Get With the Program : Context and Neo-Romanticism

As of 2014, the contextual situation around the Neo-Romanticism, the Philly Free School, and Aughts Philly is an intriguing story in itself. Of all the contingencies which could destabilize culture and cultural contexts, the Internet has to be one of the most contentious; if used properly, it can grant an unprecedented amount of freedom, autonomy, and expressive power to savvy cultural auteurs; yet, in doing so, it thwarts mainstream media outlets and their overseers, who desire a certain modicum of hegemonous power, for themselves and their formulas, over the collective psyche of the American populace. Because the Internet has developed a good deal of upward momentum over mainstream media outlets, the national psyche, and the American cultural scene to accompany it, now subsist in a fractured, uncomfortable state of imbalance, exasperated and exacerbated by the deprivations of the recession. Innovations in methods/modes of dissemination of cultural data have no echo in possible innovations set in place by the mainstream media and their repositories. In short, the Internet has given us (and everyone) the opportunity to successfully, painstakingly and artfully go rogue/renegade. To the American press corps, PFS cannot be anything/anyone but rogues— our terrain, aesthetically and on socio-sexual levels, is unfamiliar and hostile to them, our methods/modes of dissemination not germane.

In fact, the media problems PFS faces are much more extensive than this; if there is a reason you won't find Abs (affixed to this post is her First Real Top) in Modern Painters or Art in America, it is because these publications are largely fraudulent fronts for conglomerate interests, using post-modern and other art instrumentally. The Internet era has pummeled these old-school art publications, and they generally cannot be found anywhere but at centralized urban Barnes and Nobles anyway. As we're on our way up, they'll be on their way down; as will cornball century XX staples like the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, the New Republic, and the Nation, for whom the sublimity of Apparition Poems (and the Jazz Ode before it) is anathema, and the tininess of the pantheon of faux-entrenched American poets, in all their blatant and total inferiority, the kind of conglomerate-oriented, formula-based commodity they want to push. These are all closed fortresses; and they are now largely Fortresses of Solitude. 

The light in the darkness PFS, and Neo-Romanticism in general, has to shine is intense, but also strange, uncanny, and warped towards a sense of mystery— how and why we did what we did is strange and uncanny, and odd fodder to set alongside not only the Reese Witherspoons of the world, but the C.D. Wrights and the Jeff Koons. We lived as captives of the depths— even our happiest moments of expansion had some depth in them— even our bacchanals. So, as we roll up on America's collective psyche, the context around/of this confrontation is bloody odd; perhaps the oddest single confrontation in American history. Philadelphia itself, under close long-term scrutiny, is extremely odd— and I consider it poetic justice, once Philadelphia is profoundly seen, for America, that this is where we're calling from.

*****accompanying image is The First Real Top by Abby Heller-Burnham******

Late Aughts Philadelphia : Visionary Deadness

As much as I was, and am, a participant in the Philadelphia Renaissance, there is something to me very inscrutable about it— probably because, as an organic conglomeration of socio-aesthetic energies (rather than a calculated, bought out bid to occupy cultural and commercial space), its movements (backwards, forwards, and sideways) are unpredictable, even loopy. Thus it was that by 2009, my attitude towards Philadelphia and Neo-Romanticism had undergone many modifications. Because I was moving up in the ranks as a heavily published and publishing avant-garde poet (my first print full-length text had come out through Otoliths in 2007), and was doing so with no particular support from the university whose fellowship was largely funding me (Temple), I was in a very ambiguous social position. The cohesive, Highwire mid-Aughts form of PFS had collapsed; Mary and I united again for '07 and then separated by '08; I had largely lost touch with Abs; my confrontations with Jenny Kanzler were inconclusive. The Philly avant-profs seemed undecided as to whether I should be recognized by them or not; by this time, I was not only publishing alongside them, but when a lengthy review of my second print book appeared in Jacket Magazine 37 that summer, it seemed to me that I had brokered a high enough position for myself that I would be fine, thank you, with or without their sanctimonious blessings. The popular series I had going on my blog Stoning the Devil at the time, regarding "post-avant" as a possible movement in poetry, confirmed this— I figured prominently in dozens of high-level theoretical online arguments, and my name was being used in conjunction with many older poets, from established generations.

