with the Romantics and those who preceded them. I call my wonted prosodic manner “clustering”— that is, I (usually) avoid regular end-rhyme structures and build in melopoeiac devices (rhymes, near-rhymes, off-rhymes, assonances, alliterations, anaphora, etc) in a clustered fashion, where the devices fall in the poem where they will, which grants me much greater narrative-thematic freedom as a quid pro quo for musical solidarity and traditional poetic scaffolding techniques. In terms of my books, When You Bit... from 2008 is the most musically rich, with an intense focus on melopoeia in the context of a traditional form, the sonnet:

(a) My spirit is too weak— mortality
(b) Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
(b) And each imagined pinnacle and steep
(a) Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
(a) Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
(b) Yet ‘tis a gentle luxury to weep
(b) That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
(a) Fresh for the opening of the morning’s eye.
(c) Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
(d) Bring round the heart an undescribable feud;
(c) So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
(d) That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
(c) Wasting of old time— with a billowy main—
(d) A sun— a shadow of a magnitude.

(a) Asinine, as is, this ass is:
(b) ass I zip down into zero:
(a) anal, a null, a void this is.
(c) I’m behind a behind that
(d) sits smoking, rubbing, pink-
(e) tipped, tender, butt, button.
(f) She watches me watching as
(e) I go brown-nose in another.
(g) Only her car-ness, averted by
(g) eyes to the wall, seems happy.
(h) Only she can stomach rubs
(h) of the kind that want plugs.
(h) Sparked tank, here comes
(h) no come, & aggravation.

Keats’ Elgin Marbles sonnet here conforms tightly to the Petrarchan mold— both in the end-rhyme scheme, and in the way the volta (turn after the first eight lines, a sonnet convention) plays against the first portion of the poem. My spider on LSD rhyme scheme demonstrates how cluster-forms of prosody can work— the end rhymes fall in and out, and the last four lines sharing an end-rhyme have a sense both of (potentially) absurdizing the poem, and giving it an adequate crescendo.

Notes: Le Chat Noir from Posit

The media formula for Philadelphia is South Philadelphia. The media formula for New York City is Manhattan. Both equally lies. In fact, anyone in America, stationed along the Eastern seaboard, who remains past thirty-five, will probably notice that, despite a tremendous press build-up to reinforce the “mega” quality of New York City, New York has no more material power in America than several other commensurate, or more than commensurate, cities: Atlanta, Baltimore, and, of course, Philadelphia. Philadelphians over thirty-five may have discovered the labyrinthine dimensions and depths of Philly, reaching out in myriad directions (including our sublime architecture here and what it signifies in the world), and touching Philly’s tremendous material and spiritual power in the United States. There are few American power-structures without Philly roots somewhere; yet, this structuring is often “operative,” and not directly verbalized. So, older Philadelphians must live with what we can and cannot express on the surface. C'est la vie. And, to the extent that I am winding this around to note something about the poem Le Chat Noir from the Posit chapbook (also included in '17's Posit Trilogy), it stands to reason that I should express where I feel New York School poetry needs to go: into the garbage. What I’ve discovered is that Le Chat Noir can be parsed as a heave-ho to the New York School, if we take the protagonist of the poem to be spry, pop-culture consonant, semi-hysterical Frank O’ Hara:

I pressed a frozen face
forward into an alley off
of Cedar St., herb blowing
bubbles (am I too high?) in

melting head I walked &
it was freezing & I walked
freezing into pitch (where’s
the) blackness around a

cat leapt out & I almost
collapsed a black cat I
was panting & I almost
collapsed I swear from

the cold but look a cat
a black cat le chat noir oh no

The poem is a sonnet, but the form doesn’t seem to be as important here as the thematic gist and the spin I want to put on that particular ball. If this is Frank O’ Hara, stuck in the bowels of North-West Philadelphia (the Eris Temple was located at 52nd and Cedar in the Aughts), and he imitates a Lana Turner-ish (for those who know his poems) collapse, it may be because the real decadent glamour on the East Coast is in Philadelphia, with the buildings. I would like to argue that the realest glamour has always been in Philadelphia,  for the hip and worldly-wise, and O’Hara’s New York is a non-existent joke in comparison. People forget what Le Chat Noir was in Paris in the 1890s— a Bohemian haunt where artists used to hang out, in absinthe-laden, concupiscent decadence. So that, if the real Le Chat Noir vibe on the East Coast is here, in Philadelphia, then all the paroxysms in the world cannot redeem O’Hara from knowing that his aesthetic number is up, and we’ve got it.

