For Dawn Ananda

As she held scissors, stabbed my chairs,
left a hole for no good reason cause I
couldn’t stop her, then— and her face was,
and is, unreachable, a kind of moon, a fright,
a graveyard orphan’s tired lament for a kind
of nakedness she won’t allow, not to me,
though we tried, my hands on her stomach,
teeth bared, it was that kind of gotterdammerung,
afternoon sunlight slanting onto the porch, her
mug some semblance of calm, I jumped a yard,
thinking I’d won her at last...

And so the table unfolds before us,
ashtray eye-beams and saucer-eyed sentences,
coats put on for the chill November wind
that reaches around, a kind of strong-armed
curse, an anti-benediction, as if some ruddy
pope put a backwards rhyme on our spoons so
that nothing could ever be born from this tryst
but a moon-child cast up into the stratosphere,
without reason for leaving the ground...

John Bloomberg-Rissman on When You Bit...

 John Bloomberg-Rissman on When You Bit... by Adam Fieled in Galatea Resurrects. 

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Several non-book Apparition Poems, floaters, up in Diode Volume 5 Number 2. 

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A re-publishing of the 2011 Cordite Tender Buttons piece in Plunder & Salvage. 

Cheltenham: original book pdf

The original book pdf for the first print edition (2012) of Cheltenham by Adam Fieled.

from PICC (A Poet in Center City): #16

The night of the 2000 election is a strange one. I’m working a closing shift at B & N, and a call comes in for me from Elizabeth Yankel, editor of a regional print journal based in Philadelphia called American Writing. American Writing is ranked high enough (Christopher endorses it too, and they carry it at Borders) that this call from Elizabeth (to inform me that one of my poems, “Icarus in New York,” would be published in the next issue) gives me an almost unbearable sense of exhilaration. Like the rest of America, I’m up all night waiting for an election verdict. It never happens. But my ass is kicked into gear by what American Writing is, and the new task is to jump into poetry head-first. I want to be thorough— rather than sticking to the texts I know (Beats, Bukowski, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc), I want to learn the right histories and ground myself in them. I start with a vengeance— Pound’s Cantos, the Greek tragedians, Eliot’s Four Quartets. But the most profound breakthrough occurs one night at B & N, as I’m goofing off— on impulse, I pick up the Collected Poems of John Keats. I flip straight to “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and when I hit “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard/ are sweeter…” my brain turns on its axis. This proves to be the most important moment of my poetry life— discovering the English Romantics. Discovering the Romantics wasn’t just discovering a group of poets— it was my entrée into a world of high-level formality in in art. This is a world the enterprise of which had always been undercooked in the United States. But Keats and Wordsworth drew me in and, as it were, sucker-punched me into an acknowledgement that formality didn’t have to mean sterile stuffiness— it could be warm, it could be human. How I related to Keats’ Odes, in particular, was as a challenge to develop and maintain a new form of consciousness, which made American poetry look like child’s play. That’s what was missing from New York art— a sense that a work of art could, or should be, beautiful. Also, that serious work should live up to a serious standard, rather than taking short-cuts and acting as a bellwether of degeneracy and trans-aesthetic mania. This was the ultimate irony for me— that when formality in art laid down a gauntlet and forced a response in my life, it opened the door for Trish and Tobi to walk through, and ushered in the most warm, most human era I had ever known. It didn’t lock me in an Ivory tower or force me to lose myself in narcissism. Rather, Trish and I, in about a year’s time, would start working on a relationship so all-over-the-place, so rich in fruitful contradictions, that I would have to spend the rest of my life recovering my wits. Trish was like N, but to the Nth. N-isimus. Including concupiscence. It all manifested because I saw in Keats and Wordsworth what she saw in Renaissance painting. As it stands, on this night I’m still ensconced with Lisa, who is tolerant but not shot through with electricity regarding these issues. Trish, before the fun starts, approves instantly. “John was like Lord Byron,” she says. 