Then, by August, my final hook-up with Abs coincided with the beginning of my second fellowship year. I did not have to teach, and had already passed the dread comp exams, which did its sometimes wonted task of upping my IQ and (more importantly) steeling my nerves. As I prepared to move my writing into interstellar overdrive, it was difficult not to notice that the rich personal life I had enjoyed all through the Aughts had dissipated into a fragmentary state. Mary, against everyone's advice and wishes, had left Philadelphia to do an MFA in Manhattan; she had already earned a PAFA certificate; but we corresponded, and she left comments on my blog with some frequency. The absence of Mary, Abs, and the other P.F.S. characters left a vacuum in my life, now filled by a rigorous dedication to forging ahead on all fronts as a writer and theorist. What I wanted to do was to expand the Apparition Poems section of my Blazevox e-book Beams into a full-length manuscript; and to do this by broadening the parameters of what could be called an Apparition Poem. I already had some material written which fit this bill. I noticed the new poems getting richer, more assured, both formally and thematically, towards an attempt at the timelessness I loved in Keats' Odes and sonnets:

#1067

I want to last—
to be the last
of the last of
the last to be

taken by time,
but the thing
about time is
that it wants,

what it wants
is us, all of us
wane quickly
for all time’s

ways, sans “I,”
what I wants—

#1307

She hovers above planet
Earth, making strategies
for safe landings, but not
able to see that she is also
on planet Earth, watched
like a crazed cat, a maze-
rat, or a tied-up mime, I
cannot save someone so
high up or far down, it’s
like a black thread about
to snap, as it strains past
breaking point she reaches
for champagne, to celebrate—
bubbles lunge up to break.

All through September and October, an eerie feeling hung in the air around me, and around Center City in general— a sense of something misplaced, and of energies moving in strange subterranean directions. For two weeks in November, Philly enjoyed unusually warm weather— I could not write, and suffered a minor nervous breakdown, distinguished by strange, shamanistic visions of grisly murders and violence in general, alternating with a sense that Center City was suffering a major internal meltdown, and that many of my new acquaintances were stooges of one form or another. The Aughts party was over. If blood had been spilled around me, I had not seen it— but, by late '09, I felt it intuitively. The recession had become a formidable claw. 

I also made an interesting decision in the middle of my shamanistic voyage— rather than assume that my visions qualified me as crazy, I would take what was visionary about my experience and embrace it. This played itself out in tactile terms— at one point on the voyage, I called, in a state of panic, to be taken into custody, so to speak. I went out of my apartment, and when I came back, they, the mental health goons, were waiting outside the building in an ambulance. Following a decisive instinct, I snubbed them, and resolved to take care of the rest of my voyage myself, rather than be tamed by others for my immersion in the visionary. As it turns out, all I needed to do was sleep for a few days. When I had regained my strength, I was ready to write on a level I never had before. The shamanistic voyage, macabre, and solitary, as it was, had been worth it.

By Thanksgiving, my feet touched earth again; and that's when Apparition Poems really started to take shape, especially when I hit twin towers like these:

#1335

terse as this is, it is
given to us in bits
carelessly shorn
from rocky slopes,
of this I can only
say nothing comes
with things built in,
it’s always sharp edges,
crevices, crags, precipice,
abrupt plunges into “wants,”
what subsists between us
happens in canyons lined
in blue waters where this
slides down to a dense
bottom, I can’t retrieve
you twice in the same
way, it must be terse
because real is terse,
tense because it’s so
frail, pine cones held
in a child’s hand, snapped.

#1345

Two hedgerows with a little path

between— to walk in the path like

some do, as if no other viable route

exists, to make Gods of hedgerows

that make your life tiny, is a sin of

some significance in a world where

hedgerows can be approached from

any side— I said this to a man who

bore seeds to an open space, and he

nodded to someone else and whistled

an old waltz to himself in annoyance.