Notes: Elegy 420/ St. Agnes Eve

I like T. S. Eliot’s famous aphorism: “Immature artists borrow; mature artists steal.” The Cheltenham Elegy I would like to discuss does steal a crucial image from Keats’ Eve of St. Agnes. If you put the Elegy next to the relevant stanza of Keats’ longer narrative poem (not an Ode, but sharing the Odes preoccupation with celebrating oddities and inverting poetic clichés), what emerges is a paradigm model of where the last two hundred years have landed us, as regards what constitutes innocence and experience, virginity and consummation, expectancy and satiety, and what historians chose to call Romance against what I choose to call Noir:

I.
The Junior Prom deposited me (and fifteen
others) on the floor of her basement. I could
barely see daylight at the time, and at three in
the morning I began to prowl. I was too scared
to turn on any lights. She emerged like a mermaid
from seaweed. I needed comfort, she enjoyed my
need. We had gone out— she was bitter. The whole
dialogue happened in shadows.. No one was hooking
up in the other room, other. You spiteful little princess.

II.
Whether off the bathroom counter
or the back of your hand, darling,
your unusual vehemence that
winter night, cob-webbed by
half-real figures, was animated by an
unfair advantage, which stooges threw
at you to keep you loopy as you
died piece-meal. All I had
was incomprehensible fury and a
broken heart— when I hit the floor
at four, you were getting ready
to play fire-starter, opened
the little snifter, curled your finger
twice in the right direction; darkness—

Anon his heart revives: her vespers done,
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels one by one;
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in seaweed,
Passive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,
But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled.

Oddly enough, Eliot’s mermaids in Prufrock occupy a median space between Keats’ innocent, angelic Madeline, and my “spiteful little princess.” Eliot aside, both St. Agnes and 420 involve festivities— and the celebration of St. Agnes Eve in the Middle Ages (where Keats acquired his narrative plot) was just as garish and ostentatious as a Cheltenham Junior Prom. Yet, the Elegy and the semi-Ode share a preoccupation shared, as a concern, by myself and Keats— what happens in darkness, in hidden or concealed spaces, far from the proverbial madding crowd, against what would be known on the surface levels of society and its terms of acceptance or acknowledgment. Porphyro is asking for an elopement, and is accepted; the first person protagonist of 420 asks for solace, on any level, and is rebuffed. That both poems emerge as fully sexualized, on a hetero level, is fore-grounded by this comparison— a mermaid is a kind of siren, and carries feminine glamour with her wherever she goes, even in darkness (underwater, perhaps, in this tableaux). 

420 foregrounds this ambiguity— is the protagonist asking for sex (a renewal of what has been extinguished, in the poem), or just a loving verbal interchange, or both? He receives, from his mermaid, neither, while Porphyro eventually receives both. That is a critical crux between Romanticism and Noir, as a new mode of visionary Realism (which carries under its aegis, also, post-avant)— many stereotypically Romantic poems end happily, with a sense that conflicts have ended in a kind of fulfillment, textual or narrative, intellectual, emotional, or physical. The bleakness of Noir (or post-avant) significations guarantees that what is anodyne in Romanticism can never appear— and readers may find Noir either airless and claustrophobic or Romanticism weak and cloying. Now, Romanticism is a major, vital, complex movement, so that variability of signification still applies; but, reliably, that the English Romantics, even the “Satanic” second generation (Keats, Byron, Shelley) were positivists in comparison to Noir Apparition Poems like the Cheltenham Elegies would be difficult to deny.

Back to the two poems: the two versions of adolescence, one British and one American, one in third-person omniscient and one in first, are a study between adolescence retaining its wonted luster of freshness, joy, surprise, self-discovery, and unselfconscious risk, or adolescence degenerating into the space of already-thwarted dreams, premature (even atrophied) adulthood, and a sense of the crepuscular towards realizations of mortality even before adulthood is officially reached. This is part of what the Cheltenham Elegies are for— to acknowledge the ludicrousness of adolescents leading their lives like little adults, fornicating, wheeling and dealing, wielding material power in inappropriate ways, and attempting to cope with these realities in the total darkness (“basement”) of non-existent family structures and no real guidance. The acknowledgement is made looking back, in elegiac fashion, rather than the front-lines reportage style of Answered Prayers, which covers similar ground (prematurely ripened adolescence) Symbolically (i.e. in the hallucinatory manner of the French Symbolists). It is an interesting torque, and one I did not necessarily plan, between Madeline emerging from her clothes “in” seaweed (while Porphyro watches her from her closet), while my antagonist emerges “from” the seaweed of what? 

