Mary Walker Graham

This picture was taken in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2007. In it, we see casually dressed Mary Evelyn Harju standing up so that I might be allowed to sit next to her again. This being, not incidentally, the back room at Stain Bar, where I was reading that night for Mipoesias. Also in casual red attire, across from Mary H. is Boston-Virginia poetess Mary Walker Graham. Graham is someone I had done my MFA with in Henniker, NH, in the mid-Aughts, and also dated. Mary Walker Graham is worth mentioning because the poetry she was producing then was of a superior quality. I was happy to publish her in P.F.S. Post and Ocho #11, and write the critical piece Sex and Shadows about Graham, Stacy Blair, and Becky Hilliker.

P.S. Only semi-incidentally, on this night in Brooklyn, Mary Walker Graham submitted the poem Double to me, which was then published in Ocho #11 and later P.F.S. Post. 

20th Anniversary Pt. 2

One thing I would like to distinguish the Philly Free School: because we were and are all complicated people, we reserve the right to maintain and consolidate our complications, neurotic or otherwise. To cut to the chase: Mary H could be an angel and a sister of mercy, or she could be a crazed banshee. On some nights, she could be both. Montreal, precisely twenty years ago, was no exception. We were reverent before the classiness of a serious city, but there was one night on which Mary lost it completely. Hard to tell why, and Mary could be fathomless that way. Thus, Apparition Poem #555 on PennSound.

20th Anniversary

 

It is the twentieth anniversary, almost to the day, of this shot being taken (August 20s) in a garret room Mary and I were sharing on Saint Catherine Street in Montreal, Quebec. I chose to align the shot, which I treated in the late Teens, with Leonard Cohen's Sisters of Mercy, because Cohen himself is famously a native of Montreal. Beautiful Losers and The Favorite Game are both set in Montreal, and the Cohen mural in Montreal now is one of the city's most famous emblems. Also worth noting that Cohen attended McGill University in Montreal, which Mary & I visited while we were there. Confidentially, Mary looks a little like Marianne Ihlen, does she not?  

Multi-Media

Mary Evelyn Harju was never especially a multi-media enthusiast. Abby Heller-Burnham's engagement with multi-media amounted to a daredevil maneuver, by which she subsumed her entire painting career so far beneath her rock star princess front that few even knew it existed. The Philly Free School shows at the Highwire Gallery in the mid-Aughts were selling multi-media, but I'd like it to be known that there was a theoretical underpinning to our enterprise, as is reflected in this 2010 piece in Otoliths. There was no notion for us of multi-media without a commensurate notion of the spectacle and the spectacular. Hence, our own engagement with our good friend, French dramatist Antonin Artaud. 

Abby's Random Collage

This collage is one Ms. Heller-Burnham never emphasized that much. Nevertheless, I thought it would be useful to feature here, because, as you can see, we see in it Mary Evelyn Harju in profile in a Puritan head-wrap, juxtaposed over someone, y'know, playing an electric guitar. Any audience here are free to read in whatever meanings you choose. I will say, that if Mary disapproved of the rock-ism I shared with Abby, she chose not to express it to me. What she said to Abs is anyone's guess.

dear gr

When Mary Evelyn Harju was angry with or frustrated by Abby Heller-Burnham, she often hurled this epithet at her: the little rat. Among other epithet-hurlers who dwelt among us was Gretchen Stump. Gretchen Stump, when I met her, was Jennifer Strawser's best friend. When Jennifer and I began to go out, in early '96, Gretchen was jealous, for a number of reasons, and none too pleased. Remember: Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum then has lines running to, and minions in, State College, from Villanova/Manayunk. A goomba he was. When he bothered to write dear gr, which appeared in print in Columbia Poetry Review in 1999 and online in P.F.S. Post much later, he was wryly commenting on Gretchen's travails, watching a shotgun marriage unfold. Not incidentally, when Gretchen later appeared in late-Aughts Philly, I wrote After Andrew Marvell for her. 

Early Books

 A locale where Abby's work has been used to good effect: the Early Books pdf, featuring Chimes '23.