I discovered then that the ghastly view from my studio apartment at 23rd and Arch (I looked out at parking lots, billboards, and the big black PECO Utilities Building) could be improved by bringing down my slatted shades, which created a noir effect and made these winter months (and those in years to follow) more bearable. This is also the specific moment when I discovered online the cache of masterpieces which Abby Heller-Burnham had left through the Aughts— I republished many of them on Stoning the Devil instantly, and hailed Abs as the genius she was. Abs by that time was haggard, and ten sheets to the wind— I do not think she noticed, and if she did notice I doubt she would've cared. The marriage I had to Mary H. was still fresh in my mind. The cumulative weight of this congeries I called visionary deadness— built into it, the allure of states of decomposition and decay, the macabre, and the fight to survive in a blasted landscape. Jenny Kanzler time. I inaugurated the pursuit of visionary deadness as a form or manner of literary, and intellectual, enterprise during Apparition Poems, and continue, today, to pursue it in the series known as the Cheltenham Elegies. The recession, by Apparition Poems, was entrenched, and established as intransigent. As of four years later, many of us still occupy this space, as we wait for some sun to peak out from behind the clouds. This, though it is perceptible to some that states of decomposition and decay can make for compelling, if perverse and fragmented, art, as Abby foretold in a prescient way in the mid-Aughts.

****accompanying portrait of Adam Fieled at the Eris Temple by Matt Stevenson****

Gonzo Sangfroid in Aughts Philly

One quirk which made Aughts Philly interesting is that most of the Philadelphia Renaissance players displayed a penchant for exhibitionistic behaviors, postures, and attitudes. The immediate mea culpa is branded right on my "I am as wayward as Shelley" tee-shirt, made for me by my second wife Melissa in early '01. This contradiction— a flair we all had for dramatic self-presentation, while also maintaining a stubbornly independent streak which made it seem a sell-out to us to appeal to the press to legitimize our work— fueled the collective fire of Aughts Philly, towards greater and greater demonstrations of gonzo sangfroid. Mike and I got lucky at/with the Highwire Gallery, who helped us take our PFS shows there to the highest possible level of gonzo extremity; as long as we provided the booze (including, owing to our outrageous desire to get Philly Free School audiences off, not only wine and beer but bottles of whiskey and vodka), the Highwire curators brought treats for us— twice, a functioning nitrous tank, and once, hash brownies.

Under this aegis, everyone brought their own gonzo predilections to the table— with Nick Gruberg, it had to do with a nuanced, broadly philosophical drunken professor role he liked to play. With Gruberg plumbing (or spelunking) deep into his cups, out poured discursive ramblings (Nick, remember, graduated with honors from U of Chicago) meant to establish his complete and total intellectual superiority to you, whoever you thought you were or might be. And let it not be said that Nick and Mike Land did not perform what seemed to be, after a fashion, rote routines— Nick abuses Mike; Mike knocks back a bunch of shots and leaves the table, exasperated (this often happened at McGlinchey's); Mike returns to the table, and Nick begins abusing Mike again; they both slam back more shots; Jeremy finds a way of annoying both of them, and they begin abusing him; Jeremy plays pater familias, and does his "now, now, children..." routine, which they pointedly ignore, exasperating Jeremy; by the time we hit 15th Street again, we would be so comically rambunctious that no one could remember who was abusing who, or why; then, off we'd go to somebody's house party, and more variations of the same. In NYC, the game stretched to include Mike's sister Anna.