 © Adam Fieled 2012-2023

Argotist Online e-book: Mother Earth

The new Argotist Online e-book by Adam Fieled is Mother Earth. 

“Normal people tend to figure out what (and who) they want through relationships. Poetry in 2011 doesn’t always need to deal with the exalted, the archetypal, or (as is the case with post-modern poetry) the conditions and contexts of language itself. Poetry that configures the extraordinary through the normal is useful because it has utility value for an audience, largely middle and working class, that is being challenged by threatening external conditions, economic and otherwise. Mother Earth is an ordinary story with some pertinent implications; if it is read with understanding, it can function as allegory and its relationships stand as representations of the larger trends currently shaping our world.”

Apparition Poem #508

#508

O life, O time, dark dark dark
& all that, that bit, where you
confront all that won’t submit,
it’s nobody’s favorite bit, it’s
a bloody miracle we ever get
anything else, yet you never
hear talk of it except in art, &
it’s gone out of fashion, right
from Milton’s front page into
the dark dark dark, but it’s still
dark as a mudslide, & as dense


Here are some more Apparition Poems in Blazevox 11. 

Trish: A Romance, Pt. 7

VII.

All through intervening years, Trish
never fully left my mind. Many
encounters I lived through were
pointless— one-night stands, flings,
some felt, some not felt at all.
When Trish reentered my life, she
did so directly. Simply, we wanted
each other again. Trish now lived in
an apartment building, with roommates,
on 49th off of Baltimore. The apartment
had a fire escape large enough on which
to sit, and smoke. I was in the process
of beginning to publish seriously, and would
often devise new strategies as I stared

off over the clotheslines and windows.
We were older, less demonstrative— but
we still made love almost every night.
The problem was, this was interspersed with
consumption of cannabis. I am soon to
learn (again) that mutual intoxication cuts off
intimacy. What used to be sparks between
us were now ashes. There were even times
when the “little death” was a bore. So that
for six months we’re in a holding pattern.
This time, it’s Trish’s turn to do a sudden
break. Moreover, she has an older man
waiting in the background. I see them
together in Rittenhouse Square. I’m numb;

I believe (as is the case) that Trish
is now mostly frigid. She uses her sex to
ensnare and bind. But making love to
a semi-frigid woman does eventually wear
thin. Still, my attitude is that Trish
and I could still work something out.
This time, Trish never gives me a reason.
The next summer there’s a fresh confrontation—
Trish is very wary, and I’m more
perfunctory than I seem to be. We’re
buried in each other as something to
express. This time, I eventually realize,
Trish is gone for good. But I make
a conscious decision to still love her, and Tob.

When I look back on the time
I spent with Trish, it occurs to me
that we never knew each other that
well. We were “mad for it,” the passion,
the romance, without being mad for
each other, exactly. What’s worth exploring is
what I know about her now. Like
this— that her aims were more strategic,
less organic, than mine. She wanted
to take me and mold me, and I
wouldn’t let her. But this was
buried beneath other imperatives. She
wasn’t strong enough to enforce her
strategies and I was too wild to tame.

The pressing question that follows is—
was it worth it? I’d say it was,
though it could’ve ended in two (or three)
corpses. We participated in these scenes
at a time during which there was little
surface-level romance in America. Bohemian
America had never been a particularly
well-populated locale, but we set up
camp there and in the process confounded
structures that we could’ve let crush us.
Our dreams weren’t especially original,
but our improvisations created a new
context for them. Neither of us came out
of Bohemia— it was a new realm for us.

Is it only because I can still sit
here, writing these lines, that our
escapades still seem like good ideas?
If we did end up corpses, who would
be the wiser? On this account, I
have no solid answers. I can only
say that for some reason, some humans
need the charm, the sparkle, the electricity
of romance, and will put their lives
on the line to attain it. So it was for
us. Those that are kith and kin to us
will understand. Those that aren’t may
choose to laugh at our foolishness. But
it must be dry, accursed laughter to us…