Keats’ version of “seaweed” is merely an optical illusion (i.e. that’s how she looks to Porphyro from his vantage point in her closet), while my “seaweed” is a metaphor for an entire way of life— kids bedraggled by onerous, gross practical realities which cling to them whether they like it or not. The “mansion foul” where Madeline lives as a ward is (we may guess) no less corrupt than an average house in mostly middle class Cheltenham; yet Madeline has retained her innocence. My anti-heroine swims through seaweed-strewn waters, and is far from innocent. If she is spiteful, it is because others are spiteful to her, leading to an accustomed nihilistic Cheltenham chain reaction. So that, the steal I made, to transpose something from the Romantic canon into a Noir reality, inverts but also sheds light on where English language poetry is willing to go in the twenty-first century, which is into the total darkness of the American landscape, where the only joy is telling the truth about what shadows you happen to encounter. Elegy 420 also acts as an adequate presaging as to how the Great Recession will impose its strictures upon American individuals in the two-thousand Teens, and whatever epoch is to follow from them. 

Meta-Notes: On Posit

To recognize a nexus of cyclical energy in Posit, involving the poetic “I”— inhering, an association of asserted subjectivity with heterosexual sexual arousal and the phallic— specifically, the phallus in the act of sexual intercourse— I begin with Come to the Point. The poem Come to the Point, with its blatant/rhetorically dual-minded, subtle essence (to come to the point in an argumentative, discursive, or dialectical context, and to come as in to ejaculate), has a parallel structure inhering in the first and last line— “I am that I.” The line-breaks (“I am/come to the point”) emphasize the curious juxtaposition of discursive and phallic potency— that critical cruxes can (literally or figuratively) be seminal. Here, in this self-critical meta-crux, manifesting in the unlikely context of a work of verbal art, the positing has to do with a critical line (or self-perpetuated discourse/dialectic) in favor of the reemergence of first-person singular perspectives in order to inaugurate a new, genial era of textual freedom and “I” propelled experimentation for poets and dialecticians. 

The first person singular, expressed in poetic language, is also revealed to encompass phallic energy— just as Posit courts the acknowledgment and embrace of certain forms/manners of phallocentrism. To Posit something, in this compressed matrix of interests, is to enact a textual pelvic thrust. The “slipping down” in Come to the Point is meant to convey both seduction/sensuality (the slipping down, perhaps, of underclothes), and a sense of ease and freedom in the slide back into first person perspectives in text. All these imperatives are held in place, importantly, by a resolutely avant-garde or innovative textual stance against sentiment or bombastically expressed epiphany:

I am that I
that stations metaphor
on a boat to
be carried across.
that makes little
songs on banisters,
which are slipped down.
that slips down
antique devices,
china cutlery and white.
I am coming to
the point. I am
come to the point.
I am that I.


“I” must climb up
from a whirlpool
swirling down,
but sans belief
in signification.

“I” must say I
w/out knowing
how or why
this can happen
in language.

“I” must believe
in my own
existence,
droplets stopping
my mouth—

alone, derelict,
“I” must come back,
again, again,
‘til this emptiness
is known, and shown.


I married into blood and
broken necks, endless
anemic privation, but

no regret. You see,
hunger fills me. I like
vampire hours (no

sleep), a blood-vessel
pay-check, diabolical
companionship, tag-team

seductions, guileless
maidens about to
be drunk.

We know what sweetness
is in starvation. We’ve
found, satiety

is death’s approval stamp.
If you crave, there is
room left in you. If

you want, you are a
work-in-progress—
being finished is

a cadaver’s province.
Better to suck
whatever comes.

The manner in which Posit slips down into Dracula’s Bride to conclude— what we see about the first person perspective being argued for or “crux’ed” in Bill Allegrezza, that the poetic “I” perpetually manifests a kind of emptiness, which needs to be known, and shown, leads to the revelation of a persona (Dracula’s Bride), whose relationship to the phallic first person is both vulpine (infantile, even) and subservient; to, as the poem ends, “suck/whatever comes.” The rhetorical heft of Dracula’s Bride and her perspective has to do with “sweetness in starvation,” against satiety, consonant with the worship of the first-person phallus (which needn’t be brandished only by males), which delivers both sweetness and emptiness in its mechanistic performance. The emptiness of the first person singular contradicts or baffles its own power to inseminate— but that contradiction, when applied to poetic language (emptiness/fullness, infertility/insemination), is the bizarre synthesis which is the telos of Posit as a textual dialectic. The positing, or discursive thrust, is into both empty textual space and whatever Dracula’s Bride has to receive the full/empty seeds the right way— and both Posit, and 2017's The Posit Trilogy, empty and deconstruct themselves in the same motion or positing. By 2023, Posit 4, or Volo, puts the emphasis more on the mechanics of deconstruction itself, once the terms of textual consolidation have been established.