Abby and Mary were rambunctious on a different level— when Mary wanted to make an impression, which she usually did, her moves were often Grace Kelly moves. It's just that Mary and I were often all over each other in public, because we felt no constraint not to be. As has been said before, but bears repeating, Mary had it, where sexual magnetism was concerned— when she entered a room, gallery opening or not, she reached out to find everyone's sex buttons, and pressed them, then waited for the fireworks to start. They usually would, and did. Mary was volatile in other ways, too: a true Creatrix. Poor Abs, as Creatrix, was gorgeous, but tiny, and couldn't always keep up; yet few of us were unfamiliar with the sight of Abs moving in for the kill, with the right kinds of girls and boys; including me. The bisexual imperative consumed her. As predicted, Mary did find my early '05 affair with Abs outrageous— but it was karma she earned. That's why, when I saw the movie Closer, I laughed— welcome to Mary-land. Was she also a complex character beyond all the seductiveness? Yes she was— or Abs and I wouldn't have bothered to endure all her shit. We shared an interest in the occult, too. As for Nick Gruberg's garbage, that's one split which, by the end of the Aughts and for most of us, was unavoidable— though I know "gonzo" wasn't his whole life (he started grad school for linguistics roughly when I began with my University Fellowship at Temple), that is all, after a certain point, he would condescend to show us Aughts Philly stalwarts. Hannah Miller, who started with Nick and migrated to me, was an exhibitionist about politics, and an ardent proselytizer for causes, with a sybaritic streak only half-hidden. 

In retrospect, what was gonzo about Aughts Philly in general was how individualistic all of us were— a bunch of forces coalesced and made it possible for us to write our own rule-books and define ourselves and our self-mythologies any way we damn well pleased. We had more real freedom than any other group of artists in American history— some of it we had to fight for, some we did not. One of our freedoms was the right to be extreme, and to live dangerously— and we did both with aplomb, both the Creatrixes and their male counterparts. We were also free to embrace or not embrace formality in art in any way we desired. Had we been exposed to public-exposure fangs at a young age, much of this freedom would've been taken from us, and replaced with bogus imperatives and pointless restrictions. I am very glad and grateful Aughts Philly and Neo-Romanticism did not happen this way; as the slow-burn towards all that media biz begins now. 

As a final note: the affixed pic was taken at a cafe on Avenue A in Manhattan's East Village in October '05 by Amy King, the month I established P.F.S. Post (Philly Free School Post) online.

Iconicity, Half-Art, and the Philadelphia Renaissance

The Biblical commonplace of the term "false idol," and its significations, is pertinent as a tangent to the Philly Free School, the Philadelphia Renaissance, and what we were attempting to achieve in Aughts Philly. If I call the entire twentieth century an era of false idols, or false icons, it is because the drastically reduced profile of major high art consonance in said century created a cultural vacuum largely filled by popular culture entertainment business professionals, whose version of art I call "half-art," and whose manufactured iconicity filled an expanse of the Western cultural public sphere much better filled, as it may be in this new century, by the likes of us. The stock-in-trade of the twentieth century's false idols— what I call "half-art"— has, as a constituent structural feature, an imperative to fulfill of finding a way to appeal to the lowest public common denominator, while remaining representatively somehow "artistic" enough to satisfy at least part of the educated populace as well. Rock music, as a popular art form, and at its highest levels, seemed to work from this premise, and the manufacturing of rock music icons initiated the profile of the consummate "half-artist"— a figure thoughtful enough, in their life and work, to appear wise and/or venerable; but whose cultural expression remained crass enough, and uninformed by the history of serious art enough, to be easily comprehensible to broad masses of people, thus insuring (on the surface) both wide, continued interest and substantial profit margins. There is a utility value to half-art, and half-artists; engaging their work does not require an educated cultural background, and half-art grants the unrefined a handle on having at least some culture. But the abasement of the late twentieth century consisted of the fact that Western culture had lost all impetus to anything but half-art, and half-artists— they were granted an inordinate amount of cultural power and prestige.

Part of the issue was what was happening in the higher arts themselves— the insipid vacuity of the movement called "post-modernity" created a congeries of circumstances which suggested that even would-be high artists were toiling to make high art obsolescent. They not only made a fetish of half-artists; they indicated with the chips they put down, on what could be permanent and durable, that half-art would triumph over serious, passionately engaged high art. Popular culture was made to appear formidable and substantial, in a false light; that it could be a hinge to the forms of advanced cognition which inhere in serious high art, and serious pursuit of the humanities in general. All of the major figures of the Philadelphia Renaissance— the first generation of Neo-Romantics— were raised on half-art, and its pantheon of false idols— many of us were even fervent believers, in our youth, of these all-purpose mind-toys. Yet, what the arrival of PFS as a cultural influence in America (and elsewhere) creates is a novel, unexpected, and very potent power-block— a generation of educated, accomplished, manifestly historically aware and major high art consonant artists, who are (surprisingly) attractive and entertaining enough (in the romanticism of their lives/adventures) to satisfy half-art/ pop culture imperatives too; and who are more worthy of iconic status than anything the second half of the twentieth century had to offer, from Elvis Presley and Paul McCartney to Warhol and Ashbery.

On another level, and strictly speaking, very few human beings deserve to be made icons— it is often forgotten that the etymology of the word "icon" is religious, and used in conjunction with figures who have manifested miracles, and who devoted their lives to aiding mankind on the most profound spiritual levels. By granting, say, Madonna iconic status, the twentieth century confessed many things—grounding in a pagan, primitivized form of secularism, which inverted frivolity and gross exhibitionism into religious virtue; a maintained state of absolute spiritual emptiness; a sense that it was permissible to let the public sphere be run without any undue responsibility to the general public; and a patina of prolonged semantic insensitivity, which reduced discourses to buzz-words and catch-phrases. Consequently, America in general is unused to anything but half-art; and we are aesthetic whole-hogs. What I want to propose, in 2014, is that an American populace, weathered and chastened by the recession, may be ready to move culturally beyond false idols and half-art— ready for the genuine ("whole") article, and from within the United States. The half-art level of PFS is supplied by our personalities and biographies— the narrative of our lives, which in Aughts Philly was outrageous enough to make more than decent pop culture fodder. After a certain point, the body of work we have created is strong and varied enough that some press corps will be compelled to pick us up, American or not; and a twenty-first century narrative initiated, against the juvish twentieth century master narrative, in all its bought-out aridity, which will make clear just how fulsome we were.

Reading Repertoires 2000-2004

With or without other Philly Free School constituents, or with PFS adjuncts like Jae Won Chung, Will Esposito, and Christian TeBordo, Philly-lit old guard stalwarts like Jim Cory, Alexandra Grilikhes, and Leonard Gontarek, and at venues which ranged from small-scale, intimate dens like Book Trader while it was still at 5th and South to the Kelly Writers House on the Penn campus (especially during the years I was finishing my degree at Penn), I did readings galore during the first half of the Aughts in Philly. I had a standard repertoire to draw from; among the flagship poems employed were three I had written in State College in '98— Clean, Prince, and Disappear. Also, Icarus in New York, which was written in NYC, summer '99. Clean is the most serious, both formally and thematically— it can be taken as a queer poem par excellence (though the poem did not originate from queer experience per se), or an allegorical rendering of human frailty generally; and the meta-oratory level of the poem's construction and self-representation hinges it to the metaphysical conceits of Donne, Marvell, and Herbert. Plus, it was amusing enough that I could get a hearty laugh out of almost any crowd with it. Prince and Disappear were crowd-charmers, too— I had a more than decent show stopping and stealing ratio in those days.

The Ode On Jazz, written in the fall of '02, also fulfilled many valuable public functions— expansively musical enough to work as high-level, high-maintenance ear-candy, three minutes long when read properly, it introduced audiences both to an interpretation of jazz and to Keats-sized formal ambition. Ode On Psyche, completed in '01, a draft of which also appeared in American Writing in '02, fulfilled a similar imperative need I had. Certain nights stand out as extraordinary— one night in early '01, I read at Tritone with Matt Stevenson accompanying me on keyboards. Something clicked, and we achieved a kind of transcendental lift-off, and (I felt at the time) took our audience of 15-20 with us. All of this culminated in the Ode On Love in 2003. The culmination into To Bruce Nauman was similar. It had to do with balancing PAFA-consonant (Mary and Abby consonant) visual awareness with assimilating the most intelligent work that had been done under the post-modern aegis, and offering explanations when I could, around odal expansiveness. 

The Philly poetry reading circuit in the early-to-mid Aughts was limited, but had some points of interest. The PhillySound poets, ten years older than the wonted tag-team combo of myself and Jeremy Eric Tenenbaum, had been combatants of Vlad Pogorelov and Siren's Silence in the Nineties (and of Jeremy's 'd"), and were very hyped on ruling their own roost, subjecting all comers to their protocols. They were queer, and well-connected— to institutions like Penn and Temple, the Philly avant-professor crowd (DuPlessis, Perelman, Osman), and to the Poetry Project crowd in New York. Conversely, they viewed themselves as extremely "street," and prided themselves on writing in a street-consonant way. Their downfall, for us, was a rote and rigid insistence on being treated as absolutely aristocratic characters everywhere they went in Philly. To them, Jeremy and I were parvenu. Their version of Philly was South Philly working class, and anti-academic— its just that (as was noticed), because they constantly sought out the patronage of the avant-prof bourgeoisie to justify themselves, they were also easily dismissed as hypocrites, liars, and cowards; and by 2005, they were openly aping our moves. Nonetheless, we were always running into them, and C.A. Conrad, their reigning figurehead, worked with me at B & N.

The American Poetry Review guys, Steve Berg and his cronies, were also around and, like PhillySound, were such repulsively aristocratic characters that almost everyone just ignored them; while many of Berg's other cronies became my profs when I began my MFA at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire in 2004, and met Christopher Goodrich and Mary Walker Graham. Within a few years, meeting Steve Halle was even more significant. In anticipation of my University Fellowship and five years at Temple, I met Nick Moudry at around this time too.

The online journal Hinge, edited by Marilyn Bess, also established itself as a presence for me in the early Aughts. Hinge was uniquely multi-media; it had feelers out to the visual art and musical Philadelphia communities as well, and, as such, the site was tilted towards poetry but also featured music and visual art. Hinge put on a show in the spring of 2004 in Northern Liberties at which I read, and which became the template for the first Philly Free School show at the Highwire Gallery that July. Between readers, bands (one of which, Lucky Dragons, was especially fascinating to me for their ambient version of electronic, computer-based music), and a freewheeling, slightly debauched atmosphere, the Hinge Northern Liberties show fulfilled the multi-media dream I had of creating/re-creating the Swinging London of my imagination. As to what I have on the Hinge Online site, now that it has been resurrected: the first page (from, I believe, 2001) features Prince, Disappear, and Marriott Lane, all written in State College in '98; there is a 2003 page for the Keats inspired On Love, which announced that my engagement with form would be a mode of literary individuation for me, and which was very much about my life with Mary at the time; and on the third Hinge page from 2004, Hamlet On Pine Street, which I debuted in a Perelman workshop at Penn, casts light on the excesses of Aughts Philly. Technician of Tough Love is my elegy for American Writing editor Alexandra Grilikhes, who died in 2003. American Writing itself was a port of call worth mentioning (as Columbia Poetry Review was for Jeremy), which I appeared in twice in the early Aughts; professionally, sturdily published, and reasonably put together from pieces which leaned towards the visionary side of the avant-garde.

This liminal period, between This Charming Lab and the major '04-'06 PFS shows, was an interesting one for me— it coincides with the first two years I spent with Mary Harju (2001-2003), and Abs was around us constantly. As all the burgeoning Philadelphia Renaissance/Neo-Romanticism stalwarts fumbled youthfully around for direction, most of us had a sense of upward progression; that we were working towards something unique and worthwhile. It was a time of creative gestation and warmly-lived life for us. You can hear it in my Kelly Writers House performances, of prose pieces like Dominique and Stoning the Devil, and in the Yeats pastiche-homage What Needs No Myth, published twenty-three years after the fact in Eratio. To the extent that This Charming Lab and Personal Mythologies II were failed versions of Philly Free School, I was gaining competence skills, on different levels, as collateral benefit from the readings we were doing, and the pace of things for all of us was leisured and comfortable. If my writing then was comparatively directionless, I was still planting creative seeds to bear distinctive, representative fruit later.

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?